Because no one is perfect, we all have regrets. We’ve made bad choices in our careers, said and done some foolish things, wasted time, and hurt ourselves and others; yet failure can be a valuable learning experience.
Past mistakes, if we learn from them, can become stepping stones for the future. So, how do you bounce back and overcome career failures? Believe me when I tell you that you’ll get nowhere and achieve nothing much until you overcome them.
Well, first let’s look at three tactics that do not work.
Hiding
Hiding your mistake, making light of it, rationalizing it, or trying to compromise does not work. There is a Spanish Proverb that states, “A fault denied is twice committed.” Also, it has been said, that the measure of your real character is what you would do, if you knew you would never be found out.
Blaming
We tend to use blame to balance out our guilt and to shift responsibility for the mistake. It’s someone else’s fault…not ours. There is an old Persian fable of a hen, a mouse, and a rabbit who lived together in a little house. They were happy and contented because they shared all the work.
The rabbit cooked the meals. The chicken carried in the firewood. The mouse brought the water from the nearby brook. Each did his work faithfully and contentedly. But one day while the hen was going to the forest for wood a busybody crow asked her what she was doing. When told, the crow complained that the hen was doing the hardest part of the work and that the rabbit and mouse were making an easy-mark of her. Try as she would, the thought kept rankling in the hen’s mind, and when she returned home with her load of wood and her still heavier load of discontent and blame, she cackled: “I do the hardest work ever. We ought to change our jobs.”
Blame causes discontentment, which spreads, as you know, and immediately the rabbit and mouse also thought they had been doing the hardest work. They agreed to change jobs: the mouse would cook, the rabbit would gather the firewood, and the hen would bring the water. As the rabbit hopped into the woods, a big fox trailed him, caught him, and ate him. The chicken put the pail into the creek, but the current pulled the pail down under, and the chicken with it. The mouse wondered why they did not come back, but not for long. While he was sitting on the edge of the big pot of soup, he lost his balance and fell in.
Through blame and discontent all three not only lost their happiness but their very lives.
Punishing
We try to pay for our mistake unconsciously through illness, depression, setting ourselves up for failure, and other forms of self-punishment. The problem with this tactic is that the conscience never knows when to stop and will continue to punish until we give it new instructions.
The Roman philosopher and statesman, Cicero determined some 2,000 years ago that the following were the top two mistakes of man. Incidentally these still hold true today:
- The tendency to worry about things that cannot be changed or corrected.
- Insisting that a thing is impossible because we cannot accomplish it.
So, how do we win the career failure game and what strategies should we use?
Go to Part 3 to get the answer
Back to Part 1
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