How to Recover Faster from Failure
We have all experienced failure, catastrophic events, or instances where things did not go our way. These are all part of the uncontrollables of life and feel even more acute in 2020. These failures will never go away because life is uncontrollable, however, we can learn to live with them and to recover faster from negative events.
I look at Joe Biden as the epitome in recovering from failure. He’s had 77 years of life and some corresponding years of catastrophic events.
He’s struggled with stuttering since boyhood. While he’s not the most crisp and confident speaker—his stutter was noticeable last Friday evening as he spoke to the nation and told everyone to have hope, one day before the news outlets officially called the presidential race. His speaking style is all the more impressive for knowing what he’s overcome. In this Atlantic interview he discusses his lifelong strategies for taming the stutter including this lesson:
Biden says his father taught him about “shouldering burdens with grace.” Specifically, he told his son, “Never complain. Never explain.
Joe Biden understands grief. He’s faced unbelievable personal losses in his life. His wife and infant daughter were killed in a car crash leaving him with two toddler sons to raise solo. He kept on moving forward, serving his first term as senator and then eventually meeting Jill and building a blended family. Years later, his son Beau passed away from brain cancer at 46.
“By focusing on my sons, I found my redemption,” Joe said in a Yale commencement speech in 2015. “The incredible bond I have with my children is the gift I’m not sure I would have had, had I not been through what I went through.”
We celebrate him today for winning the presidency. Not everyone knows that this was his third try. He ran unsuccessfully in 1988, and then 2008 before becoming Obama’s VP. He epitomizes perseverance, recovery from failure, and continuing to try over and over again. It’s been 32 years since his first presidential run. This is a man who looks at the long-view.
I look to Joe Biden as a hopeful leader. He will be a president who intimately understands grief and suffering and is unafraid to shine in the strength of his emotions. Inspired by him, I’m sharing three lessons that I’ve learned on how to recover faster from failure:
Lesson One: Honor the Emotions
You’ve just received some negative information that’s hitting you like a punch in the gut. It might be health-related about a dear friend or family member. It might be a negative performance review, or news that you’ve been laid off or fired. It’s OK — we’ve all been there and we’ve all gone through this.
A common reaction is to go into shock and disbelief. We may have known that something like this is coming, either because a loved one has been ill for a long time or if we’ve gotten warning signs about our job. This may also be a complete surprise. Either way, disbelief is often the first emotion and it aligns well to the five stages of grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance).
Listen and experience the emotions that you’re going through. We often make the mistake of wanting to suppress anger, resentment, fear, or any negative emotion because they feel bad. It’s uncomfortable to marinate in the emotion and we want to put on a cheery positive outlook. Yet when we try to suppress the emotion, we often find ourselves thinking about it even more; leading to being trapped and wasting time in a vicious cycle. An alternative approach is to honor the emotion — you can try strategies like journaling about the feelings, venting to a confidant, or meditations that help work through the emotion.
Many years ago, I was fired from a dual job I held as General Manager (GM) of the San Francisco office and Head of Design for a digital innovation consultancy. It felt entirely unexpected. I’d just returned from a week-long vacation in Mexico and both my children were suffering from food poisoning as I took the call. The CEO decided to shut down the San Francisco office and let me and everyone else go. After hearing the news, I made the mistake of suppressing all my emotions and robotically going through the next several weeks of closing the office and laying off all the employees. When I finally slowed down to take a breath, all the negative emotions emerged—anger, resentment, self-hate, self-doubt, and guilt for letting down the team.
When you pay attention to your emotions, notice when they start to change. It might be within hours or days, or it might take weeks. Paying attention to the transition of emotion can be a guide that you’re ready to move forward.
It took time for me to sit with those emotions-of-failure before a new one emerged—relief that I was done with a job that felt impossible to do well despite my optimism and that took me away from my family so frequently. When I honored all the emotions, I was finally able to acknowledge the reality of how unhappy I was at my job.
In order to recover faster from failure, start with honoring your emotions and not suppressing them.
Lesson Two: Surrender to the Past
We rationally know that we cannot change the past, yet we spend so much time beating ourselves up for what’s happened. I’m super familiar with this:
Self-recrimination: I should have spent more time being nice and building better relationships with the rest of the leadership team.
Regret: How did I not see that it was impossible to do two jobs at once? Why did I even take that job? Why am I so ambitious and eager to say yes to more?
Blame/victim-hood: Why didn’t they hire a business development lead for the San Francisco office? How can I succeed as GM without that?
Guilt: I personally recruited everyone. What’s going to happen to all the people I had to lay off?
This can be an endless, self-repeating loop that only takes us on a downward spiral. Instead, surrender to the past and accept that the events unfolded exactly as they should have to set the stage for what happens next. There is a gift from knowing that the past experiences are now a part of your auto-biography and life experiences.
I’ve worked with many clients who have had challenging bosses, and been stuck in miserable jobs for many years. Eventually they are ready to move on. And when they’re not, they can accept their past choices with equanimity. They’ve learned some lessons:
I know what type of leader I don’t ever want to be
This is not a job I love, yet it pays well and I’m optimizing for that security right now.
My boss was mostly absent, so I was given full autonomy over the team.
I understand the culture and processes of [my current company] and when I start my own, it’s going to be nothing like that.
There may be things you regret in the past. And that’s OK. There is an acceptance to know that it can’t be changed. And there is discernment to know that you can use it to fuel what happens in the future. Limit the time you spend in self-recrimination, and surrender to the the past, both rationally and emotionally.
Lesson Three: Failure Fuels Introspection
If we change our relationship with failure, it helps us to recover from it faster. We go through most our lives in a complacent type of default mode. The days, weeks, and months pass by and we settle into the rhythm of the work days and the weekends. These points of failure, catastrophic events, or instances where things didn't go our way serve as a giant STOP sign to break us out of the patterns of default mode.
When we run into this wall of failure, stop and take a breath. First work through the emotions and truly surrendering to the past. This can take days, weeks, months, or years. At some point in time, you’ll be able to reflect on the failure and ask yourself what’s the gift of that failure. Take a look at the event, consider the learnings, and let it fuel what your next steps might be.
After I got fired from my dual job, I spent a lot of time thinking about what I valued in a job, what gives me energy, and what type of people I wanted to be around. With that introspection, I was more discerning about the next companies I talked to. The next job I accepted turned out to be one of the most fulfilling jobs of my career. It was the opportunity to be head of design at a series B funded startup. The parts that drew me in was the relationships with my key partners — the CEO and the head of product. I knew it was right when hours of the interview passed by and it felt like we were simply colleagues whiteboarding the future of the company together. The icing on the cake was that I also got the opportunity to drive culture and process, not for design, but for the entire company.
When we reframe our relationship with failure and call it out as a gift that fuels introspection, it shifts our frame of mind. Failing fast is simply part of the process.
Bottom Line
We will all continue to experience the uncontrollable events of life. We can choose to dwell in these failures and catastrophic events, or shift our mindset. Recover faster from failure by honoring emotions, surrendering to the past, and reframing that failure fuels introspection.