One problem that many of us face is that we have not been adequately prepared to deal with things that go wrong. Our education system focuses primarily on rewarding students for getting correct answers—not for fixing mistakes. In addition, we’ve increasingly chosen to reward people for participation in events rather than success, which means that we do not get much practice with adversity.
Yet, things are quite likely to go wrong at work. Sometimes bad outcomes reflect your own mistakes. But other times you’ve done everything you could correctly, and you still don’t achieve the outcome you desired.
If you find yourself struggling after setbacks, here are a few things you can do to improve your ability to come back stronger.
Play the long game
The biggest difficulty people have overcoming problems is that they give too much weight to what is happening right now. You feel great in the moment when you have a success, and you feel lousy when something goes wrong. It’s important to pay attention to what is happening in the moment, but career success is a long-term effort. You have to learn to pay less attention to what is happening in the moment and more attention to trends.
