How to Recover from a Career Setback
It happens to everyone at some point. You step in it at work and get your legs cut out from under you. You’re left wobbling like a dazed prizefighter.
This is when the timid sell their stock and go to cash. They bottom out their careers before the upswing. They quit… or remain as the walking dead, filling cubicles, gaining weight and greeting new precocious bosses every other year.
Your MBA won’t help you deal with this particular business challenge. Nor will your ability to code (playing to the crowd here, Medium). This is an emotional challenge, not a management challenge. Bouncing back is an exercise of the heart, not the brain.
This five step process for overcoming career setbacks is based on twenty years experience managing and observing many different people at various levels in challenging situations, including my own sorry self. It’s grounded in emotional truths, rather than management platitudes:
1. Have an adult-diaper sized tantrum.
Go down to the river and scream at the pigeons. Corner someone close to you and tell them every last detail. If necessary, spit while you talk. Write a single-spaced diatribe, then burn it while you howl at the moon. Punch your bed. Or all of the above. Be inappropriate. Don’t worry about offending anyone. Don’t spare a soul in this rant, including yourself. Drain the poison — all of it.
2. Pray for the bastards.
An old twelve step trick. You know who I’m talking about — the bastards at work who put you in this situation. There is always at least one. Pray that they get everything they dream of, even though you don’t mean it. This is self-brainwashing with a purpose. After a few weeks the negative charge will start to disappear. You won’t feel angry any more, or if you do it will probably be normal, fading anger, on its way to full dissipation. That big lump of hate on your shoulders will start melting away.
3. Gain perspective.
FaceTime with your kids if you are on a business trip. Focus on your personal art project, your fantasy football league, that visit to your grandmother you have been putting off. Read a blog from a friend who has cancer. You know what counts most: family, friends and meaning, however you define it. Be happy that you are healthy and/or have all your faculties. And don’t ever forget that you are biodegradable.
4. Take discreet action.
Bouncing back doesn’t require you to fix everything all at once. Just take it one project at a time. Focus on the specific task at hand, not the gargantuan existential challenge of winning back everyone’s praise. Start your engine back up and be deliberate about where you focus. In your stressed out state you will be easily distracted. Stay on the road and build your confidence one mile at a time.
5. Make survival your rocket fuel.
Your Ernest Shackleton, Diana Ross and that dude from The Martian mashed up into one ugly ass, inspirational individual. At first you were afraid — petrified. But now your strong. You learned how to get along. Play every damn song in this genre while you jam down the freeway in your crappy car. You will be surprised at how good that feels and how it will drive you forward.
Redemption is an underrated phenomena — most fully expressed in seventies power ballads and the written works of Apple employee number 342, Friedrich Nietzsche, who said:
“That which does not kill us makes us stronger.”
You’re damn right.
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