 Artfully
Managing Mistakes and Rethinking Rejection
Dear Friends and
Colleagues,
In previous
issues of this newsletter I outlined essential
principles and strategies for staying the course while
in the pursuit of a worthy goal – how to keep on keepin’
on, even when the going gets tough. (See
archived
issues April through July, 2007.) A key piece in that puzzle
remains, however, as I felt it deserving of our fullest
attention and the benefit of its own article. In a
nutshell, as we journey towards any aspired end, how we
approach and respond to the feedback we receive along
the way will significantly color both the quality of our
experience as well as the eventual outcome we are able
to achieve.
Whether the goal
is to get a job, publish a book, raise funds for a
cause, or make the monthly quota required on the job,
rarely does the journey proceed in a linear fashion from
A to B to C, right on through to Z. What we all know
from experience is that the typical path looks more like
A to B to C, back to B to C to D to E, and back to C
again. (For an easy illustration, just reflect on your
last roller coaster ride with a diet, an exercise
regimen, or a spiritual practice.) Clearly it’s
important to prepare and ready ourselves for the step by
step progression inherent in any journey, but it is
equally important to anticipate and prepare ourselves
for the inevitable backslides, slow-downs, pitfalls,
detours, setbacks, and once in a while, start-overs that
we are bound to encounter along the way!
I think we
readily accept the notion that in order to achieve
something noble, we have to ennoble ourselves in the
process. We recognize that big dreams require big
courage! We know that landing a great opportunity will
require great patience and persistence, while a less
worthy goal will require less effort. We acknowledge
that anything we aspire to that represents a “stretch”,
requires us to grow, and hopefully, in so doing, will
make the pursuit itself worthwhile. We expect that
somehow at the end of any important endeavor, we will
know things we did not know before, and that we will
somehow be different (wiser, better, humbler) than we
were before we began. In other words, we expect to
learn, grow and change along the way, or why would we
pursue it in the first place?
What we don’t
like, rarely prepare for, and in fact, deeply resist, is
that which will in fact teach us, grow us, and develop
our mental, emotional and spiritual muscles along the
way. We don’t like to make mistakes, we hate rejection,
we despise appearing the fool, we deplore criticism, we
avoid taking risks, and we resist changing our ways.
Ironically, all of these which we would take great pains
to avoid, are often the very arrows that help point the
way to the elusive Grail. Here are some simple (though
not easy) suggestions for maintaining a healthy
perspective and appreciating the value of the ups and
down’s which will be part and parcel of any worthy
endeavor.
1. Expect
Challenges!
I remember while
in the throes of a major fund raising project for
refugees, many of the volunteers, including myself,
growing increasingly frustrated with the seemingly
endless onslaught of barriers we faced from the
community, the government, and other social service
agencies. One day the woman organizing the project (who
would later become one of my most cherished mentors)
gathered us together and admonished us by saying, “You
know that we are bound to confront many problems and
challenges in order to reach our goal. The problem is
not that there are problems. The problem is expecting
otherwise and getting discouraged as a result of your
unrealistic expectations. Toughen up, people! Nothing
worth doing is ever easy!”
It was a
transformative moment for me to realize that what was
getting in the way of our progress, was not so much the
challenges we faced, but our attitude about them! The
situation wasn’t yet hopeless, but we had grown hopeless
about it! Wouldn’t we be more resilient and less
troubled by challenges if we accepted them as a
necessary part of the territory?
2. Acquire a
healthy appetite for fresh mistakes!
One of the thirty
skills outlined in my guide to job retention entitled,
30 Ways to Shine as a New Employee, is to befriend
mistakes as a useful and important part of learning. I
add, however, that we should take care to not repeat the
same mistakes over and over, but to make fresh mistakes
reflecting the necessary errors, risks, and perils
inherent in all growth. From that perspective, I would
assert that, to a great degree, all the success we will
ever enjoy is the result of the artful management of our
mistakes!
The Chinese have
a saying, “Failure is not about falling down, but
staying down.” What we are able to achieve is always
dependent upon how we fail, how we view our mistakes,
and most importantly, how we react to them afterwards.
The riches that come as a result of trial and error are
priceless. Mistakes motivate us to look for alternate
solutions, to encourage lateral and tangential thinking,
and to explore possibilities. Mistakes reveal what more
we need to know and what we need to improve in order to
achieve our objectives. They build character, keeping
us honest with ourselves. As Sophia Loren shares in her
memoir, “Mistakes are a part of the dues one pays for a
full life. If we could sell our experiences for what
they cost us and how they enriched us, we’d all be
millionaires.”
3. Take care
what you label “failure”.
There are all
kinds of reasons that we fall short of meeting our
desired ends when in pursuit in a worthy goal.
Sometimes we blow it and make an honest mistake. If we
learn and grow from the experience, using it as a
stepping stone rather than roadblock, would we consider
that failure, or would we call it hard-earned
wisdom?
Sometimes we have
done the best we could in a situation, and still fall
short of meeting the mark or making the cut due to
factors outside our control, like another person’s
discretion or the quality of the competition. In this
case, if we have succeeded in doing the best we could,
is it really fair to consider this a failure, or is it
more of a disappointment?
Sometimes we
experience a setback in the form of a complaint, poor
evaluations, failing an exam, a defeat in a competition
or an election, the loss of a contract, or the loss of a
job. In cases such as these, it looks, feels and smells
like failure, and you’re not going to let me get away
with calling it something else, even if this is my
newsletter! Granted, it’s not that the experience of
“failure” isn’t real. Still, what we need to keep in
mind is that even in the face of real defeat or
difficult criticism, how we respond and think about it
- what we do with it – is going to be the telling factor
of how it eventually affects our lives.
When a person is
turned down for a job, it may be viewed as a setback,
disillusionment, a letdown, a disappointment, a
travesty, or a personal failure. Our ability to cope
and bounce back from what we consider a “setback” is a
far cry from how we would recover from that which we
would consider a “travesty”. The language we use to
describe our experiences has tremendous power in telling
us how to think and respond to them, thus we need to
take great care in how we label them.
4. Remember
that all feedback is important information!
Our experience
reflects that this is a lessons-based world and the
natural course of all progress is by way of feedback.
Once we act on a dream or put a plan into motion, we
expect feedback from the environment letting us know if
we are headed in the right direction or if we’re barking
up the wrong tree. This feedback comes in the form of
data, advice, help, suggestions, directions, criticism,
success, and failure. While not all feedback is a joy
to receive, every form of feedback is valuable. When we
meet with favorable feedback, we value it as important
information to keep doing what we’re doing. When faced
with negative feedback, however, we are more prone to
cave in and quit, get angry or defensive, or to ignore
it completely, totally disregarding the fact that
criticism is also important information! As Norman
Vincent Peale observed, “The trouble with most of us is
that we would rather be ruined by praise than saved by
criticism."
What if we were
to live our lives more like a pilot flies an airplane?
One of the things I learned from my one time in a
cockpit (long story), was that a plane virtually never
flies in a straight and narrow path. Pilots simply
respond to an automatic correctional guidance system
that tells them when they have gone too high, too low,
too far to the right, or too far to the left. The job
of the pilot is to continue correcting its course in
response to the feedback he/she is receiving. The pilot
doesn’t all of sudden freak out, break down, or cave in
because of the relentless flow of feedback; in fact,
he/she depends upon it.
What if we
thought of all forms of feedback, from the highest of
praise to the lowest of condemnation, as our own sort of
correctional guidance system? As a trainer, the only
way I know if a new idea will work, is to try it. What
I am looking for that first time is not success, but
feedback as to whether or not I should do it again. I
think it is fair to say that any workshop that I have
come to feel good about delivering, has been retooled,
reworked, and refined in response to the feedback, good
and bad, received from past participants. From this
point of view, there really is no such thing as failure,
there’s just feedback!
5. Don’t
allow your first response to be your final response!
We’ve all been
taught that when life hands you lemons, make lemonade.
Sure enough, lemonade is nice, but not when it’s below
zero and you were expecting hot chocolate, or when you
were planning on celebrating with a glass of champagne,
(in which case we should pretend the lemons are limes
and make margaritas!) I think it is only fair that we
call a setback, a setback, and not try to whitewash
frustration, disappointment, or real pain as a result of
a blow. I think it is healthy and fitting that our
first response to a setback should entail the thoughts
and emotions ordinarily accompanying a bad turn of
events. What is important is that we don’t let that
first response be our final response!
Once we’ve
stopped reeling from the blow, we need to pick ourselves
up, brush ourselves off, and allow ourselves to move
past our primal response to a more level-headed,
considered response. In their book, “This Is Not the
Life I Ordered”, the authors suggest that we approach
challenges knowing four things: 1.There is probably
something good in the situation we have yet to discover.
2. There are aspects of this situation which are in our
control. 3. We are not alone in this situation; help
exists. 4. This too shall pass!
6. Use the
power of questions to turn setbacks into opportunities.
When facing
difficult circumstances, the questions we ask will
either work to support us or they will serve to sabotage
us. Consider the difference between “Why me?” and “What
now?” Asking “why” puts us into victim mode and halts
our efforts, while asking “How do I proceed from here”
sets us back into motion. Here are few worthy
questions that can help us regain our grounding when
facing a setback or in the wake of making a nice juicy
mistake:
-
What do I
need to do to regain my perspective in this
situation?
-
What would be
my advice to a friend or family member if they were
in my shoes?
-
How might
this turn of events contain within it the seed of an
equal or greater opportunity?
-
How do I use
this experience to work to everyone’s advantage?
-
How can I
walk away from this situation with more rather than
less?
-
Who do I know
who could help me in some way?
-
What
qualities do I need to bring to this situation –
Humility? Courage? Perseverance? A sense of humor?
-
How do I
remember that ‘this too shall pass”, and help myself
bide my time while waiting for that time to pass?
7. Carefully
discern between “input” and “influence”.
In a training
exercise I designed for youth (many involved in gangs),
I ask them to consider the people in their lives whose
views and opinions they receive but choose to ignore,
and the people in their lives whose views and opinions
they receive and take seriously enough to affect their
actions and behavior. That is the difference between
feedback that is treated simply as “input” and that
which is treated as “influence”. We receive all kinds
of feedback everyday, but we are the ones who get to
choose what to do with it! We have to consider the
source before we appoint value to the opinion! In
fact, criticism from some can be taken as a great
compliment, and vice versa!
For example, the
woman who doesn’t get hired because she doesn’t present
herself in a way that is “feminine enough” for the
company’s image, may take that to mean that this was
definitely not a good fit for her and her own personal
style. This feedback was important input about the
company, but it needn’t influence how she presents
herself in the future. I remember a contractor telling
me that my diversity training was “too humanistic and
needed more of a corporate slant”. I took that as a
compliment that I was headed in the right direction, but
that I needed to market it to a different kind of
customer. Clearly, all feedback can be useful depending
on how we use it.
8. Invite
Ongoing Feedback.
We should heed
the advice of Oliver Cromwell who said, “The person who
stops being better stops being good.” We need to
nurture our innate desire to continuously learn, grow
and develop, to strive to become more than we are
already are. Yielding to that never-ending yearning is
what will give us the courage and the gumption to invite
ongoing feedback, take from it what we will, and
actually use it to change, improve, or alter our course
in a positive way. But to get honest and open feedback,
we need to ask for it, and we need to make it safe for
people to give it to us!
We all know the
difference between the person who asks, “So what did you
think of my presentation?”, and the person who asks,
“What do you think I could do to improve on what you
just heard?” The first person may be fishing for a
compliment while the latter welcomed constructive
criticism. Questions which invite honest feedback
include:
-
How do you
see me limiting myself?
-
What else do
you think I could be doing to be more effective (in
my efforts, on the job, in my job search, in my
role)?
-
Do you have
any ideas on how I could alter my strategy in order
to get my message across (to employers, to my staff,
to my boss, to my target audience, to my
customers)?
-
I’d love any
suggestions you might have on how I can improve on
what I’m doing now!
9. Look for
and Learn from Patterns!
In the process of
discerning which of the feedback we will treat as
“input” and which we allow to influence us, it is
important that we look for patterns. There’s a great
saying: “If one person tells you you’re a horse, they’re
crazy. If three people tell you you’re a horse, there’s
a conspiracy afoot. If ten people tell you you’re a
horse, it’s time to buy a saddle.”
In other words,
if several people are telling you the same thing, there
is probably some truth to it. If you’ve sent umpteen
resumes and not received a single response, it may be
time to revamp it or to rework your cover letters. If
every job you’ve had falls apart in the first three
months, or every relationship you’re in comes to an end
before you’ve gotten to the next plateau, you might stop
and notice that the most powerful common denominator in
these equations could be you! There’s no use in
looking for or asking for feedback if we’re not open to
hearing it or using it afterwards.
In summary, while
making mistakes, experiencing rejection or receiving
criticism is never fun, they are an important part of
the process of improvement. We have to be big enough to
face them and grown from them. It is also helpful to
remember that failure is never final, and rarely is it
fatal! (For that matter, success is never final
either!) It’s all part of the journey, and if we can be
mature enough to get the lessons, the setbacks we
experience and the mistakes we make can be welcomed and
valued as part of what makes the adventure both richer
and more worthwhile. I will leave you with the words of
the great Joseph Campbell, “You know the rule: if you
are falling, dive. Just do the next right thing that
has to be done.”
Wishing you fresh
mistakes for the wisdom they hold,
~ Denise
© Denise
Bissonnette, September 2007 (If not used for commercial
purposes, this article may be reproduced, all or in
part, providing it is credited to "Denise Bissonnette,
Diversity World - www.diversityworld.com." If included
in a newsletter or other publication, we would
appreciate receiving a copy.)
Read Denise's
previous (July 2007) newsletter...
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