How to deal with career failures?

This person, who founded one of the famous production houses in the world, was once fired by a newspaper editor because, "he lacked imagination and had no good ideas". Believe it or not, the person was none other than Walt Disney, who said, "You may not realize it when it happens, but a kick in the teeth may be the best thing in the world for you."

Bill Gates too was dropped out of Harvard. His first business with Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen was also a failure. While this early idea did't work, Gates' later work did, creating the global empire that is Microsoft.

True, no successful person has climbed the career ladder without encountering some failure along the way, including Walt Disney and Bill Gates. Failures are sometimes small and sometimes huge. Some can upset a career, while some can lead you in a direction never really imagined or planned for. But the bottom line is failure is a fact of life. If it can sink you, it can be the beginning of a rebirth too. What shapes the overall outcome is your attitude and response to that failure. Don't let your hopes die when you have a set back at business or trouble with your job, who knows a few years down the line, you would look back and say, "Being fired was the single best thing that ever happened to me."

Learn from failure

 

With every failure, we learn one more way we can abandon and focus in on what may be the correct way in the future. Failure teaches us that we need to change our plans. It teaches us that there is some mistake in our decisions that needs to be rectified. It's very important to take failures personally and learn from them rather than simply dwelling on them.

Set realistic goals

 

Life circumstances are often changeable and unpredictable. To cope with this unpredictability one needs to set a realistic plan. It can be a four-year-plan, having commitment to revise it on an annual basis. A career can fail if a person picks one that he is not fully qualified for. Moreover, some people's careers fail because they made the wrong career choice. Hence, while setting the goals, one must make sure he really wants to do it and that he is completely qualified for it.

Update your skills

 

The failure in your previous attempts will show you the loopholes in your approach and skills. So in your next attempt you should update all your skills that better suite your work and go ahead without getting panic. Updating skills is always a smart move dealing with failures.

 

Review and rewind

 

If you failed in your first attempt, there must have been something that went wrong. What you must do here is to hit the rewind button and review all the steps that you took. Review your attitude, your work style, skills and ask yourself - What went wrong? Were you in the right place?

Use self-belief to shape your own destiny

 

It's very important to cultivate a strong belief in yourself and use the same to shape your destiny, rather than wholly depending upon the ideas from others. Even if you were failed once, if you believe in yourself you will be able to inspire confidence in the people around you, which will help you on your way to achieving career success. In the meantime, you should also cultivate a capability of self-affirmation instead of fearing disapproval and being insecure.

Try different strategies to improve your job performance and marketability, take on different tasks, read books, network with people in different organizations. Dealing with failure requires bouncing back and surviving setbacks. As Thomas Alva Edison said, "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work."