Everyone is going to fail at some point. It's inevitable. But learn to be resilient and you'll see these failures as setbacks, not disasters.
"You can only control so much," said Melody Wilding, a New York-based executive coach and author of "Trust Yourself." "Even with the best technical skill, you're not always going to get the results you want."
Resilience enables you to go after something that poses a challenge rather than playing it safe.
"If you have a resilient mindset, you're more likely to step up to a challenge again and take a risk," Wilding said. "If someone doesn't have that mindset, they're more likely to retreat, give up and resign themselves to the situation."
Be Resilient By Taking A Different View
Resilience enables you to look at missed targets with a constructive outlook rather than something that will slam you down.
"How else can people view goals as mile markers instead of finish lines?" said Colin Coggins, co-author of "The Unsold Mindset" and Los Angeles-based sales consultant and adjunct professor at the University of Southern California. "Otherwise if you don't hit your goal, you crumble because you didn't hit the finish line."
View goals not as an end but a sign of progress toward your overarching purpose, he says.
"Every successful person has goals," said Garrett Brown, the other co-author of "The Unsold Mindset," who is an Orange County, Calif.-based sales consultant and also adjunct professor at the University of Southern California. "But people who are successful tie them to purpose."
Rather than just setting a revenue goal, add the reason why you need to achieve that goal. For instance, you might aim to help customers live better lives. If you're not hitting the target, that bigger purpose fuels your resilience.
Focus on the process rather than results, Coggins says.
"Garrett and I say we wish any new sales person a thousand no's in their first job," Coggins said. "Celebrate not just success, but the process and what you learn in between."
Coggins and Brown once were invited to be speakers on a weeklong cruise. Organizers later decided not to have speakers. They had an after-action review to examine why they missed out.
"Then we literally went out for a beer and celebrated it," Brown said. "Now the next time an opportunity like that comes along, we're not going to do the things that potentially cost us the opportunity to do that one."
They worked with a company that has a weekly gathering to celebrate their failures, such as getting hung up on by potential clients.
"The rules are you learn from it and don't make the same mistake again," he said.
Be Resilient By Working Up To It
Resilience is a skill you can develop, Wilding says. Start by putting yourself in situations that expose you to potential failure.
"You're finding opportunities to set yourself up to take bigger risks," she said. "It gives you the confidence: 'I can do difficult things and no matter what happens, I can figure it out.'"
Think about the biggest challenges you've overcome in the past and what that says about your character and ability to bounce back.
"It's helpful to reinforce your own confidence and capability at a moment when that might have been dinged," she said.
Debrief After Something Goes Haywire To Be Resilient
Try to make sense of why the failure happened and how you can use it as an opportunity to move forward.
"You can craft the narrative and instill in the team more of a growth mindset," Wilding said. "It helps people see the lesson in this rather than just seeing it as a setback."
But leaders have to guard against the false positivity of rushing too quickly to call the setback an opportunity.
"Sometimes they don't recognize people may be hurting," Wilding said. "You have to give people space before you choose to move on from this."
