The 3 Best Ways To Deal With Career Disappointment

Whether you’re just beginning your career or are a seasoned veteran of the workforce, you’ve likely experienced a few professional setbacks. Add to that a years-long global pandemic, unkind macroeconomic trends, and prolonged market uncertainty, and it’s the perfect storm for career frustration.

But the professional disappointment you feel doesn’t have to be all bad. Here are three ways to deal with things when nothing seems to go your way:

1. Mitigate it before it happens

You can’t stop disappointment from happening, but you can mitigate its effects. One of the best ways to do this is by setting realistic expectations and remembering that progress beats perfection.

Have lofty goals? Great, go after them, but be sure to break them down into manageable chunks. For instance, take your annual BHAG (big, hairy, audacious goal) and create quarterly, monthly, and even weekly milestones. If you see things through an “all or nothing” lens, you’re setting yourself up for inevitable heartache. No one — not even the greatest athletes, leaders, and thinkers—achieves a perfect record. So instead, aim for progress over perfection, tracking your smaller wins along the way. Even if you fall short of your stretch goals, you’ll still have made fantastic progress that should be celebrated.

2. Shift your perspective

Didn’t get the promotion you’d hoped for? Lose a client? Yes, it’s a bummer, but it doesn’t mean you’re worthless and the universe is out to get you. Sometimes a lack of progress simply means you’re going in the wrong direction.

I know it’s a tough pill to swallow, but if you’ve been at it for a while and haven’t made headway, perhaps you need to consider a new path. Sometimes spinning your wheels is the best thing that can happen to you because it gives you a chance to reevaluate your strategy: if to date, you’ve been a lone wolf, perhaps you should consider a partner; if a new offering isn’t getting the reception you’d hoped for, scrap it and try something different.

Maybe this is the nudge you need to strike out on your own or make a professional pivot. Instead of viewing the incident as rejection, shift your perspective and consider it redirection.

3. Use the “failure” as fuel for further growth

Failure and success aren’t mutually exclusive; they’re connected. As counterintuitive as it sounds, you’ll grow far more from a supposed failure than when everything goes your way. The key is your ability to adapt and understand that a failure is only a mistake if you fail to learn.

Remember, there is no growth in your comfort zone. To achieve personal and professional development, you must take risks—even if that means you might fail. By adopting a growth mindset, you view every interaction, every project, and, yes, every failure as a chance to improve. And by reframing failure as an opportunity to learn and an ingredient of success—rather than a negative alternative—you’ll adjust your mindset to a more positive one where you see failure as a necessity.

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