How You and Your Team Can Learn to Recover From “Failures” or Disappointments Quickly

One of the biggest challenges that my high-achiever clients face in their work is learning how to recover more quickly from setbacks, failures, mistakes, disappointments, and the like, so they don’t waste minutes, hours, or even days spinning their wheels, distracted on the sidelines in self-doubt, self-judgment, and overthinking, instead of getting back in the game and play of their work and life, focused and energized.

Maybe the disappointment was something they played a part in bringing about, or maybe it was something totally outside of their control, like unexpectedly needing to work all weekend when they were planning to have time with a significant other or family.

To shorten the time it takes to recover from such setbacks, I help my clients practice setting boundaries with their thinking. I also help them to adopt a perspective that every failure or disappointment, even the most humiliating oversights, can be turned into a gift or opportunity.

To practice boundaries with their thinking, my clients first practice noticing and observing their thoughts, especially the ones that generate negative emotions.? These thoughts might sound like, “See, you screwed up again!” “How can you be such an idiot?" or “This is why you won’t ever be taken seriously.” If it’s something outside their control that happened or could happen, the thought might look like, “What if I don’t get to take my wife out because I have to work yet another weekend?”

Once they have a much keener awareness of their unuseful or self-critical thoughts, I help them practice setting boundaries by choosing to drop the thought instead of continuing to entertain it or absorb it.?

Instead, I help them learn to activate the region of their brain associated with empathy and curiosity, by practicing mini-mindfulness “reps”, much like you would do reps with the weights at the gym, in order to get more physically fit.??

Mini-mindfulness “reps” are essentially instances of focusing on one and only one physical sensation while dropping all thoughts for a time.? Think of these as 10-second or longer meditation sessions that can be done literally anywhere.

They use these opportunities of getting hijacked by negative, unuseful thoughts to practice building their mental performance (strengthening neural circuitry in the “positive” region of the brain, weakening neural pathways in the survival or “fight or flight” regions of the brain).

This practice, when done consistently, actually increases grey matter in the regions of the brain associated with empathy, curiosity, creativity, purpose, and calm, clear-headed action.

What a gift, right?? Challenges, setbacks, and getting triggered actually become opportunities to build grey matter in “positive” regions of the brain, making it easier for you to stay calm, centered, and focused next time you get hit by a challenge, and help you to do so when faced with even bigger challenges, the more consistently you practice it.

So when my clients get triggered when they make mistakes, the first gift they get to create as I describe above is to improve their mental performance in ever more challenging circumstances.

In addition to this gift with immediate benefits that actually rewires their brain and helps them feel much more calm and focused, they learn to adopt the perspective that every circumstance or difficult situation can be turned into a gift or opportunity.

What initially appears to be a bad situation is actually a gift, as long as you choose to see it as such.

By adopting that perspective, as a choice, my clients actually create gifts in every situation.

Awhile back, an attorney client of mine entered one number wrong in her phone’s GPS app for the address at which she was to give an important presentation for the firm’s clients.? It took her to a landfill that intersected with a liquor store. She was dumbstruck.? Once she entered in the correct address into her phone’s GPS app, she realized she would be 30 minutes late for her presentation to the firm’s clients.??

In our coaching conversation following this event, she expressed how grateful she was that we had been working together already for a few months because before, she would have had a mental or emotional breakdown, and spiralled downward in self-judgment for making that mistake.? She would’ve showed up to the conference frazzled, nervous, embarrassed, and uptight, and it would have killed her confidence for her presentation.

Instead, by practicing her PQ reps as I describe earlier in this article and choosing in that moment to turn the oversight into a gift, she was able calmly inform her supervising attorney by text message of her mistake, ask him to give his presentation first, and she would be there to give hers thereafter, all the while maintaining a level of composure with which she even surprised herself.??

When she gave her presentation, she was able to poke fun at her oversight (not everyday you are taken to the intersection of a liquor store and landfill on your way to give a legal presentation), injecting humor that elicited a lot of laughs from her audience.? She received a lot of compliments afterward.

Through her practice of activating the “positive” region of her brain through mini-mindfulness reps and setting boundaries with her unuseful thinking, from the moment of realzing her mistake, she created the first gift in her mistake or “failure.”? Through her choice to create a gift or opportunity from it, from the moment she realized the mistake, she was able to create an even more engaging presentation than if she had entered the address correctly into her GPS the first time.

Where in your life or in your attorneys’ lives are you or they wasting time and mental and emotional energy due to not having a learned practice to stay calm and set boundaries with unuseful thinking? Or, of purposefully choosing to create a gift or opportunity out of everything, even when it’s the last thing you would choose in the moment?

I have a powerful 8-week program for high-achievers that helps you learn to do just what I describe here, and you get to benefit from practicing it the rest of your life.? I work best with individuals who have previously done therapy/coaching or read a lot of personal development books but haven’t found a powerful method of helping themselves to feel and perform their best when personal or professional challenges arise.??

Email me at [email protected] to schedule a call and discuss what that would look like for you individually or for your legal team.