How to handle a career setback

Roger Gilpin of Lee Hecht Harrison (LHH) in Northern Ireland offers advice on how to handle a career setback.

It is almost inevitable that we will encounter a career stumbling block at some point during our working lives. Sometimes they can be minor such as a disappointing performance review, or more significant like being passed over for a promotion. Setbacks can leave us feeling frustrated, inadequate, and wondering where it all went wrong.

The following tips will help you to bolster your confidence when faced with disappointment and how to make the most of a bad situation.

1.    Take a step back. An unexpected setback can be difficult to accept or understand. Taking a break will help you come to terms with your feelings and enable you to put things into perspective. Why not indulge yourself and do things you had previously wanted to do but hadn’t had the time? Try not to wallow in bad feelings and instead write an action plan to help you get where you want to be.

2.    Analyse what went wrong. Asking for feedback can be a useful tool to help uncover any shortcomings you may have. Try to turn the situation into a learning exercise, and embrace the advice you are given. This can be a challenge when you are feeling defeated, so give yourself whatever time you need beforehand until you can objectively determine how to move forward.

3.    Don’t scapegoat others. It is tempting to level blame at other people when you are looking for a reason as to what went wrong. Instead, focus on why the event happened and how you can learn from it.

4.    Learn from others in the same boat. Steve Jobs once proclaimed that being fired from Apple was ‘the best thing that ever happened to him’. The former CEO had suffered the misfortune of being fired from his own company but saw the incident as an opportunity to unburden some of the responsibility he had felt and begin to regain his creativity again. He was of course re-hired in 1996 the rest is history. It can be therapeutic to look at the careers of friends or of individuals you admire and observe how they overcame their own personal setbacks.

5.    Redefine or adapt your goals. You may find that suffering a setback can help you to re-evaluate your own ambitions. Perhaps you were heading down a path which you hadn’t planned or even really wanted but circumstances had led you that way. Adversity can sometimes be the catalyst you need to rediscover what makes you happy and what doesn’t.

For more information on how you can avail of our outplacement services, please contact us on: 0845 456 2269