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When life gives you a knock, how can you move forward? Lessons can be learned from team disappointment not only from the recent Euro 2024 tournament, but also from the inevitable experience of any business team that fails to land the deal or the pitch.
Being knocked out of a tournament is tough, particularly when the whole of the nation is already carrying home the silverware in their minds. But learning how to fail is part of life, and for many corporate businesses it happens time and time again. When a business deal goes awry, or a contract falls out of bed it can be deeply crushing. Learning from disappointment and a let down is part of growing up professionally and it is an inevitable part of the career rollercoaster. HR Grapevine spoke to two experts about how to learn this, the hardest of lessons and emerge stronger and more resilient.
Expectation can be a thorn in any professional’s side. Never was something more expected than Gareth Southgate bringing home a win for the football loving nation. Yet, it wasn’t to be and for many a fan and player alike picking themselves up after this defeat will take a long time to process. In business, there often isn’t the time to rest and recuperate from a disappointment – there’s just the slow annihilation of facing the music and rolling out the day job once again, only this time with the shadow of a let-down. So, what can be done and how can you swipe left on the negative shadows?
Fall, not fail
Daniel Driscoll is founder of TrueLead Coaching. He says the focus should be upon changing the narrative. We all know the dangerous inner voice that sits on your shoulders and calls the shots on how you feel, compounding the way you progress and move forward.
“We hear a lot about how failing is good and that it’s ok to fail - even good to fail. But it never did sit quite right with me. To not be successful in achieving something is the definition of failing. The word failure invokes a binary feeling, a finiteness - you either have achieved or not. Now, in some cases, this may be true, but in most, it is only a moment in time on a journey.”
That journey is most often peppered with ‘falls’ – it harks back to our earliest days when, as a child, we must navigate a friendship exclusion or the humiliation of failing a test. We start early with processing these hurdles but how we talk to ourselves can be the difference in our levels of resilience and how we move forward.
Driscoll adds, “I came across a video of Simon Sinek talking about changing the word fail to fall. What do you do when you fall down? You get back up. Saying we have tripped up, stumbled, or fallen down triggers an innate motivation within us that we learned right back from when we learned to walk.”
