How To Deal With Professional Failure 😓
In this post, I’m going to talk about how to deal with a professional failure OR really a failure in any area of your life that you feel you’ve really failed, and I’m going to show you how to move on from it.
Also, we are going to talk about my greatest professional failure story, something really embarrassing that happened to me.
So stay tuned.
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Okay, so when I was first starting out in my career, my first job was a receptionist at a law firm.
My job was to answer the phones at the law firm and redirect the calls to many of the lawyers.
I was answering the calls one day, just picked up a call, had this guy yelling at me saying, “I need to speak to the owner of your firm. You owe us money. We are putting a lien against this building and I’m going to give you the information for the lien, but we need this money. I need to talk to the owner of your firm immediately, or this is going to be a bigger problem.”
I buzzed the owner of the firm. He was sitting in his office and I said, “Hey, there’s someone on the phone here who says they’re going to put a lien on this property. This is the information.”
And he goes in a grumpy voice, “There’s no problem with that property. That’s been dealt with.”
And I’m like, “No, it hasn’t. Here’s the information for the lien and they’re going to put this-“ and he goes, “There’s been a mistake.”
He hung up really abruptly and I was like, okay, I think that was the wrong thing to do. I shouldn’t have said that.
Then he comes out of his office later on with these clients that he was meeting with and I was on speakerphone and they heard everything and they were not happy.
After I saw that, I was like, my heart sank. I’m like, oh, my god. I think I just lost the firm, a giant client.
I felt so bad. The rest of that… it was a Friday and he looked at me. He wasn’t happy.
I was left with, oh, my god, I’m going to get fired.
Anyway, in the morning I came in. I told him, “You know what? I know that I made that big mistake, but now at least you know I’m not ever going to do that again.”
He was over it by then as well, and he said, “You know what? Yes. That was embarrassing, but I’m not going to fire you and you’re right. You’re not going to make that mistake again.”
I recently was coached and I learned that that wasn’t something I was just going to be able to get over really quickly.
It was going to be something that I needed to feel for a while. I needed to process the emotion.
What processing emotion is, is really getting present to what the emotion feels like.
Giving it a name, describing it in detail, how it feels in your body. Mine was an embarrassment.
Embarrassment, how it felt to me was it was in my stomach.
It felt heavy and it just went into as much detail as possible to describe how that would feel, as before when this actually happened to me, I was resisting that emotion.
I thought it was wrong for me to feel it.
Then I wasn’t able to move on from it very quickly and I just kept coming back to it and crying and processing how I process emotion, and it wouldn’t go away because I was resisting it.
That was the big lesson I learned was, if you fail and you feel really, really bad about your failure, sometimes you just need to process the emotion, whatever it is.
Maybe you feel ashamed, maybe you feel embarrassed, whatever it is. You want to name the feeling you’re experiencing.
You want to describe it in as much detail as possible.
Then you want to feel it and then you just got to let yourself feel it for as long as you need to feel it, and then you’re going to be able to move on from it a lot easier than if you’re trying to push it away and resist it.
When you describe it, even down to like what color is the emotion, you’re not going to want to stay there as long.
You’re going to be able to move on from it.
That was my big lesson in processing a failure that hit me really hard.
In conclusion
There you have it, and if you don’t know me yet if you’re new to my blog, my name is Natalie Fisher. I am a career and business mindset coach.
I help people achieve their goals, whether that be in their career or if they’re starting a business or they already have a business.
And I’m here to offer you any help that you need.
You can get in touch with me by starting by signing up for my free workshop.
It’s called: Four Days To A Six-figure Job You Love.
Click that link below to GET IT NOW!!!
SIGN UP TO WATCH THE FREE WORKSHOP HERE
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Looking forward to seeing you there!
Do you know one person who could benefit from the information in this post? If so, do your friend a favor and share this info with him/her.
And remember, the current system isn’t perfect, but you can outsmart it. I’m here to prove to you that you do have what it takes.
I’ll see you next time and I can’t wait!
In Work & Life
I’ve got your back
– XO Natalie
