From Setback to Success
How to navigate failure and find growth
Kelly Pottharst was an Australian national indoor volleyball player and one of the best in the country. But one day, she landed awkwardly and blew her knee out. It wrecked her knee and put an end to indoor volleyball for her. She was utterly devastated. Her Olympic dreams were dashed.
After lengthy and slow rehabilitation a year later, she had a go at beach volleyball to see if it would be a little easier, and it was.
Despite already being in her late twenties, she went all in. She quit her well-paid full-time job to go on tour as a professional beach volleyball player with her volleyball partner Natalie Cook. She could see the opportunity and went after it with everything she had.
Come 2000 she and Natalie took to Bondi Beach for the beach volleyball final in the Sydney Olympics. And they won. By now Kerry was 35. She had taken a career-ending setback and turned it into the best possible outcome.
Major setbacks and failures are inevitable and part of life’s rich tapestry. No one is immune to them. They can stop us in our tracks. Whether it's a job loss, the end of a relationship, a business going under, or a cherished dream being crushed.
These pivotal moments take us down unplanned paths but they can reshape our futures for the better, depending on what we do next.
There are plenty of other high-profile people who have dealt with setbacks and have gone on to enormous success and impact.
Sir James Dyson created 5,126 prototypes and cleaned out his savings in the process before finally creating the perfect cleaning machine.
Malala Yousafzai began advocating for girls’ right to education. She was shot by the Taliban for her beliefs and advocacy and went through multiple surgeries and extensive rehabilitation. But she didn’t let this stop her and she continued her activism and founded the Malala Fund with her father. By age seventeen, Malala became the youngest person to receive the Nobel Peace Prize for her work.
Steven Spielberg has won Emmys, Oscars and Golden Globes but was rejected twice by the University of California’s School of Cinematic Arts.
Kurt Warner, who’s story was shared in Netflix’s American Underdog, dealt with setback after setback before going on to be a two-time most-valuable player and Super Bowl MVP in one of the greatest Cinderella stories in NFL history.
As Michael Jordan famously said:
“I have missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I have lost almost 300 games. On 26 occasions I have been entrusted to take the game-winning shot, and I missed. I have failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”
The word “success” is derived from the Latin succedere, “to come after, follow after”—and one thing it often comes after is failure.
How we respond to the situation sets us up to maximise the outcome.
Step One: Acknowledge and Accept
The first step in dealing with a major setback is to acknowledge and accept it. And that is far easier said than done. We need to acknowledge the situation, and that the setback or failure has occurred. Denial can prolong the pain and prevent us from moving forward.
Failing at something you've put your heart into can feel devastating in the moment. The more meaningful the goal or significant the impact, the more distress we might experience. Painful as it might be, we have to accept the situation and allow ourselves to feel what comes up – grief, anger, disappointment.
Depending on the situation, we might experience shame or guilt. Perhaps throw in some embarrassment and a sense of helplessness. Our ego can take a beating, our self-worth deflated and we can be left feeling inadequate.
The power of these emotions makes it a demanding cognitive task to not just accept the situation but prevent ripple effects across our lives and future endeavours.
When Tara and I were cycling across Australia we had a mantra: It’s not good, it’s not bad, it just is. The abridged version is: It is what it is. It was our shortcut to acceptance. We said this mantra many times!
Accepting the situation and allowing the emotions to be felt creates the space to begin to reframe and start taking the power back. This lays the groundwork to shift our focus to healing and moving forward. Bottling up emotions can lead to greater stress and hinder our ability to progress.
Step Two: Get Perspective
The next step is about how we attribute the cause and impact of the setback. When disaster strikes, we can lose perspective. We might unnecessarily beat ourselves up and start catastrophising, believing it will affect every aspect of our lives forever.
Martin Seligman is considered the founding father of positive psychology and a leading authority in attribution style. He talks about how we explain setbacks and failures through three frames with either an optimistic or pessimistic explanatory style.
Pervasiveness: do we see this situation or its cause as specific to this situation or global? For example: “Nothing ever works out for me” versus “I may have lost this job, that doesn’t mean I won’t get another great job.”
Permanence: do we see the outcome as being changeable or fixed? For example: “I’ll never be able to successfully run a project” versus “I just need to learn the skills to become a good project manager.”
Personalisation: do we see what happened as down to inherent abilities or caused by impinging external conditions? For example: “My business failed because I’m hopeless” versus “My business failed because it was the wrong market for this product.”
Across these frames when we’re pessimistic, we see situations as pervasive, permanent and personal (internal).
Conversely, when we’re optimistic, things are seen as specific, temporary and external
Working through these frames objectively and compassionately is where we get perspective. When we’ve had a major setback, like being fired, a business going under or a relationship ending, it’s easy to lose that perspective.
Getting objective can be hard, particularly if there the related emotions are still settling.
This is when talking it through with a friend, mentor or, depending on the situation, a therapist can be of value. They can help you get perspective and bring a more optimistic outlook.
Seligman’s view on optimism is not about being Pollyanna about the situation. It’s also not about avoiding taking responsibility. It’s about having an explanation that empowers us while being realistic.
Our inner critic and be quick to beat us up when things go wrong and make us feel all is lost. It’s important to spend time getting perspective to silence that inner critic and move to the next step.
Step Three: Extract the Lessons
The final step is to draw out the lessons to take forward. Back in my corporate days of project management, we’d do a post-implementation review (PIR). In the military, they have a similar process, called an After Action Review.
In both cases, the goal is to extract the lessons – what worked and what didn’t – to then take forward to the next project, objective or goal.
Blending the approach for the two the questions to consider are:
What was the goal/plan?
What actually happened?
What went well and why?
What didn’t work / could have gone better and why?
What could I/we have done differently?
Does anyone else need to know?
Doing this is not about assigning blame or solely about what went wrong.
Work through the questions and answer them as objectively as you can and then think about how you’ll implement the learnings. Perhaps come back after a period of time - that space can increase our objectivity.
In Closing
We can be certain that we are going to face major setbacks or failures in our lives.
Running through these steps is important. If we don’t, we risk ‘fearing failure’ and potentially avoiding situations and taking risks in the future. It might have us playing small or tapping out of something we truly want.
We can get fixated on what happened, stuck looking in the rear-view mirror, perhaps trying to find meaning in what happened. Rather than searching for meaning in it, I believe we need to be future-focused and make meaning from it.
Whatever happens, it doesn’t define who we are. It is our response that does.