One of the biggest challenges in keeping the momentum going is the ability to accept and learn from setbacks or mistakes, put them behind you and keep going.

The saying “dusting yourself of” comes from an old 1930’s song with with Fred Estaire.

The song begins with:
Pick yourself up,
Take a deep breath,
Dust yourself off
And start all over again.

Here’s a fact: as you try new things, you will have failures along the way. Sometimes the failures will be devastating. No one has an unfettered path to the success they are looking for; whether that be in relationships, sports or work.

Sometimes these setbacks will be completely outside your control and other times they will be the result of mistakes, experience or just bad luck.

Regardless, if you want to achieve success, you need to be able to look at the failures unemotionally, figure out why they happened, take any learning you can from them, then move on and try again.

Once, when I was having one of my best years ever in the retail banking side one external event sent me back considerably.

My branch was part of a test where we were trying something new in retail banking, we were separating all the customer-facing activities from the back-room administrative activities. Ours was the first branch in the bank to move test this new concept. It’s just the way banks do things now but, way back when, customers could “see everyone” and even though there may have been long lineups, some people just sat at their desks and didn’t seem to help. Today, in most banks, everyone you see should be able to get up and help move things along.

As noted, our branch was the very first branch in this bank to move to the new business model and I was the Manager of Administration at the time. The whole management team was firing on all cylinders and we were receiving positive recognition throughout the enterprise. Then, something happened.

An employee decided it was a good time to steal $10,000. A bag of cash from a delivery just went missing. Within hours, corporate security was at the branch questioning everyone and building personal files on everyone. Rightfully, each and every person was under scrutiny. Other financial institutions collaborated as best they could and all personal expenses or unusual purchases were questioned.

What could have been a stellar recognition and career opportunity, turned into a “holly crap, I can’t believe this is happening to me” experience?

In the end, no one was ever charged however we are all pretty sure where someone’s $10K deposit came from for their new home but nothing could be proven.

All our performance ratings that year were sub-par because of the loss. It was pretty demoralizing – or at least it could have been. What did I and the rest of the management team do? We picked ourselves up, dusted ourselves off and started over again. There was nothing we could do about it. We still took a tremendous amount of pride in our accomplishments. We persevered, focused on what we “could” do and we went on to once again getting accolades from senior management and the board of directors for setting the stage for a new era in personal banking.

We could have taken it personally and supported chips on our shoulders. We chose not to. We could have whined and complained about the reduced performance appraisals – especially since salary increases were based on performance ratings – but collectively, we chose not to.

Something bad, outside our control, had created a significant setback. I’m positive that in the end, our joint positive attitude and acceptance or the situation actually worked in our favour in the long run. People promote people that can roll with the punches and get on with the task at hand.

What about when the issue or failure is within your control? What if the failure to meet an objective is actually your fault? Maybe you missed a deadline because of competing priorities. Who’s fault is that?

The point is, that no exceptional achievement at work, or in life for that matter, is going to happen without a lot of falling down, re-assessing, re-focusing and re-starting.

When senior management is looking for people to fill senior roles, the way you handle setbacks will play a big role in how you are perceived. Did you not meet an objective because it was someone else’s fault or did you take ownership of it and take corrective action for the next time?

Picking yourself up and dusting yourself off is a learnable skill. It’s just like learning any other skill. Once you become aware of your behaviour when something fails or goes wrong, it becomes easy to avoid the blame game. Take ownership for figuring out how to do things differently, then start over with the new learning.