Feel your failure...and then move on

When I interviewed Howard Behar (former Starbucks president and author of It's Not About the Coffee) for an installment of the M.A.P. Maker Podcast, one of the things he talked about was the importance of being able to experience failure with a positive attitude. Accept it, learn what you can, and keep moving.

That's not to say that you have to embrace failure like a gleeful puppy. In fact, his first suggestion on how to successfully navigate failure is to give yourself time to feel the sting - but not too much time. Here's what he had to say:

I think number one, you have to allow yourself to mourn. And you can be mad at yourself. I mean sometimes I get just – my self-talk, you know, I can be really mad at myself.

I don’t give myself very long at doing that. What I try to do is I try to set a time limit. I say, Howard, after Friday, you’re done with that talk. Right? I do that. It sounds strange, but I’m talking to myself, and I say OK, you’ve got a couple of days to moan and groan, and then you’ve got to start thinking about what you’re going to do, and talk only about what you learned, not what you did wrong.

It’s a little trick you play with yourself. Acknowledge it. Give yourself time to mourn, and to do all those things you need to do. Yeah, it did happen. I’m terrible. I stink. I will never do anything right. And then starting on Friday, OK, what did I learn from that? And how will I take what I learned into the next experiment that you’re going to try?

As I wrote in my recent post on 9 ways to break free of the Craposphere, sometimes you just have to spend some time and wallow in feeling bad, using up that energy so you can transition into feeling better.

It reminds me of something a good friend of mine used to do with her young daughter. She called it the fussbox. If her daughter was vocally unhappy about something, my friend would sit down and give her five minutes in the fussbox (figuratively speaking) to just vent. But the rule was that she had to vent the entire five minutes. Inevitably the energy behind it would sag before the five minutes was up, and then she was ready to move on to other things.

How about you? How do move past failure? What helps you stay positive after you screw up? How do you keep the momentum going?

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