The sales manager of a Portland, Oregon radio station, Margaret Evans was let go unexpectedly in late September. As she researched new jobs and grad schools, it occurred to her that getting laid off was a kind of gift. She'd always intended to do service work. "This was my chance to make it happen," she says.
The tumblers aligned, and by December she'd signed on as a volunteer at an orphanage in Belize, through a Florida-based charity called Dream Center International. Travel, live cheaply, and do good for people who genuinely need it: not a bad recipe. "This turned out to be the best thing that could have happened to me," she says.
Scale down your expectations for yourself
When we succeed, we tend to just ratchet up our expectations for ourselves and not get a lot of pleasure out of it. But when we fail, it's much harder to ratchet down our expectations for ourselves. "That might be what failing well is," says psychologist Jonathan Haidt. "A willingness to lower our sights when that's realistically required."
Gilbert Brim begins his book Ambition with the story of his father in rural Connecticut: or rather, his father's windowbox. As a young man his father took pride in maintaining the forest on the whole property, but eventually that task became impossible. So as he grew older and weaker, he reduced the range and scope, until he was content just to tend the flowers in his windowbox, albeit to the same standards of excellence. If failure is about failing to meet goals you set for yourself, then one way to avoid failing is to revise those now-outdated goals. That way, instead of failing on a stage you once mastered, you're still succeeding on a more modest stage.
Harness the Bridget Jones Effect
Keeping a journal can help you cope with failure. Jamie Pennebaker, a psychologist at the University of Texas, studied middle-aged engineers who'd lost their jobs. Those who wrestled with their feelings about the trauma through journaling were far more likely to find reemployment.
It wasn't simply the tension-relieving "catharsis" of getting their feelings out. Nor was it that they were more motivated to get out there and pound the pavement—they didn't receive more phone calls, make more contacts, or send out more letters.
Rather, writing helps create meaning—finding coherence and building a personal story that lassos all the question marks hanging in the air and making sense of them. Writing about their feelings forced them to come to terms with getting laid off. It also boosted their social skills—making them more likeable, less vindictive, and better able to get on with things. They were less wrapped up in their past. They could listen better and were more optimistic and less hostile.
Don't blame yourself
Self-blame is corrosive. Research on kids raised amid domestic violence, abuse, or maternal depression shows that self-blame can trigger or worsen depression. Attribution errors—blaming yourself for the bad things that happen to you—are probably the biggest reason people metabolize failure badly. Attribution has a potent effect on depression—the more you blame yourself for problems, the more depressed you grow. And it's a vicious circle—the more depressed you are, the more you blame yourself. By contrast, children who understand that such negative life circumstances are outside their control are not as vulnerable, notes Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck.
Act!
Failure is an opportunity to change course. Seize it.
