Getting unstuck: The f word
No, not that one — failure is in the eye of the beholder
It’s been a big week, as the career river was featured on the latest episode of The Best Advice Show podcast! Welcome new subscribers, and thanks to Zak Rosen for your thoughtful questions and Jenn Brandel for connecting us. Give it a listen to learn more about why this project exists and how it upends our assumptions about what makes a fulfilling professional journey!
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How do you respond to this quote?
“It’s better to be wrong and interesting than right and boring.”
- Daniele Fiandaca, founder of Token Man Consulting, cited in The Squiggly Career
To be honest, this idea stresses me out. I don’t want to be wrong. At the same time, I love how it frees me up to explore something new. And from the need to be right all the time and lose out on the opportunities that follow taking risks.
Last week we looked at how to get unstuck when it comes to exploring a new direction for our career by shifting our thinking from the near-term to the long-term. Today we’re going to look at facing our fears of failure.
I was chatting with someone about the career river concept the other day, and he pointed out that the river allows us to take our existing skills in new directions over time. The beauty is what came before informs what flows after. This isn’t a disjointed and desperate exercise in acquiring the right skills for the job market, jumping from one track to another. It’s exploration and evolution over the long haul.
A river allows for setbacks — in fact, we expect to face them. One of the many pressures put on us by the career ladder concept is the idea of continual upward progress. But how are we supposed to learn without occasionally stumbling?
I’ve had my share of professional setbacks, and I suspect many of you have too. With the benefit of hindsight, though, I can see how many of those challenges helped me make better decisions moving forward. Heck, Oprah became Oprah after she was fired from a TV reporting job because “she couldn’t separate her emotions from the stories.”
So how do we embrace our inner Oprahs and bounce back? It’s all about your mindset.
Research shows that people who experience career failures don’t lose their self-esteem, as long as they view those failures as steppingstones to new opportunities.
“We’re all going to have failures, some more than others. But it is how you interpret those failures that matters in the long run in terms of how you feel about yourself,” the article quotes Patrick Carroll, lead author of the study and associate professor of psychology at The Ohio State University’s Lima campus.
The real “f word” to grapple with isn’t failure, or even fear — it’s a fixed mindset. Psychologist Carol Dweck shared the drawbacks to this frame of thinking in her book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. As described in this Harvard Business Review article:
Someone with a growth mindset views intelligence, abilities, and talents as learnable and capable of improvement through effort. On the other hand, someone with a fixed mindset views those same traits as inherently stable and unchangeable over time.
Dweck herself describes how to cultivate a growth mindset in this talk, sharing “the power of yet” for students. Her advice — praise regularly, offer rewards, and transform the meaning of effort — applies to how we treat ourselves along our career journeys as well.
It’s easy to see how a river approach encourages a growth mindset, one where the effort we put into our careers pays off over the long haul, even as we may face short-term rapids or obstacles. It’s certainly more forgiving (and accurate) than expecting us to clamber up the career rungs with no setbacks along the way. May we all embrace growth and the power of yet along our professional journeys.
Happy navigating,
Bridget