It is much easier to digest a failure if you don’t look at it as the opposite of a specific success, but rather as the necessary step towards some success.
Even when it takes you far away from your goal, even when it is repeated in time, even when it looks like you are just not going to make it, failure is always capable of revealing some truth.
Sometimes it’s harsh – e.g., “this is not for you” -, but it is never definitive – e.g., “nothing is for you”.
Everyone wants to be liked. But there is a different between striving to be liked in the moment and striving to be liked in the end.
To be liked in the moment means that you are betting on your capacity to escape immediate evaluation. It’s about being erratic, leveraging every situation, and since people talk, caring about short-term benefit.
To be liked in the end means that you are betting on the capacity of people to judge by themselves. It’s about consistency, authenticity, and long term.
So, the choice is not really between wanting to be liked and not wanting to be liked.
It’s a choice between now and forever.
Three things to do in order to establish emotional and professional safety in a moment of crisis at work.
If you constantly doubt what you do, people will start doubting you as well.
If you play down compliments all the time, people will stop complimenting you.
If you point at your flaws and the skills you lack, people will turn their heads in that direction as well.
The fact is, if you do all that to stay in the background, modesty is not a good strategy.
Try empowering others instead.
A checklist always gets the job done.
It accounts for rules and processes, it ensures that timelines are met, and it guarantees that no critical step is forgotten.
But what a checklist does not do is to consider the emotions of those involved. The stress it puts on them, the uncertainty between one step and the next, the guessing that tends to fill in the gaps.
For that, there’s no checklist that can help.
You’ll just have to be human.
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