HOW TO DEAL WITH FAILURE

Dean Shepherd, a professor of entrepreneurship at the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University, knows a few things about failure. Shepherd became interested in the subject as a doctoral student, when his father lost his longtime business. “He clammed up, denied that the business had gone and never spoke about his emotions,” Shepherd said during our recent conversation. His father’s reaction led to Shepherd’s eventual book From Lemons to Lemonade: Squeeze Every Last Drop of Success Out of Your Mistakes. Here is some of his advice.


The right and wrong ways to deal with failure

Needless to say, Shepherd’s father did not react to his failure in a healthy way. “If you don’t talk, you keep emotions down, but after awhile you have a severe reaction,” Shepherd says. However, talking about your failures too much can also be unhealthy, Shepherd warns, as constantly discussing emotions causes them to escalate.

The best way to deal with failure, then, is to find the middle ground between these two paths. “People usually feel comfortable talking or not talking, but we need to do both.” In other words, learn to talk about your reaction to failure, but don’t wallow in it. Shepherd says it’s this strategy of oscillating between talking and not talking that allows us to learn from our mistakes.

Three tips for facing failure

Here are a few of Shepherd’s additional suggestions for dealing with failure in a healthy way:

• 1. Address “secondary” causes of stress: When confronting a failure, it’s important to take care of the other things that need tending to as a result of that failure. Shepherd shares an example: “If you’re an entrepreneur and your business fails, you might have to sell the house, switch your children’s schools, look for a job. As you do these things, when you turn back and think about the failure, the enormity is less.”

• 2. Separate yourself from the failure: “Just because your business failed doesn’t mean you’re a failure,” Shepherd says. It’s important for people to actively work on separating their identity from their failure in order to move on.

• 3. Don’t let failure become normalized: “If we end up failing a lot, failure can become normalized, and when we fail, we don’t feel any emotional reaction,” says Shepherd. “That may sound good, but if you become desensitized to failure, you’ll become desensitized to commitment. This creates a bad cycle: you have less investment in your endeavor, so you fail, and you don’t learn from it.”

Finally, Shepherd advises people to keep the big picture in mind when dealing with failure. “Learn from past failures so you don’t make the same mistakes again. If we think of our projects as a series or a stream, we can be successful overall, even though we may fail at any particular one of them.”