And the last thing you feel is confident. 8 Tips for Rebuilding Self-Confidence After a Bad Month 1) Talk to your manager. That’s another place where talking to someone else about it -- like your manager -- can help to put things into perspective. But as soon as I bring it up with a colleague or my boss, one of three things usually happen: It turns out to be a first-time mistake that everyone makes. That last figure is a shame, since the same study also found that the 29% of business owners who decided to try again were more likely to be successful on subsequent tries. And as long as you’re acknowledging that making mistakes -- and maybe even failing -- happen to almost everyone, don’t give up, either. It’s easy to feel like stressful work situations spiral beyond a solution that you can reach on your own. Starting to Rebuild Feel better? As you begin to regain your confidence after a bad month -- or making the effort to do so -- take your time. What do you do to rebuild confidence after a bad month?
When you’ve had a really bad day, the last thing you want to do is spend the night figuring out how to rebuild for the next.
Now, imagine if it were an entire month. Your energy is sapped. You might even feel defeated. And the last thing you feel is confident. Getting up and trying again seems like an ordeal — one that requires a lot more effort than you feel like making. But you have to.
When we’ve experienced a prolonged period of negative events, one of the biggest challenges is regaining your personal morale to go back and give it another shot. That’s true of dating, and it’s true of negative fallbacks at work. We’re here to discuss the latter — and we’ve got some ideas for how you can get your professional groove back.
So if you’ve had a tough month and you’re not feeling so positive, chin up — we’ve got a whole collection of tips to get you back on your feet.
8 Tips for Rebuilding Self-Confidence After a Bad Month
1) Talk to your manager.
We are a society that’s afraid of looking weak, and it has a bad impact on our behavior. It makes 29% of us reluctant to ask for help at home, and 40% of us afraid to be nice at work — because we fear that people will take advantage of us.
It makes sense, then, that many of us are afraid to ask for help at work for fear of looking foolish or ill-informed. Not only can that lead to making mistakes in the first place, but it can also leave you without the necessary information to avoid them in the future.
Let your boss know that you recognize where things have fallen short, and ask for specific feedback. Chances are, your manager will appreciate your proactive attitude about mistakes.
2) Ask what “bad” means to you, compared to reality.
“I’m my own worst critic.” It’s something that many of us say, since we expect perfection from ourselves, which starts at an alarmingly young age. In one study of children in Singapore, researchers found that 60% scored remarkably high on “self-criticalness,” with 78% scoring high in “socially prescribed perfectionism.” And more than half — 59% — were reported to have both.
Yikes. With such a perfectionism epidemic, we wouldn’t be surprised if you’re perceiving your “bad” month to be worse than it actually was.
That’s another place where talking to someone else about it — like your manager — can help to put things into perspective. Personally, I have a tendency to assume the absolute worst about everything, especially when it comes to mistakes at work.
But as soon as I bring it up with a colleague or my boss, one of three things usually happen:
- It turns out to be a first-time mistake that everyone makes.
- It’s easy to fix.
- It’s really not that big of a deal.
When we’re so focused on being perfect, we tend to view mistakes as — at worse — fireable offenses. If that’s the assumption you make with every typo, missed deadline, or other mistake, your confidence is going to take a huge hit.
Instead, when a “crisis” occurs, try your best to step back and put it into perspective. How bad is it, really? Are you completely powerless to it, or is there something you can do to address it now? Once you’ve fully evaluated the problem — which should only require about five minutes of deep breath and de-escalation from your panic — gaining the confidence to tackle the issue might be easier than it first looked.
3) Don’t turn failure into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
As we covered above, many of us allow our perfectionism to manifest as an overreaction to mistakes. If that’s how we constantly behave in the face of performance that doesn’t meet our own standards, could we start habitually expecting failure from ourselves?
Yes. That’s because 70% of us suffer from something called Imposter Syndrome — the sense that, no matter how much we’ve achieved, we don’t belong in a leadership position or deserve the success of having gotten there. And according to recent research, going through life feeling like an imposter can cause us to bring less confidence (and therefore, less quality) to our…
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