How to Overcome A Bad Day At Work

contacted at Mark@ Leadership.com.fj

Everyone has good days and bad days. There are days that everything you do seems to work and all is well with the world.

Yet there are those other days when it seems there’s nothing you can do right. And not only do you make mistakes but you make big mistakes that make you doubt yourself.

And those doubts stay with you long after working day is over.

The next morning you don’t want to go to work, you are low on confidence but you know you have to go to work, so what do you do?

This week, I want to explore how to face a bad day at work because no matter what you do bad days happen.

There are a few things you the can do to get over a bad day at work and to put yourself back on your feet.

‘Our greatest glory is not in never falling but in rising every time we fall” Confucius

Step One: Forgive yourself

The first thing you need to do is to forgive yourself for making a mistake.

You are not perfect so mistakes will happen.

Hopefully not many they will occur.

It’s how you deal them that matters.

If you are acknowledging the mistake you made and are currently in the process of doubting yourself then that’s a good thing.

It may not feel like that now but it is because it’s a sign of intelligence. In order to be aware of your mistakes you require a certain level of intelligence.

The most confident people I have ever met are only confident because they lack the intelligence in order to realise they are not as good as they think they are.

So if you are sitting there upset about the mistakes you have made then tell yourself that’s a good thing.

Smart people accept their mistakes and successful people learn from those mistakes.

So forgive yourself because if you haven’t reached the high standards you have set for yourself that’s okay. Just accept it and move on.

Step Two: Accept mistakes and fix them. Step Three: went wrong

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I coach and train hundreds maybe thousands of Leaders and one of the differences between good and bad leaders is not the mistakes they make but it’s how they deal with them. Bad Leaders tend to make excuses.

They don’t accept their mistakes and they place the blame elsewhere. It wasn’t their fault, they weren’t informed etc.

Poor Leaders put their energy into creating a mountain of excuses that they can hide behind yet the good Leaders accept their mistakes and their energy goes into fixing the problem.

No one expects you to be perfect but they do expect you to take responsibility for your actions.

I’ve worked with people who made terrible mistakes resulting in significant detrimental impact.

But their team forgave them because they embraced their failings and made amends and what those people found was that afterwards they were respected.

More for failing and rising up rather than they would have been if they had never fallen.

Self-pity highlights a problem but doesn’t fix it only action can move you forward so focus on accepting and then fixing your mistakes.

Review what

Smart people make mistakes but don’t repeat them.

Whenever I had a responsibility for a team I always made it clear that when a mistake happened I had no interest in discussing who’s fault it was.

Instead I only wanted people to focus on the solution and only after a solution was found would we discuss how we could make sure the mistake would never occur again.

Every team loses, but a champion team comes back from the loss stronger than before.

When you are reflecting on your own performance you need to identify the trigger for your action. Something would have happened which caused you to react in a way that in hindsight you have identified as not being ideal. Once you have identified the trigger then you can put in place processes or safeguards that would avoid the same mistake being repeated.

Maybe you forgot to do something, so ask yourself what you can do to make sure you don’t forget this in the future.

If you make a mistake because you didn’t know something then ask yourself where you can get the necessary information. Self-reflection is the key to ongoing success.

Review what went wrong and how you can avoid making the same mistake again.

Step Four: Reset

I recall watching an interview with Dana White the CEO of the UFC, the ultimate fighting championship, an organisation that under his leadership went from a valuation of $2 million dollars to $4 billion dollars.

When Dana White was asked about the secret of his success, he said that he never cares about what happened yesterday even if yesterday was the best day ever.

He didn’t care because it didn’t impact what he needed to do today and today was the only thing he cared about.

Successful people live in the present, they don’t allow the possibilities of tomorrow or the regret of yesterday to distract them from what they need to be doing right now in order to win.

Yesterday can be a tempting place to visit and what happened there can haunt you but today is where you are needed.

So it’s time to reset, place yesterday in the past where it belongs and focus on the present and ask yourself what you need to do today in order to be successful.