SELF-IMPROVEMENT

Your career can sometimes feel more frustrating than fulfilling – find out how to bounce back from setbacks at work.

Whether you’ve been passed over for promotion or you are being ignored by your colleagues, the workplace can be a minefield, but with a little expert help, Mike Peake says setbacks can be overcome and even turned to your advantage

Aquick back-of-anenvelope calculation: during the course of a 45-year career, the typical employee will spend around 90,000 hours at work. That's around a third of the time that they are awake, and if you really want to break it down, it all adds up to around five-and-a-half million minutes of sitting down at a desk in pursuit of a pay packet.

Your dream, as you started out on your career path, was that each of these minutes would be infused with interesting and lifeenriching moments – professional challenges to stimulate the mind; personal encounters to help you forge life-long friendships; development opportunities to inch you ever nearer to your personal career nirvana.

No one ever told you about the horrible boss who would hold you back. Or the bizarre whispering campaign that suddenly started up about you when you got back from holiday. Or the awkward office cliques or the endless rounds of redundancies or the unshakable feeling in the pit of your stomach that you are actually going nowhere.

Unfortunately, the chances of work enveloping you like a dark shadow and steadily sucking out your soul are high: a Gallup poll last year found that 85 per cent of workers hate their jobs. A few years earlier, Forbes magazine found that work was far more likely to offer frustration than fulfilment to employees.

While many people are dissatisfied with their professional lot because they find their work rather mundane, other times it is something else entirely – something that might loosely be described as a "professional setback". We asked experts for help with four of the most brutal ones.