Managing Emotions to Learn from Failure

Dean A. Shepherd

If you are a normal person, you will have obstacles, setbacks, and outright failures. For some people, these sting like the dickens; for others, they lead to total collapse. Part of what I want to help you with is how to be better prepared not only to expect to deal with some failure, but to be better able to deal with it when it comes, and to actually derive some good from it. But this is not as easy as just saying it, as I was to find out myself.

I had always taught my management students not to be discouraged by failure, that we learn more from our failures than our successes. I had even said that failure is often the fire that tempers the steel of one’s learning and street savvy. Then ...