The psychology of dealing with things going wrong

Over the weekend I auditioned for a pantomime, and narrowly missed out on the role of the pantomime dame. Unfortunately, a friend of mine got another lead role, leading to more jealousy than I am comfortable with, and my thoughts have gone to the psychology of dealing with things going wrong: something we all have to be familiar with in the course of our careers when we fail to get a promotion, or are beaten onto a good project by someone else.

According to Zuckerman (1979) we take credit for our successes but deny blame for our failures. I’ve certainly been doing that today – I have preferred to blame the heat of the rehearsal room, when in fact in all likelihood I just wasn’t right for the role. This is the same reason we attribute luck to someone else beating us.

There is a huge amount of fascinating reading out there about how we cope with failures, and one of the areas I find particularly interesting is the effect of self-esteem. People with high self-esteem will follow the pattern above.

Conversely, people with low self-esteem will typically enter a cycle of self-blame, reinforcement and repetition. The phrase “I must have done something wrong” comes into their heads.

In real life, of course, we don’t have “high” or “low” self-esteem, we sit somewhere on a spectrum. And there are advantages to different positions – lower self-esteem will at least open ones eyes to the opportunity of learning from mistakes (and as an introvert with not especially high or low self-esteem, I self-reflect regularly) while higher self-esteem leads us to taking care of ourselves better (see Harris and Napper, 2005).

http://www.setsights.co.uk/2011/09/11/i%E2%80%99m-good-you%E2%80%99re-lucky/