Give yourself a break!

Alright! You got me. I’m guilty. I can be way too hard on myself, and I bet there are a lot of folks out there that do the same thing. We want to be successful, right? We want everything to go our way, right? Well, as a recruiter in this crazy job market, anyone in this industry can tell you something you already know…. you can’t control everything! (Insert Serenity Prayer here).

This TA love triangle thing we have going on in this industry is chaotic. It’s stressful and we want to find that purple unicorn, uh, squirrelly, thing (who btw already has a handful of offers) for our clients. We’re good at what we do, so we usually find THE candidate. But, when we don’t (or at least fast enough), we expect more from ourselves and obsess over how to not lose another one.

• I’ve learned that I have to give myself a break sometimes. Forget about it and move on to my next WIN.
• When something doesn’t go your way, take it as a chance to determine if there’s a learning opportunity there. Don’t take too long or beat a dead horse. You can, at least, try to diagnose what happened. But you know what? (Stuff) happens sometimes. And, when it does, give yourself a moment to evaluate, focus, center yourself, and go get that next one!

Have you seen Ted Lasso?

I challenge you to watch that show and not get some nugget of positive reinforcement or life lesson. One of my favorite scenes is when Ted is trying to get a player to forget about a play where he failed to perform. His lesson is that goldfish are the happiest animals on earth because they only have a 10-second memory. He tells the player to “Be a Goldfish!”. (Warning! If you look up the bit on YouTube, there is some fruity language.) The lesson a lot of us American football fans already know is that the great players have short memories, meaning they have to forget about that last bad play and immediately get ready for the next play. No time to dwell on what went wrong, just trust your abilities to prevent it from happening again.

The key to greatness is not that you failed, but how you respond to the failure. I can’t think of a more real-world example than Thomas Edison’s famous comments after getting a question about how many times he failed while inventing the light bulb. His quote is “I have not failed 10,000 times. I have successfully found 10,000 ways that (a light bulb) WILL NOT work.” Talk about being a goldfish!