There are moments in a career that properly knock you sideways.
Sometimes it’s a big, obvious thing – a promotion that doesn’t land, a redundancy that arrives out of nowhere or a role or team that fundamentally changes in ways you didn’t see coming.
Sometimes it’s less dramatic – feedback that hurts more than expected, being passed over for something you didn’t fully realise how much you wanted until you didn’t get it, a project that gets cancelled after months of effort.
Whatever the specifics, most of us have had a few of these moments. What often gets less attention than it deserves is the response to them – specifically how quickly many of us move straight into recovery mode without stopping to ask whether that’s actually the most useful place to be right now.
The instinct to prove you’re fine
Most of the people I work with are exceptionally good at pushing through difficult situations. It’s part of how they’ve built the careers they have – the ability to absorb pressure, keep delivering, and not let things derail them. That capacity is of course genuinely valuable and often has been a core factor in success to date.
The difficulty is that it can become so automatic that it gets applied to every setback, regardless of whether it’s the best response. The instinct to regroup quickly, demonstrate resilience, and prove you’re fine is a strong one – particularly at a senior level where being seen to struggle can feel like it isn’t an option.
There are of course times when picking yourself up and carrying on is the right thing to do. Some setbacks don’t require extended examination, and getting back to what you’re good at can actually be the steadying point in itself.
The risk I’ve seen is when pushing through happens at the expense of properly understanding what the experience was really telling you. Are you missing the learning, the perspective, or the bigger course correction it was perhaps pointing to because you were too busy pushing forward and proving you’d recovered?
What can get missed
I worked with a client who hadn’t been successful in a promotion round for the second time. Her immediate reaction was that she should just do more – take on more projects, make her case even stronger, work even harder. It’s an entirely understandable response, and in some situations perhaps it would be the right one.
When we worked together on seeking more useful feedback however, her capability and delivery weren’t really in question. What it was pointing much more towards was a lack of understanding of her value, insufficient visibility, and perceived lack of senior presence – the way she was showing up (or not showing up) in various forums and conversations. The effort wasn’t the problem, the lesson was somewhere else entirely.
The real work was first working out whether staying was the right thing to do, and then putting some proper strategies and accompanying actions in place to increase her visibility, and senior sponsorship.
Sometimes it’s about trying differently rather than trying harder. Sometimes, it’s about whether you’re in an environment that’s still the right one for you. An issue that keeps recurring despite genuine effort and real capability is sometimes pointing to a fit problem rather than a performance problem. That can be a harder thing to tackle, but often more useful to confront than keeping on pushing down a path that isn’t working.
There can also be a cost to sustained pushing through that’s worth paying attention to. Repeatedly absorbing setbacks without properly examining them can have a cumulative effect in areas such as energy, confidence, quality of judgment over time. The people I’ve seen navigate difficult career periods most effectively in the fullness of time tend to be the ones who stepped back and gave themselves enough room to more deeply understand what was happening.
Making the space to actually look at it
Pushing difficult experiences aside rarely makes them disappear. Often they resurface in different ways later, sometimes in ways that can be harder to spot – it may be an erosion of confidence, a reluctance to put yourself forward again or just a feeling that something isn’t right without quite being able to put your finger on it.
Giving a setback enough attention to genuinely understand what it’s pointing to is usually time well spent, even when the pressure to just move on feels significant. That means allowing yourself enough time to process before jumping to action and pushing for proper specific feedback rather than working from assumptions about what held you back – assumptions aren’t always accurate, and can lead you to focus on the wrong things.
Most of the people I know who’ve built strong careers carry a few “didn’t go to plan” moments somewhere in the mix. Those moments often turn out to have been much more pivotal and useful than the stretches where it did all go to plan – they tend to teach us something the smoother periods don’t, and take us a step closer to the places where we are more likely to thrive.
If you’re navigating one of these moments right now and would find it useful to think it through with someone, you’re welcome to send me a message or book a call via the link in my profile.
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