In the past year, you have worked hard for the sale. You have invested your time, resources, and optimism in the outcome. It looked like the buyer would give you the nod, but at the last moment the customer decided to move in another direction. You are disappointed. That disappointment is a measure of how much you care.
Having spent the past twenty years studying how people and organizations compete in tough times, I have found that resilience is the difference in those who merely survive and those who thrive. Those who thrive move beyond their disappointment. They transcend personal failure. They feel the pain and move on.
Moving on does not mean that you erase the pain of losing a sale. You simply move beyond the loss by taking control of those things over which you have control. You get out of bed tomorrow morning and pursue more sales. Moving beyond loss leaves room for acknowledging the pain without obsessing on it. Disappointment is only one emotion that we have available to us at any given time. If we dwell on disappointment, we wallow in misery. It hurts to lose but feels good to compete. That is the good news of resilience; you still get to compete.
The moment you decide to lick your wounds, stand up, and pursue another opportunity is the beginning of resilience. That you fail to quit or to submit to your disappointment is the best antidote to feelings of helplessness. In Man's Search for Meaning, Holocaust survivor and psychiatrist, Viktor Frankl wrote: “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: The last of the human freedoms is to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.” You can choose your own way.
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