Inspiration

Express your feelings, but don't act on them right away. Immediately after a failure is not a good time to make decisions about your future. You need to mourn the loss by simply allowing your feelings without taking precipitous action.

Seek support. Shame makes us want to hide. Don't surrender to this impulse. The empathy and support of friends who have had similar experiences are invaluable aids in the healing process.

Remember your strengths. Try writing about other accomplishments in your career and about your strengths in other arenas of your life. Invite trusted friends to help you remember.

Don't over generalize. As terrible as failure feels, it does not make you a failure. Resist any temptation to evaluate yourself negatively in other domains of your life.

Differentiate between events and emotions. Just because it feels like a catastrophe doesn't mean it really is one. You will survive this failure. Try to remind yourself of this in moments of panic.

Use your outrage to energize you. It's natural to want to lash out at people you blame. Instead, transform your anger into determination to move forward in spite of the failure. Anger can also function as a protest against your loss of self-esteem and can help you rebuild your sense of self.

Try to learn from failure. Once your sense of self begins to rebound, you can analyze the situation more rationally. Why might this have happened? Were there flaws in your approach that you can correct? Were you politically naive? Have you chosen such a competitive field of study that you need to develop a more specialized expertise? If you decide that you made some mistakes that contributed to the outcome, don't use this awareness in a self-defeating way. Simply decide how you'd like to do things differently next time. Perhaps you were not a good fit for the position or the office environment. Perhaps, like me, you've been pursuing a course of action despite the fact that it doesn't really fit your gifts and talents. In that case, it's time to consider other options.

Recommit to your goals. If your goals remain the same, then assess the changes you need to make in your direction and strategy, and persist in your efforts. Persistence is what separates people who succeed from those who fail. Every fulfilled dream occurred because the person was dedicated to the process of working toward a goal.

Take care of your family. Whenever we are intensely emotionally affected by an event in our lives, this reverberates through our families. Try to keep your anger from spilling over onto your partner. Explain the situation to your children. Model self-acceptance -- it will help your children be more accepting of their own failures.

Rewrite the narrative. Immediately after failure, the story seems simple. You did your best work and it wasn't good enough. But remember this: It's a fact that your paper was rejected or that you didn't get tenure, but whether this was a failure is a subjective judgment. Try retelling the story including only the bare facts. Since reality is mostly invented, you might as well write a new narrative that empowers you, rather than one that's self-defeating.