How you handle disappointment will play a major role in your personal branding success.
At some point or another, you may experience disappointment during your journey to personal branding success. An expected job offer may not materialize, your book may not sell as well as expected, or a recent marketing campaign may not attract qualified prospects.
Disappointment is inevitable, but you can control your reactions and move forward.
7 tips to help you bounce back
Here are 7 ways you can take positive action, so you can minimize damage and get your personal brand back on track as quickly as possible.
1. Acknowledge. Disappointment is never fun, and facing what has happened can be difficult. However, rather than attempting to minimize your disappointment, acknowledge that your career is at a turning point and commit to learning from what has happened. Failure to acknowledge what has happened can lead to stagnation and making the same mistakes over and over again.
2. Evaluate. Start by objectively evaluating the seriousness of the situation. As a passionate, brand-building entrepreneur or career-builder, you have to guard against the temptation to exaggerate the damage, or lost opportunity, that has recently taken place. Asking questions like, What is the actual extent of the damage?, How much of a setback have you really suffered? and Who else knows what happened? may help you develop a more realistic perspective.
3. Review. What are the steps that lead to the personal branding disappointment? What actions or assumptions lead you astray? Were there any turning points leading to the problem? Were there any warning signs, or intuitions, you may have ignored? Who else played a role in the disappointing outcome? The goal is not to assign blame, but simply gain a better understanding of what went wrong.
4. Salvage. What are the lessons you can learn from the setback? What will you do different in the future? How will you guard against the same thing occurring in the future? More important, how can you reformat, recycle, or reuse some of the work you put into the disappointing project. For example, can you reformat your book into a series of podcasts or YouTube videos, or, perhaps an autoresponder-delivered ecourse?
5. Give back. The above steps may leave you emotionally drained. You may be wondering, How can I quickly restore my enthusiasm and passion? What I’ve done in similar situations is to take a temporary break from thinking about the recent personal branding disappointment and simply do something for others. Write something, present a teleseminar, or do something for a client that doesn’t have a back-end upsell. Offer to share valuable information simply for the joy of sharing your passion! It doesn’t matter what you do, as long as you share helpful information and positive energy with others.
6. Revise. When you’re feeling better–and, trust me, there will be a time when you will feel better–that’s the time to revise your expectations and continue your journey to personal branding success. Avoid moving forward until your ready. Give your recent lessons time to sink in. With the perspective of time, you may find that your disappointment was the result of overambitious goals or unrealistic expectations. Before closing the book on your personal branding disappointment, create more realistic expectations for the future.
7. Recommit. Lost battles can be very painful, but wars are won and lost over longer time frames. Your brand might have suffered a major disappointment, but you can still go on to personal branding success. Learn from your disappointment, but put it aside, so you can better prepared for the next step in your journey to personal branding success.
For more information about bouncing back from personal branding disappointment, check out Dan Schawbel’s interview with Barry Moltz, author of Bounce!: Failure, Resiliency, and Confidence to Achieve Your Next Great Success. And, don’t forget to share your stories of bouncing back from personal branding success as comments, below.
Author:
Roger C. Parker is an author, book coach, designer, consultant who works with authors, marketers, & business professionals to achieve success with brand-building books & practical marketing strategy. He helps create successful marketing materials that look great & get results, and can turn any complex marketing or writing task into baby steps. Visit his blog to learn more or ask a question.
