Tim Herrera
NYT
What if you had gotten that one job?
You know the one. The job you were banking on, hoping it would be the next big step in your career. The job you were so close to getting but that seemed to slip through your fingers.
We’ve all been there — I certainly have. It can feel disheartening, and it can shatter a person’s confidence. But what if we chose to look at these missed opportunities from a slightly different angle?
I raised this question on Twitter a few weeks ago. But rather than just ruminating on rejections, I asked people: What’s a rejection you got that ended up being for the best in the long run?
That shift in perspective isn’t easy to make, but it’s worth the effort. In a Smarter Living article from last month that looked at dealing with regret, particularly around missed opportunities, Jenny Taitz wrote that “researchers have found that obsessing over regrets has a negative impact on mood and sleep, can increase impulsivity, and can be a risk factor for binge eating and misusing alcohol.”
But how do we get from obsessing over a missed opportunity to finding the silver lining?
To figure it out, I called in the experts: Mollie West Duffy and Liz Fosslien, co-authors of “No Hard Feelings,” which looks at how emotions affect our work lives.
The first step to getting over a missed opportunity and instead seeing it as an advantage, Ms. West Duffy said, is to allow yourself to feel regret.
“Sitting with that emotion and processing it is really important,” she said. “Too often we just think, ‘O.K. I’ll just bury that inside.’”
This is a feeling Ms. West Duffy knows well. Years ago she applied to business school and didn’t get into her top choice, which forced her to re-evaluate whether she even wanted to go.
“I realized that in the process of not getting what I wanted, I had this deep self-reflection about what actually motivated me and what I wanted to do with the rest of my life,” she said. “Looking at the roles that I would’ve had if I had gone to business school, I don’t think I would’ve been happy in them.”
Next, identify whether you’re feeling regret because something in your current situation isn’t going particularly well. If you’ve been obsessing about not getting a job you really wanted, consider if you’re only feeling that way because you didn’t get a promotion you were hoping for, or because your co-workers have been getting under your skin lately. This can help you recognize that you might be focusing on a missed opportunity not because you truly wanted it to pan out, but because things just aren’t going very well at this moment.
Perhaps most helpful is to orient your thinking around what’s going well right now, and then work backward to figure out why, Ms. Fosslien and Ms. West Duffy said.
Try this exercise the next time you’re falling into a “what if” spiral: Write down three things that went well for you recently, and note who or what caused those things to happen. This helps you look at the positive, while causing you to reflect on the past steps that got you to your current position.
Ultimately, how we frame missed opportunities is a matter of recognizing that life is full of twists and turns, and that change — or a lack of change — doesn’t always have to be considered unequivocally good or unequivocally bad. Sometimes it has shades, and those shades can change depending on your perspective.
“We operate, especially early in our careers, under so many shoulds,” Ms. Fosslien said. “And we think we need to immediately have figured out what our passion is, and that’s just ridiculous.”
“You can’t know what your passion is if you’ve only done a limited number of things,” she said. “So not getting something you’ve always wanted is an opportunity".
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HERE IS AN OOOOOLLLLD FASHIONED IDEA: GAM ZOOO LI-TOVA!!
HASHEM RUNS THE WORLD.
DON'T FRET!
