Failure starts in the mind, because it’s your own interpretation that turns a setback into a verdict on you as a person. A missed goal is first of all an event. Whether it leads to paralysis or to learning is decided in the days that follow, in the conversation you have with yourself.
By failure I mean missing a goal you had committed yourself to. In our part of the world that’s still a taboo: Visible successes get shown, and setbacks tend to be swept under the carpet. That’s exactly what makes it hard to deal calmly with a flop of your own.
Psychologists explain the pain with high expectations. The higher the bar, the further you fall. Leaders often reached their position precisely because they demand a lot of themselves, so a setback usually hits them harder than others.
What follows first is uncertainty. You feel embarrassed, and a film starts running in your head: How will colleagues react, will they show pity or be secretly pleased? That film is usually louder than anything anyone actually says.
Then there’s constant competition. Almost any position can be up for grabs within a short time, and many corporate cultures equate mistakes with personal failure. The mind absorbs that harshness and turns it against you.
In her book “Mindset” (2006), psychologist Carol Dweck describes two basic attitudes. If you consider abilities fixed, you read a setback as proof of your own limits. Someone who sees abilities as something to develop reads it as information about what’s still missing. Dweck studied this mainly in pupils and students, and I come across the same pattern regularly in executive suites.
The difference lies in the sentence you tell yourself afterwards. “I failed” closes the file. “This strategy didn’t work in the second quarter” opens it, because the sentence names a cause you can work on.
Your interpretation can be trained. For one week, pay attention to the sentences your inner critic uses after a setback. Simply writing them down creates distance.
Before you talk to others about a setback, an honest conversation with yourself is worth having. These four questions help.
What exactly went wrong? Usually you can narrow it down: To an assumption that didn’t hold, or to a schedule that was too tight from the start. The more precise the answer, the smaller the chunk becomes.
Which part was mine? Named honestly, without hiding the share of others. Both belong in the picture.
What do I know now that I didn’t know before? This question turns pain into experience. Pilots work in a similar way: They reflect on their behaviour in tricky situations and discuss wrong decisions so that disasters don’t repeat themselves.
What would I advise a colleague I respect? Most of us are gentler with others than with ourselves. The change of perspective brings that gentleness back, without glossing over what happened.
When I start talking with clients who want to change something, I hear the same thing again and again: The push came from a setback. Sometimes it takes a clear sign to see that a change is due.
And quite often something motivating grows out of the failure afterwards. If you’ve worked through what went wrong, you often decide more clearly, because you know what you’re going into the next round for. A setback forces you to re-sort your priorities, and that’s exactly what people like to put off in good times.
That takes time. Work through the setback for yourself and with the people close to you first, before you take it to larger groups. People who know neither you nor the circumstances only see the result.
Failing is part of growth. Still, I don’t like to romanticise it. A failed project costs money, sometimes jobs, and those consequences deserve to be taken seriously.
My experience is that the mind almost always makes the damage bigger than reality does. Leaders who doubt themselves for weeks after a setback lose more decision-making power in that time than through the mistake itself. That’s where coaching comes in, usually with uncomfortable questions.
Sometimes, though, the inner critic is right, and the analysis reveals a real blind spot. Then you need a change in behaviour that the people around you notice too. Honest self-reflection recognises that moment and doesn’t dodge it.
Rarely, as long as you take responsibility and draw a lesson from it. A pattern of repeated setbacks that never get analysed is more dangerous. In my observation, a single flop is forgotten faster than those affected believe.
First separate the event from yourself as a person. After that, the four questions above help, ideally in writing. Talk to someone you trust before you take the subject to larger groups.
Yes, starting with people who know you and the circumstances. Once you’ve worked through what happened, you speak about it more calmly and more convincingly. A wider audience only needs the story once you can also say what you made of it.
Because they usually expect a lot of themselves, and their mistakes are more visible than other people’s. The higher the expectation, the greater the pain. Knowing that makes the pain easier to place.
Further reading on hofmann.coach: Resilience at work: How to get back on course after a setback · Conquering imposter syndrome as a new leader · 13 steps after a disastrous mistake at work · Setbacks: Why leaders should talk about them openly · Fear of failure: How leaders lower it in their teams
Note: This article was first published on 07.12.2018 and was revised and expanded in October 2026.
Cristian Hofmann is an executive coach in Zurich and Schaffhausen (MAS Coaching & Supervision BSO, Forbes contributor). Over more than 20 years he has coached more than 1,500 leaders: CEOs, executive boards and leadership teams in Switzerland, with measurably agreed goals and, on request, pay-for-results. More about Cristian Hofmann.
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