Around one and a half year ago, I proposed a quite revolutionary change at Blendle. I basically said: let’s shuffle the complete company and create a couple of new teams. The initial response was not good. My presentation was not up to par, and my plan wasn’t solid. On top of that, I made the bad decision to move forward with the plan anyway and inform the complete company about it.

This was a failure. I should have created a better presentation and I should have checked things before moving forward. Going over this afterwards really made me feel like a failure, and I almost threw in the towel with my plan.

When things go wrong, it is really easy to get into a negative thought pattern. It almost feels good to punish yourself a little. To get over it, identify and call out these negative things: “My ideas always suck”, “My enthusiasm is not valued”, “See, I’m actually quite stupid”. By saying this stuff out loud, you’ll probably already their incorrectness on so many levels. There is huge power in reframing them in a positive way: “The fact that I got so much pushback means that they take me seriously”, “They value what I’m doing so much that they want to be involved whenever I do something”, “Most ideas aren’t good the first time around, the fact that I came up with this one means that I’ll be able to come up with a better one”.

Reframing negative thoughts is a really powerful way to learn and move on from failures.