Career Goals: A Flexible Approach to Failure and Success

This is a guest blog by Gina Covarrubias

Failure and Success

Whether student or engineer, society seems to indicate that goals should part of a career routine. But have you contemplated the true purpose of goals — perhaps to obtain success, prestige, or happiness? And how are we supposed to manage failure when our goals fall short? This article offers practical exercises to help you manage goals!

What Is Failure? What Is Success?

“I’ll be successful once I earn my P.E.” As an engineer, does that sound familiar? How about, “If I don’t get the promotion I really want, it means I’m a failure.”

It can be tempting to label a result as a “failure” or “success.” While it’s not wrong to do so, this belief system is an example of all-or-nothing thinking. Such binary thinking tends to omit the vast, gray space in between. Inside this gray space, there is another angle you can embrace — a kinder, more forgiving way of interpreting failure and success.

The gray space offers a flexible perspective: Failure and success are both fluid, mental constructs that are defined by you. This means you are the authority over the definition of failure and success in the context of your own life.

For example, if you spend months performing research to submit a proposal, is it a failure if the proposal is rejected? On the surface, an all-or-nothing thinker may believe their hard effort amounted to a failure.

But a more open-minded thinker will notice the long-term successes:

  • “I met some very interesting people through this process.”
  • “I deepened my engineering knowledge, enhancing my expertise.”
  • “My vocabulary and communication skills have drastically improved during this journey.”
  • “Despite the final result, this experience has taught me self-discipline.”

Failure and success do not have to be so binary. Try to think of them as being elastic and flexible, without concrete boundaries. You get to decide!

Failure and Success

Giving Credit Where Credit Is Due

The moment you tell yourself, “Hey, I was a great success performing XYZ!,” you will probably feel elated or confident. In contrast, when you believe that you have failed, you may feel disappointment or defeat. In these instances, your emotions become conditional, dependent upon external results.

When our emotions conditionally depend on external results of goals, it can drastically affect the way we view ourselves. The habit can lead us to compromise our self-worth.

Rather than relying on successful outcomes to increase your self-worth, I’d like to offer an alternate perspective. What if you can remain emotionally grounded and self-confident regardless of the goal’s outcome?

This concept involves a certain kind of skill: Rewarding yourself daily for micro pursuits and efforts in addition to the macro results they produce.

Examples of internal triumphs through pursuits and efforts may include:

  • The recognition that you made a small breakthrough with a difficult colleague.
  • Speaking up for the first time even though you felt fear.
  • Keeping your cool composure during a contentious disagreement.
  • Looking your boss in the eye and finally asking for a raise.

The workplace can easily expose our own flaws and imperfections. Finding and celebrating internal progress in your day-to-day, however small, will promote emotional composure and self-respect.

The Purpose of Goals

Planning deliberate steps to achieve your goals is a process that requires your prefrontal cortex, the human part of your brain. Animals do not possess such an ability. Humans have the privilege to plan and make sacrifices today for longer-term gain.

Great! Let’s take this concept to the next level — striving for goals can force us to manage the discomfort of facing unknown obstacles and challenges. But sometimes we give up when it’s “too hard” or when it takes “too much time/effort.”

It is only through obstacles and challenges that we learn how to increase our human capacities and graduate to the next version of ourselves.

You see, if life were easy and everything went according to plan, we would become very comfortable (and perhaps lazy). Hence, there would be less incentive to pursue difficulties.

Therefore, we need obstacles and challenges to continue growing and preparing ourselves for the next phase in life. Goals incentivize us to unravel and defeat personal flaws that prevent us from knowing how capable we truly are.

Goals enable us to enhance and build our brain capabilities so that once we evolve, we get to do it all over again at the next level — regardless of failure or success!

Failure and Success

About the Author Gina Covarrubias

Certified Life Coach, B.S. Aeronautical & Astronautical Engineering (Purdue University), M.S. Mechanical Engineering (University of Utah).

Gina is founder of Deliberate Doing, an exclusive STEM professional development service dedicated to helping engineers optimize their careers. She is the authority on establishing a purposeful career with her book, Career Purpose: When Work Isn’t Working for You. Whether speaking or coaching, she offers practical guidance for early and mid-level engineers.

Gina’s distinctive background blends life coaching expertise with 12+ years engineering/technology experience in the government, academic and corporate environments, all within the aerospace sector.

We would love to hear any questions you might have or stories you might share on how setting career goals is a flexible approach to failure and success.

Please leave your comments, feedback or questions in the section below.

If you enjoyed this post, please consider downloading our free list of 33 Productivity Routines of Top Engineering Executives. Click the button below to download.

To your success,

Anthony Fasano, PE, LEED AP
Engineering Management Institute
Author of Engineer Your Own Success

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