There’s nothing more frustrating than working really hard on something only to have that hard work go to waste or not pay off. When that happens it’s easy to take a trip to Negative Town (population: 1) and want to just throw in the towel. But the next time your hard work doesn’t yield the results that you’d like, here are some tips to stay positive:
1. Embracing Small Victories
Instead of focusing on the entire final end result and thinking that it’s a failure, look at each individual piece of the outcome and find the good. Somewhere in there is a small victory that you should celebrate. Being able to praise yourself for what turned out correctly is vital when it comes to maintaining a good attitude. This doesn’t mean that you should just ignore what didn’t work or pay off, but it does mean that you shouldn’t look at it as an entirely black-and-white situation.
2. Putting The Measuring Stick Away
Comparing your efforts to other people is a slippery slope because no matter how hard you work, you’re bound to feel like you could have done more of the results could have been better. Instead of always pulling out a measuring stick to compare yourself to a colleague or superior or competitor’s brand won’t do anything other than create a moving target that you feel you need to hit, and that can get exhausting. Just focus on your own efforts and your own results and take them for what they are without making it into a constant game of comparison.
3. Focusing on The Journey
It might not feel like it at the time, but your work is actually a journey and that journey means something. Instead of putting all of your stock into your results, you should also look at what you did to get there. There’s a lot that you can learn from yourself and being introspective will help you improve a lot professionally.
4. Looking Forward
Maybe you don’t feel like any of those tips really apply to your situation – that’s okay. Even if your hard work resulted in a huge flop and there’s nothing good that you feel like can come from that, dwelling on that failure won’t do you any good. Instead, just move on! Look forward to the next opportunity that you have to work hard and achieve big results. This is sure to get you in a positive frame of mind again.
Kate Pierce is the owner of LionShark Digital Marketing LLC, a West Michigan internet marketing company. Her areas of expertise include Paid Search, Search Engine Optimization, Business Blogging and Web Copywriting. She lives in the Grand Rapids area with her husband and son and enjoys cooking, watching sports, and spending time together as a family. Like a true digital marketing expert (i.e. geek), she loves talking about current marketing trends… so don’t say you weren’t warned!
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