How to recover after making a bad decision at work, according to an executive coach

Making a mistake at work isn't the end of the world - you can always bounce back.

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• Harrison Monarth is the CEO and founder of Gurumaker, an executive coaching company.
• Making mistakes in your career is inevitable, Monarth says, so what matters is how you recover from them.
• Don't run away - instead, find a way to showcase your strengths and make a new, positive impression.
• See more stories on Insider's business page.

In May on a trip to Jamaica, I was invited for a drink with the legendary music producer Chris Blackwell, at his Goldeneye resort. We made small talk, and I asked him how he got started in the music business. Blackwell, who'd just turned 84, is probably best known for launching the careers of artists like Bob Marley, Grace Jones, U2, and many others.

Harrison Monarth is the CEO and founder of Gurumaker.

Harrison Monarth

He answered that he had no experience in the music business whatsoever when he started out, so I asked him if he'd relied on passion and good instincts.

"I don't know about good instincts," he said with a twinkle in his eye. "I turned down Pink Floyd, Elton John, and Madonna." And then he shrugged and smiled.

As a successful music mogul, Blackwell can easily be philosophical about having made some poor choices in his life; he's obviously made many good ones, too, and he knows a bad decision doesn't mean it's the end of road.

A great deal of career trajectories and livelihoods hinge on demonstrating good judgment and making smart decisions. But life is a balancing act, and we won't always get it right. So it's important to learn how to recover from a blunder at work without making a bad situation worse. Here are three strategies that can help anyone mitigate the consequences of a bad decision, and become more balanced and confident in the process.

1. Get over it

Ruminating on the situation isn't helpful and can hinder your capacity for analytic thinking, creative insight, and problem solving. To keep your mind from focusing on a failure, you can gain psychological distance by labeling what you're feeling. Research has shown that when we consciously summarize an emotion, such as "I feel angry at myself" or "I feel guilty," we can reduce the intensity of the emotion and regain control of our executive functioning.

Another powerful emotion regulation strategy recommended by neuroscientists is called cognitive reappraisal, whereby we reframe a negative stimulus, such as an embarrassing mistake we made, as a learning opportunity that will help us make better decisions going forward.

2. Learn from it

To keep from making the same career-limiting mistakes, over and over, we need to learn from them. Feedback from more experienced people who've 'been there, done that' can also be helpful.

Demonstrate your learning agility by adopting a scientist's curiosity and scrutinize every aspect of the process that resulted in a poor decision, and understand the factors that would have led to a better outcome instead. This way, you'll confront future similar situations with more finely honed judgment and a basis for making informed choices.

3. Stay visible

Our natural instinct may be to hide in shame, but a better way to move on and thrive after a bad decision is to keep engaging with those who were impacted. This can help prevent a negative impression about you from becoming the defining characteristic of your reputation in that person's mind.

You can reset someone's negative perceptions about you by finding opportunities to showcase your strengths and make positive impressions moving forward. It may be counterintuitive, but you don't want your colleagues' or customers' or investors' most recent and salient thoughts about you to be negative.

In the end, the key to success lies in forgiving yourself for a bad choice, analyzing it and learning its lessons for personal growth, and moving on to make better choices that reflect your true resilience and ingenuity to everyone around you.

Harrison Monarth is an executive coach, CEO and founder of Gurumaker, and author of "Executive Presence: The Art of Commanding Respect Like a CEO."

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