Experience doesn’t just teach us how to fix problems. It teaches us how big they really are.
I am the king of catastrophising. If there was a Master’s degree in it, I could teach the course.
Give me a relatively small mistake and, left to my own devices, I can have the entire world ending within about five minutes: I’ve lost the client > I’ve lost my job > I’ve lost my home > all my friends have abandoned me > the dog has left. And I don’t even have a dog.
I’ve written quite a bit recently about resilience and said that I consider myself pretty resilient. I do, and I don’t think these two things are contradictory.
I can be resilient and still be absolutely world-class at convincing myself that a relatively small problem is about to destroy my entire life, because resilience isn’t necessarily your first reaction to something going wrong, it’s what happens next.
When a 3/10 problem feels like a 10
I’ve spent hours pacing around, smoking, replaying something over and over again and convincing myself that whatever had happened was considerably more catastrophic than it actually was.
When you’re in it, it doesn’t feel ridiculous. Looking back afterwards, of course I can see that getting a client’s name wrong in an email wouldn’t have resulted in me losing my job, my home, my friends and presumably being forced to flee the country under an assumed identity.
In the moment, each of those feels completely plausible and you’re mentally preparing for an outcome about twelve stages removed from the thing that has actually gone wrong. There is no sensible way out. No possible explanation. No scenario where everything turns out fine.
The only remaining option is apparently to lead yourself to the stocks and await rotten fruit being flung at my face.
I’ve got better at recognising it over the years. Not stopping it completely. I wish. But recognising when my brain has taken a relatively ordinary problem and run off down the road with it.
I think experience has played a huge part in that, because one of the things you accumulate over a career isn’t just knowledge about how to do your job. You accumulate perspective.
You’ve made mistakes before. You’ve had difficult conversations before. You’ve upset a client before. You’ve missed a deadline. You’ve sent the wrong thing. You’ve had a piece of work come back covered in comments.
You’ve said something and immediately wished you could grab the words out of the air and put them back in your mouth.
And crucially, you’ve experienced what happened afterwards.
Usually, the world didn’t end. You apologised. You fixed it. You had an uncomfortable conversation. You learnt something. You went back to work the next morning. And slowly, without necessarily realising it, you built up a reference library of mistakes and consequences. That library helps you judge the next problem. You’ve seen enough 3/10 problems to know what a 3/10 problem looks like.
Early in your career, you don’t have that yet
This is where I think catastrophising gets particularly interesting for people at the start of their careers. Imagine you’ve just started your first proper job and you make your first significant mistake. You send something to a client that shouldn’t have gone out or miss an important deadline. You get something badly wrong in a meeting and your manager asks to speak to you about a piece of work.
How serious is it?
If you’ve been working for twenty years, you’ve probably got hundreds of experiences to compare it with. If you’ve been working for three months, you haven’t. Your sample size is tiny. You don’t necessarily know the difference between something that’s mildly irritating, something that requires a proper conversation and something that’s genuinely serious.
So a 3/10 problem can quite easily feel like a 13/10 problem. And that’s before you add in all the other things that can be happening when someone is new to work. They want to make a good impression, are still working out what’s expected of them and may already be questioning whether they’re good enough to be there.
They don’t know their manager particularly well yet, don’t know how that manager reacts when something goes wrong and may never have made a mistake with real professional consequences before.
Some of them will catastrophise. I’d argue that, sometimes, it’s a fairly understandable response to not yet having enough information to put the problem into proportion.
The things that help me
Thankfully, I’ve developed much healthier ways of dealing with it over the years.
Talking helps. Walking helps me enormously.
I’m still yet to reach the point where the gym feels like anything other than torture, but I’ve been reliably informed that helps too, if you’re that way inclined.
I’ve also been nicotine free for nearly two years, which definitely helps given that chain-smoking my way through a problem turned out not to be a particularly effective coping strategy.
Then there’s something I picked up somewhere along the way, possibly on an NLP course, that I’ve always thought of as listing and halving. I can’t claim this one as my own, and I can’t even remember exactly where I learnt it, but I’ve used versions of it ever since.
Start with the problem. What has actually happened? Not everything that might happen next. Not what someone might think. Not what might happen if the first hypothetical thing leads to the second hypothetical thing. What has actually happened?
Then halve it.
Break the problem down.
Then halve it again.
Keep going until you’ve separated the thing you actually need to deal with from all the other stuff your brain has attached to it.
Then I find it useful to list the possible outcomes. What’s the worst realistic outcome? What’s the best? What’s somewhere in the middle? And what is the probability of each one actually happening?
Because being hung, drawn and quartered because you spelled the client’s name wrong is, on balance, probably not the most likely outcome.
Once I’ve got things written down, I have something concrete to deal with.
It doesn’t necessarily stop me worrying, but it gives the rational bit of my brain some evidence while the other bit is busy preparing for societal collapse.
Managers can lend people perspective
For managers, there’s something really simple here that I think is incredibly easy to overlook: context.
“Can you pop into my office for five minutes?”
“I need to see you for 30 minutes this afternoon.”
To you, that’s probably just arranging a conversation.
To someone whose brain has a tendency to catastrophise, particularly someone early in their career who is still trying to work out what everything means, you’ve just given them three hours to imagine every possible reason you might want to see them.
And I can tell you from experience, their brain probably isn’t spending those three hours compiling a list of all the lovely things you might be about to say.
A tiny bit of context changes the whole thing.
“Can you pop into my office for five minutes? Just want to run through tomorrow’s client meeting.”
“I’ve put 30 minutes in this afternoon to talk through the project. Nothing to worry about, I just want us to work through a couple of things.”
Same meeting. Completely different three hours beforehand.
Managers can’t, and shouldn’t, try to remove every uncomfortable feeling from someone’s working day. That’s not the point, but we can avoid creating unnecessary uncertainty when a few extra words would remove it. This is where I think there’s an important role for managers of people early in their careers. When someone brings you a mistake, you already have something they don’t: perspective.
You may instantly know that it’s fixable. You likely made exactly the same mistake yourself fifteen years ago. You know that three other people in the team have done it this year.
You may know that the client will be mildly irritated for approximately seven minutes and then never think about it again.
The person sitting opposite you doesn’t necessarily know any of that, which means your reaction matters enormously.
If your face drops, you sigh and say, “Right. Leave it with me,” you’ve just given their catastrophising brain quite a lot to work with. If, instead, you help them understand the scale of the problem, what needs to happen next and what they can learn from it, you’re doing more than solving today’s mistake. You’re adding something to that reference library.
You’re helping them learn:
This is what this kind of problem feels like.
This is how serious it actually is.
This is what to do next.
This is what happens afterwards.
Then, the next time something similar happens, they’re not starting from zero.
That’s part of how resilience gets built
This brings me back to resilience. I used to think resilience was much more about the reaction: something goes wrong, you dust yourself off and you move on.
I think resilience is partly what happens once the initial reaction has passed.
Can you put the problem into proportion?
Can you separate what happened from what you’re frightened might happen?
Can you ask for help?
Can you work out what needs to happen next?
Can you learn something that makes the next time slightly easier?
And perhaps that’s another reason managers shouldn’t be too quick to judge how someone responds when something first goes wrong. The person who looks devastated by a mistake isn’t necessarily lacking resilience, they may simply not have enough experience yet to know that they’ll survive it.
Part of our job, particularly when we’re managing people at the beginning of their careers, is helping them accumulate that experience without every mistake feeling like a catastrophe.
Eventually they’ll have their own reference library. Until then, we need to lend them ours.
