FACING SETBACKS

When I voiced my concerns to the CEO about the price the company was going to pay for the acquisition candidate, I could have experienced a very different outcome. The CEO could have been annoyed that I had spoken up, and complained to my boss. My boss could have become so angry that I talked with the CEO that he fired me. If that had happened, it would have been upsetting, but it would not have defeated me. Because I had true self-confidence and, through self-reflection and balance, knew that I was speaking up for the good of the organization, I would not have hung up my spikes and stopped engaging in the game. Nor would I have lost my self-confidence and become a timid person who did everything his boss said without question. I was not about to live my life inside a turtle shell. Not with true self-confidence.

In your life, you will face setbacks of one sort or another. A promotion you wanted may not come through, or someone else will get the job even though you thought you were the most qualified candidate. You may get laid off or even fired. Upsets invariably happen in your personal and professional life. I have certainly not been immune. After twenty-three years at Baxter—including ten years as the chief financial officer, president, or the CEO, a post I held for nearly six years—I was asked to resign. To make a long story short, after the company enjoyed eight consecutive years of excellent performance, growth began to slow for many reasons, including competitive and economic pressures. When the company had to announce that although our profits were still increasing, our quarterly earnings were not going to be as strong as we originally thought, I was asked to resign as CEO. This was not the end I had imagined for my career at Baxter, but I had always been realistic: CEOs typically are not in their jobs for more than four or five years. When I left the company, two strong beliefs stayed with me: I had always tried to do the right thing, and I had always done the best I could do.

One of the many benefits of building true self-confidence is the ability to persevere through the inevitable ups and downs you will face in your life, both personally and professionally. In fact, unless you have true self-confidence, a setback can become devastating and undermine your confidence in the future. With self-reflection, balance, and true self-confidence (along with genuine humility, which we will discuss in the next chapter), there is nothing that you cannot face with courage, dignity, integrity, and optimism.

When you face a setback, self-reflection and balance can help you discern what happened. If you really believe that you were trying to do the right thing and that you were doing the best you could—if those two things are true—then you will be able to keep your circumstances in perspective. The outcome of being fired or losing out on a promotion, though disappointing, will not adversely affect your ability to move forward. True self-confidence will help you accept that setbacks are part of life, that some disappointment is inevitable. Although unpleasant and difficult, upheavals happen to everyone, and you can't let them get you down. With true self-confidence, you will always be on the lookout for the lessons these experiences contain.

When adversity strikes, many people will indulge in asking why this misfortune occurred, because they believe it was so unfair. They tell themselves and anyone else who will listen, “I worked hard and should have been promoted,” or “I never should have been the one who was fired.” Whenever someone gets into the “It's not fair” mantra, I am always reminded of the opening words of M. Scott Peck's book The Road Less Traveled: “Life is difficult.” There is far more wisdom in those three words than in believing that everything should always go your way and that everything that upsets your plans is unfair.

The mathematically minded like me might think of it this way: the events of your life have a normal distribution, like a bell curve. Most of them will cluster around the expected—the “norm” if you will. But there will be outliers at both ends: some wonderful surprises and some huge disappointments. On a smaller scale, you probably experience that variation every day—some upside, some downside, and a lot in the middle. As you go through these ups and downs, self-reflection and balance will help you keep the events of your life in perspective. As you learn from these experiences, you will see what you could have done better or differently. Your true self-confidence will be further strengthened as you identify both your strengths and weaknesses. Self-improvement becomes a lifelong journey.