October 9, 2023
How to protect self-esteem when a career goal dies
Many people fail at achieving their early career dreams. But a new study suggests that those failures don’t have to harm your self-esteem if you think about them in the right way.
Researchers found that people who viewed career goal failures as a steppingstone to new opportunities never lost self-esteem, no matter how many times they failed. But those who thought their failures left them worse off showed a drop-off in how they felt about themselves.
“It’s not how many times you have had to give up. It is how you felt about the failures, and whether you thought they led to something better for you,” said Patrick Carroll, lead author of the study and associate professor of psychology at The Ohio State University’s Lima campus.