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When Dr. Jenny Prohaska walks into a room full of police officers who’ve just experienced a critical incident, she’s not there to tell them they’re broken.
As a clinical psychologist who works on more than 30 officer-involved shootings a year and consults with more than 50 public safety agencies, she’s learned something every entrepreneur needs to hear: the difference between those who bounce back from trauma and those who don’t has almost nothing to do with how severe their trauma was. It’s all about how they view it. Her lessons learned from handling trauma and failure taught me a lot about how to handle failure in business.
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The victim mindset is killing your business
In the past decade, conducting thousands of pre-hire psychological evaluations, Prohaska noticed a troubling trend: police candidates are increasingly fragile, with lower self-efficacy, poor self-awareness and diminishing drive. Sound familiar? These same characteristics are showing up in the business world, where the victim mentality has become a badge of honor. We’ve gone from a “look how tough I am” mindset to a “here is why I never had a chance” mindset.
The problem isn’t that people experience hardship. They always have. It’s that we’re teaching them they won’t recover from it. “If we send that message enough,” Prohaska warns, “people will stop recovering from things.” In just a few generations, “we’ve gone from ‘suck it up, buttercup’ to ‘all your feelings are valid all the time,'” Prohaska explains.
For entrepreneurs, this manifests as the founder who can’t move past a failed product launch or the executive who becomes paralyzed after losing a major client. It’s not the failure that does the damage. It’s how they’ve framed it and how that informs their future behavior.
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The Three Rs: A framework for processing failure
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