The Trump Blog

The more risks you take in your career, the greater the likelihood that you will suffer a setback someday.

Maybe you will be accused of incompetence after one of your  high-stakes projects fails. Or perhaps your accounting firm will be implicated in some kind of malfeasance and your company’s good name will get smeared in the press.

If you suffer a devastating setback, you can’t sit back and wait for the problem to go away. Here’s a five-part strategy to recover quickly and get back on the road to success:

1. Fight, not flight. Face up to the reality of the situation. Distinguish battles that must be fought to restore your reputation from battles that merely drain energy and purpose in escalating rounds of retaliation or revenge.

2. Recruit others into battle. Take responsibility for innocent close colleagues who suffer collateral damage with you. Effectively leverage distant support networks to reaffirm your credibility through the voices of others.

3. Rebuild heroic stature. Explain the true nature of the adversity. Provide a rational explanation of the context behind any injustice or provide authentic contrition over any missteps you made.

4. Prove your heroic mettle. Regain trust by demonstrating that the setback has not destroyed your professional expertise and character strength.

5. Discover a new heroic mission. Don't merely define yourself by your past success or failure. Rather, define a new leadership vision and a new path for personal meaning in your work and you may transcend past triumphs to reach new heights of success.

 Remember, nearly every successful person, from Thomas Edison to Martha Stewart, has fought through serious career setbacks to succeed. The steps I outline above will help you rebuild your reputation and chart a brilliant new future.

Ambitious people don’t go looking for trouble. But they really know how to handle it when it comes along.

Look at Jet Blue CEO David Neeleman. He certainly didn’t want his airline to make front-page news a few months ago when a customer-service disaster struck. And I don’t think that Martha Stewart enjoyed being accused of insider trading. (Unjustly, in my opinion.)

But David and Martha certainly knew what to do when trouble knocked at the door. That ability is not innate. It is learned. You can only cultivate it by fighting through at least one major difficulty. Or often, quite a few of them.

So my advice is, don’t hide from trouble. Use it to build your resiliency.

To understand why David Neeleman was able to handle the recent Jet Blue disruptions so well, you need to know a little about his history. Before he founded Jet Blue, he was one of the top executives at Southwest Airlines. One day, his boss Herb Kelleher fired him. David was devastated. He went home in tears to tell his wife and children - nine children! He had an onerous five-year non-compete clause to deal with. But he weathered that and then launched Jet Blue.

Even at successful Jet Blue, David had more problems to deal with. A few years ago, the airline had a security problem when several million customers’ confidential information got sent off to Homeland Security and then to a third-party consultant, in violation of Jet Blue’s own policies. David stood up, took ownership of the problem and got stronger in the process. So just a few months ago when a service disruption stranded thousands of Jet Blue passengers, David could take charge so compellingly because he had already built the strength to handle adversity.

Martha Stewart teaches us another good lesson about dealing with disasters. When she got hit with her insider-trading accusation, she didn’t go hide. She didn’t wait for people to come to her and ask, “Martha, is this true?” No, she set up a Website to declare that the charge was false. She put ads in newspapers to fight back. And you know what? The only people who withdrew their support for her and her products were a lot of 25-year-old ad buyers. As you noticed, Sherwin-Williams and the other retailers who distributed her product lines never wavered. That was because she told her side of the story without waiting for someone to ask.

So don’t go looking for trouble. But when the hard times come, come out swinging. You’ll build the skills and resiliency to continue your fight right up to the top.