We all have bad days at work. Sometimes we fail. Sometimes we have to fire people. And sometimes (hopefully not too often) we get fired or downsized from a job that we love and/or need. To overcome such hardships professionals like you must be resilient in how you deal with the hard times and optimistic in how you deal with what happens next. This article explores how to bounce back from a bad day.

Lean into the hurt

Feel the failure. Understand what happened. Experience the stress, disappointment or pain that’s happening. With so much information and so much complexity contributing to the decisions that you – or someone who reports to you – make every day, it is very likely that more often or not mistakes will happen. It’s common for people to shy away from what’s hard or pass along blame to someone else. Don’t. Accept responsibility and try to really understand what a bad day feels like because – it’ll prepare you for your next failure or difficult decision.

Reflect (and learn)

Feeling the pain of what we did wrong – some call it “Failing forward” – only works when we learn from our mistakes. Otherwise we’re simply achieving incompetence by repeating errors over and over again. After bad day take the time to reflect on what happened and what you learned from the experience. Most importantly, try to assess if there were any root causes that contributed to the failure or hard decision that resulted in your bad day. For example, my bad days often result from my moving too fast and failing to review the details, so a big part of my reflection and learning consists of creating strategies for stopping and thinking a little longer than I normally would.

Talk it out

If you’re like me then you probably need to talk through bad days with loved ones or trusted members of your community (sometimes I find talking to strangers is even more liberating because they don’t share my history). Melody Wilding calls this “comfort through connection” and she’s on to something! A few weeks ago I received scathing feedback from an audience member at an event that I emceed and it pretty much ruined my night. My lovely wife, who was very tired when I got home, took 20 minutes to hear my story, empathize with me, and talk through ways to address the problem. That went a long way in allowing me to bounce back.

Let go

Bad days will continue to haunt us until we let go and move past the experience. In her article about how leaders can cultivate resilience in their careers, HBR’s Andrea Ovans focuses on the importance of managing emotions and striving to treat successes and failures as positive learning experiences. She says we shouldn’t get too high or too low ourselves or let our teams ride such an emotional roller coaster. Once you’ve absorbed what there is to learn from your bad day – whether that means a big mistake or firing a 20-year veteran of your company – it is important to release your hurt feelings and/or guilt and look forward to the next day

Never forget

Linda Graham, author of Bouncing Back, argues that our ability to bounce back is determined, in part, by how we cultivate resilience over time – whether it’s by weathering heartbreak, downsizing, choosing one employee over another for a promotion, or making a big mistake at work. So, as we let go of the emotions that we attach to these struggles, it’s important to also maintain a detached, analytical perspective on what we’re going through / getting over. Because the more we understand the behaviours, actions and feelings that cause us to have bad days the more likely we’ll be able to build attributes of resilience and optimism that will help us smash through the pain of failure and tough decisions to ensure that our next day is a really, really good one.

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This article was originally published on May 20, 2015.