Maureen Gold, manager of Baxter Health care Corporation's career center in Deerfield, Illinois, admits to having her own version of what I now know is an almost universal night mare about performance and competence. "Final exams are checkpoints where some authority passes judgment on your work," says Gold. "They're a rite of passage. You can't make it to the next step until someone tells you you're OK."
As an adult, you may discover that your work life is putting a new spin on some age old fears. When Chicago writer Judy Markey informally polled a diverse group of professionals about their current career nightmares, she discovered that many competent people share an anxious underside.
Take, for example, the teacher who dreams she's walked into a classroom of unruly students and doesn't have a single skill to calm her wild charges down. Or the builder who dreams he's grabbed the wrong set of blueprints and built the wrong shelving and cabinets in someone's home. Then there's the accountant whose nightmare revolves around omitting some numbers on a tax form, getting discovered by the IRS and losing most of his clients. And how about the pastor who, in his night time angst, walks up to the pulpit in a church packed with worshippers only to discover that he has nothing to say. No sermon.
No words of inspiration. No tidbits of wisdom. Nothing. This last nightmare is similar to another archetypal fear of exposure dream: the one where you're standing naked and exposed before an audience you want desperately to impress. This is probably why a pianist sometimes dreamed she was sit ting on stage before a concert stark naked. Or why, on the night before he was expected to deliver an important paper, a doctor dreamed he was at the lectern with no clothes on and his mouth glued shut.
These nighttime dramas reveal, in all their angst ridden glory, the imperfections that most of us take elaborate precautions to hide. While the rest of the world imagines you're firmly in control of your destiny, your dreams remind you how fallible you really are.
Fortunately, these nightmares seldom prove real. Despite the castle of catastrophe you may insist on building in your head, no awful mistake is waiting to rear its ugly head and am bush your career ambitions when you least expect it. Granted, horror stories do happen. But most mistakes are recoverable. However embarrassing, life goes on and so will you.
Look at Richard Nixon. He was driven from the Oval Office in total disgrace. Yet at the time of his death, he'd recovered a piece of his status as an elder statesman. He was eulogized as if Watergate was little more than a blemish on his history. Obviously, given enough time, energy and attention, even the most serious blights on a reputation can be repaired.
Besides, most professional mistakes are much more benign.
Former television newscaster Mary Nissenson Scheer, who worked for NBC News in New York, remembers sharing a particularly embarrassing moment with millions of television viewers. She was pinch hitting for one of the regular news anchors, who was out sick for the day. It was her first time on national television and her first experience with a teleprompter.
While a Freudian interpretation is tempting, nervousness and inexperience are probably what account for Nissenson Scheer's gaffe. At least let's hope that's what caused her to refer to Jimmy Carter's "peanut farm" as a "penis farm," instead. She can laugh about the incident now, but it wasn't exactly the national television debut she was hoping for. Still, it didn't turn out to be a career stopper. Surviving the relentless ribbing that trailed her for months was probably the more difficult task. On the bright side, an incident like that can teach you to develop a sense of humor about yourself pronto!
The Thrill of Defeat?
Greg Hiner, the current CEO of Owens Corning Fiberglas Corporation, a three billion dollar Toledo based company, believes in "celebrating" failure rather than maligning it. This isn't an exercise in corporate masochism, simply a recognition that the painful lessons learned from failure can pave the way to greater success. That's why Hiner immediately took an 800 million dollar tax write off on an asbestos litigation case after taking over the helm at Owens Corning in 1992. He recognized that past failures were holding his management team back from trying new things. He wanted them to put the failure behind them rather than continue to dwell on its consequences.
The head of Nomura Securities, one of Japan's wealthiest companies, shares Hiner's positive outlook on failure. Although it may sound strange, he's concerned that Nomura hasn't had enough failures. Why? He believes that failures force you to develop new ways of thinking and doing things, whereas success, on the other hand, can make you complacent. Rather than looking at and experimenting with new ideas, it encourages you to take the easy way out by endlessly trying to duplicate your past victories.
The professors who run the Harvard MBA program agree with this perspective. That's why their students study failed companies. The experts at this prestigious graduate school know you can learn a lot by understanding where other people went wrong. They say copying someone else's formula for success is unlikely to yield as great a payoff, since the competition has already captured the market.
Review the life story of any highly accomplished individual and you'll almost always find a history of failures and recoveries. Usually, the person is someone who was determined to succeed against the odds.
Abraham Lincoln is my favorite example of this determination. "Honest Abe's" public report card reads like the record of an "F" student. Born into poverty, he failed in business twice, lost eight elections and suffered a nervous breakdown before becoming one of this country's most successful presidents.
