Resilience Strategies—Use Your Allies

This is a fairly easy resilience strategy that I like and use frequently, and yet, I find the women in my Women in Sales classes using it less and less. Throughout my eight years of reading thousands of resilience papers, I see my women students confiding in a friend less frequently than ever. When I first started teaching women how to fail or, in more positive terms, how to become resilient after failing, “confiding in a friend” was a commonly used strategy. However, within the last couple of years, the “confide in a friend” strategy is used so infrequently I have to actively promote it and encourage my women students to try it. I haven’t yet had to offer extra credit for trying it, but the fact that I might have to add an incentive to encourage women to confide in each other gives me pause.

When explaining this strategy in class—one that I employ on a regular basis—I ask students to explain why it isn’t used as frequently as it was in the past. The student answer is always the same: social media. We’re in an age of social media where every post about every person and event can be doctored and adjusted to make everyone and everything look perfect. No wonder we are so afraid of making a mistake, much less admitting a mistake. My plea to get off social media falls on deaf ears as I expect, but I make the request anyway. At the very least, I implore my students to re-read the section on perfectionism.

I think there is another, sadder reason why we are more hesitant to confide in a friend. Thanks to COVID and social restrictions employed to keep it at bay, I have seen a marked downturn in social skills in my students. Don’t forget, I teach sales, and sales students are expected to be able to walk up to a stranger and start a conversation and not rely on alcohol for courage. Post-COVID, I find myself spending more time than ever helping students learn to start a conversation with a stranger, find commonality, ask questions, and be curious when talking with people. My concern is that we are confiding in friends less frequently than before because we don’t have friends to confide in. As highlighted in the Women Supporting Women section of this guidebook, we were never designed to do life alone. Intentionally seeking out friends with whom you can share the good, the bad, and the ugly is important and is an affirmative resilience strategy.

What does this strategy involve? As the name suggests, instead of hiding the failure deep inside of you where it festers and grows—oftentimes to massive proportions—you open up to a friend, or in the words of Brene Brown, become vulnerable, and share your mishap and subsequent feelings of failure. Vulnerability sounds easy enough but, in reality, it can conjure up scary thoughts. What will they think of me? Will they judge me? Will they not like me anymore? And the list of social fears goes on and on. I used to fear being honest and vulnerable even with close friends because I was afraid that if they knew me, they wouldn’t like me. Not true. And in fact, my ability to be vulnerable actually enhanced my close relationships and created deeper levels of trust.

However, there are a couple caveats to be aware of when employing this strategy.

First and foremost, choose your friend wisely. This person should be someone you trust. You don’t want your failure ending up in someone else’s Facebook post, so make sure this person is a dependable friend. It has been interesting to see who my students choose to share their failures with. Women tend to share with other women or their mother. In contrast, men in my Women in Sales class use this strategy even less than the women do and, when they use it, they share their failure with women. While my sample of men’s resilience papers is much smaller than the number of women’s resilience papers, I still find it interesting that I have yet to read of a man confiding in another man. Maybe this is something that needs to change and where women can help.

In addition to choosing your friends wisely, I also suggest a second layer of protective confidentiality. When sharing a failure, I always ask the friend to keep it confidential. I know, you would assume your friend would automatically understand that you wouldn’t want this embarrassing information to be passed around like the children’s game of telephone. But it is dangerous and foolhardy to assume that everyone thinks like us. Even my dear sweet husband, who would never do anything intentionally to hurt me, needs to be reminded to “please keep this confidential.” In my experience, whenever I explicitly ask for confidentiality—see the Ask for What You Want section—I get it. When I assume confidentiality, it has gone both ways. Don’t take a chance and instead ask that your friend keep the conversation in confidence. And if she doesn’t? She’s not a friend and now you know.

The other thing to remember is that good friends are not unbiased. Thank goodness! I wouldn’t want it any other way. In many cases, I don’t want a friend who tells me the truth: “Yes Jane, you are correct. You made a fool out of yourself and now everyone thinks you’re an idiot.” I want a friend who understands and empathizes with my embarrassment and fear and realizes that even if the previous statement was true, articulating it is not helpful. When confiding in a friend, you want to lean on a friend that supports you. True, in some cases that means telling you a hard truth, but not in this case. You’re looking for emotional support, not accuracy.

There are two positive outcomes that can emerge from the “confide in a friend” strategy which is why I encourage my women students to use it and push my men students to try it. First, in every paper I’ve read that used this strategy, the confidant friend admitted to making the same failure at one time or another. That does not surprise me. As previously mentioned, after reading and grading over 2,500 resilience papers, I have yet to see a failure that I have not also experienced. Yes, I am the Queen of Failure—but I honestly don’t think I’m that exceptional when it comes to failing. The beauty of this strategy is that it makes everyone, the failee and the friend, aware that we are all in this together. We all make the same mistakes and feel bad about it. Instead of fearing that you are the only person who ever made that mistake, you learn that others have done the same thing—in many cases even worse—and you are not alone. There is great comfort in learning that you are not the only person who fails.

Secondly, when using this strategy, don’t be surprised if you make a new friend. As crazy as it sounds, I’ve bonded with women over failure. We are relieved that we are not the only ones making mistakes and, in many cases, wind up laughing at ourselves instead of beating ourselves up. Confiding in a friend requires vulnerability and, per the work of Brene Brown, that vulnerability can become a source of strength and a new or stronger friendship.

And finally, there is also a benefit to getting the failure out of your head. For the same reason that I am a fan of journaling, talking a failure out to someone else will help you minimize its magnitude. It takes a lot of energy to be something you’re not and, all too often, when hiding our failures out of fear, we spend way too much energy disguising, hiding, and burying our failures, or our perceived failures, so that no one will find out. Bringing a failure out into the open, to a carefully curated friend, gets the failure out of your head and into the light. And fear does not like light.

Remember, the best way to practice reframing failure and learn resilience is to write about them. Journaling is essential because it helps get the failure out of your head. This strategy takes that a step further. In addition to writing about your failure in your journal, you talk about it to a trusted friend. The effect is the same. It’s no longer rattling around in your head.

A truly good friend allows you to vent your frustration and can give you brutal honesty but is always kind and comforting. Make sure you choose your friends wisely. You might also be surprised to learn that your friend has encountered this failure as well.