Success is a tricky fish. How can anything typically greeted with the popping of champagne corks have a dark side? And yet, success at work can be a step towards stress, burnout, even failure. And call it tall poppy syndrome, or simple jealousy, but a pat on the back from the boss can unleash hell from your workmates. Here’s how to survive your own success:

1. Give yourself a break. If you’re hiding behind a filing cabinet in your office, that’s OK, says Gary Miles, a principal consultant at Rof-fey Park, an executive education college. “It’s natural for success to bring its traumas and to doubt yourself that you can do it,” he says. Getting ahead means change and that’s inevitably stressful, but it doesn’t mean that you don’t deserve your success.

2. Know your limitations. Successful doesn’t mean perfect: it’s normal to have strengths and weaknesses. Strive to be an all-rounder and “you are watering down what brought you to where you are”, he says.

3. Start your own fan club. It’s lonely leading a team rather than being part of it because you don’t receive feedback in the same way. “You need to validate yourself,” Miles says. “You’ve got to be able to say ‘I know I did well today’.” Jot down your achievements in an “ego book” and occasionally settle down for a good read.

4. Bare your teeth. “There is nothing wrong with ambition,” says Jo Ellen Grzyb, a director of Impact Factory, a training consultancy. “That’s a little bit British: you are not supposed to be seen to sweat . . . [but] it’s very refreshing to be ambitious as long as you are not harming other people along the way.”

5. The f-word. “You are going to fail at some point,” Grzyb says, so get used to the idea. Have enough confidence in your abilities to know that one failure isn’t a Titanic disaster.

6. Laugh it off. “A sense of humour is very important, particularly in tough times,” Miles says. Being able to smile in the face of failure cheers those around you and allows you to keep blunders in perspective.

7. Be a mentor. “Some people will be jealous of your success. It happens,” Miles says. “Establish yourself as a coach and mentor of those who also have the ability to succeed. They will look up to you and respect you and minimise [their] feelings of jealousy.”

8. Don’t micro-manage. Your success won’t stick if you don’t allow yourself to focus on the task in hand. “You have to delegate more as you become more senior,” Miles says. “Trust other people to do what you used to do.”

9. What do you really want? A career plan will stop you stumbling aimlessly from one opportunity to another, but it’s equally important to consider your emotional goals. “It’s more [about] how you see yourself as a person in five years’ time,” Grzyb says. “For example, ‘I want colleagues to come to me for solutions’.” Success means little without job satisfaction.

10. Embrace the new. Long hours, stress and greater responsibility can lead to burnout, according to Sanjay Dhiri, a manager at the consultancy Bain & Co. Tackling something new – be it a project, role, MBA or a secondment – is a good way to energise the mind and stave off meltdown. “People are seeing their careers in a more modular way,” he says. “Companies need to think about how to facilitate that.”

Find out more

Learn how success can lead to mediocrity in well known companies such as Procter & Gamble, Toyota and IBM, in Seduced by Success: How the Best Companies Survive the Nine Traps of Winning, by Robert J. Herbold, a former chief operating officer at Microsoft (McGraw-Hill, £14)

Take heart from the survival stories of others. Firing Back: How Great Leaders Rebound After Career Disasters, by Jeffrey Sonnenfeld and Andrew Ward (Harvard Business School Press, £15)

Personal chaos, office clutter and a fly-by-night attitude to planning is no barrier to success, according to A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder, by Eric Abrahamson and David H. Freedman (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, £12.99)

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