BEING Australian, people expect me to start articles about failure by mentioning one of our national sporting teams. However, as failing at work is nothing like as important as losing the Ashes, I’ve decided against it. That’s not even much of an exaggeration: messing up is bad, but it doesn’t have to kill your career.

1. Stop it before it happens. If you’re worried that you’ve been set an impossible task, talk to your boss about the extra resources or skills that you’ll need to get it right.

2. Don’t beat yourself up. Stephen Harvard Davis, the author and publisher of Why Do 40% of Executives Fail? (£9.99), says that it will make you less productive. “If you don’t make mistakes you don’t learn.”

3. Don’t talk yourself down. If you keep telling your colleagues that you’re rubbish — they’ll start to belive it. “If you keep going on about it and apologising, it doesn’t allow anyone to move on,” Davis says. And it’s not good for team morale: “You have to think in terms of ‘what use to them am I going to be getting down on myself about it’,” says Andy Barton, the sports psychologist behind thesportingmind.com.

4. Bosses don’t like surprises. “Come clean as early as possible,” Davis says. “Go to your boss and say ‘I messed up, the reasons are these and the consquences are X and Y’.”

5. Can you fix it? It helps to take something positive into the meeting mentioned above. How you do it depends on what sort of manager you have. “Some bosses will want you to take action before you approach them, some will want to be approached first, but either way it’s best to have at least some suggested solutions in mind,” Davis says.

6. Don’t blame others, even if it’s not your fault. “There’s a way of dealing with that which isn’t blaming other people . . . you should take on a sort of team failure”, then use that as a starting point for learning, Davis says. Plus if you vilify Dolly this time, she’ll twist the knife in your back next time you slip up.

7. Learn from your mistake. Get this part right and you can even afford to make the same mistake twice, if you do it in different ways. Thomas Edison failed to make a lightbulb hundreds of times before he got it right. “Take what you can from anything that didn’t go to plan, then think about what you could have done instead,” Barton says. And take action to show others that you’ve done it: “That way you . . . reassure your boss that you have learnt from what you have done.”

8. It’s not you, it’s them. Failing to get a new job/great promotion is rarely the result of your own mistake. “Say to yourself ‘it’s not me that’s being turned down as a person, it’s my skills’, or possibly that somebody else fitted better,” Davis says.

9. Learn something new. “Failure is the ideal time to channel your negative energies into a new passion,” says Viswanathan Anand, the world rapid chess champion, on www.niit.com. “It gives you a chance to challenge yourself in a new area. The feeling of accomplishment weeds out depression.”

10. Create a happy ending. When things go wrong, we have a tendency to keep replaying it in our heads, thus reinforcing old mistakes, Barton says. “It’s a matter of changing that mind movie into something that you do want to happen. Focus on the positive outcome that you want.”

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