Viewing Setbacks As Opportunities

tl;dr

• Viewing setbacks as opportunities makes you happier and helps you grow as a lawyer.
• If you can’t adopt a setbacks-as-opportunity mindset, it’s worth considering why; you may not be viewing “growth” as a key part of your role.
• As a leader, adopting a setbacks-as-opportunities mindset will improve how your team responds to challenges and their roles.

Viewing Setbacks as Opportunities Makes You Better and Happier

Viewing setbacks as opportunities is a common trait among the best people I’ve worked with.

It makes sense. When something gets hard–a prospective customer who doesn’t accept their proposed redline, a CFO who wants to revise their Board resolution, or a Product team wants to dig into why they can’t spam all your users’ contacts–it doesn’t help to get angry or frustrated. Instead, by embracing it as an opportunity to get better and grow their skills, they make the most of it.

Also, it makes them happier, which makes them better teammates and reduces their risk of burnout.

Your Job Is to Grow

Fine, you say, but what if I don’t see the world that way? Well, that’s interesting (or, as my former-counselor mother would say, “let’s explore that.”). As an in-house lawyer, your job is not only to create work product.

I think your job is to both produce work and grow–grow your legal skills, grow your relationships, grow your sub-function, grow your Legal team, and grow your company. By creating excellent work product, and learning from setbacks, you grow.

For example:

• Your draft contract comes back with a bunch of redlines? Good, now I can improve my arguments for the changes and drafting skills.
• A vendor is threatening to breach a major contract? Good, I can hone my letter-writing and argumentation skills.
• The CFO wants to sign NDAs with twenty potential investors? Good, I can get experience creating an efficient NDA-negotiation process and playbook.
• The Product team is pushing back on my recommendation to change the Terms of Service sign-up-flow? Good, I can build a better relationship with Product, deepen my understanding of the law, and practice my skills at convincing them.
• My project is late because of an unforeseen complication? Good, I can build my project management and communication skills, as well as trust, by creating a project doc and regular email updates for all the relevant stakeholders so they know where things stand.

Stress = Growth

When facing any of the above examples, you’re going to feel stress. That’s good. Stress helps you focus, prioritize, and motivates you to get something done (see more here). You can use stress to your advantage; further, viewing stress as a positive has numerous benefits.

An Opportunity to Lead

As a leader of a Legal team or function, cultivating this attitude has outsize effects; your attitude affects not only you and your growth, but your team’s attitude and growth. In other words, attitude is contagious.

For example, your team is working on a big partnership agreement and the counterparty isn’t accepting your positions. If, instead of positioning it as an opportunity, tell them, “This counterparty is terrible. This contract is going to be a huge slog and really slow us down. I’m sorry but we’ll just have to work through it.” they are more likely to view the contract that way.

On the other hand, if you say, “This counterparty is tough. They didn’t accept many of our edits, but that just means we have to find a way to build a better relationship with them and sharpen our arguments and make them even better. We are going to develop some great skills from this one,” they are going to view the project more positively.

It Isn’t Always Easy, But It’s Worth Trying

I have often struggled to adopt this mindset when it matters most–I’m working on some high-profile project and something gets delayed, complicated, or poorly executed. In those moments, my default tendency is to start the recriminations against myself, the situation, or someone I’m working with. But, when I think back to those times, that approach never helped. If I can take a breath, walk away from it for a bit, sleep on it, I can, sometimes (often?), turn my mindset around and think of it as an opportunity.

Am I Just Reiterating Carol Dweck’s “Growth Mindset” Research?

Yes. But this post is way shorter than the book.

Fin.

Notes:

• Inspiration for this post came from writer and podcaster, Jocko Wilink, who has espoused this view in his writing. He says it well here.
• A toolkit for changing stress mindsets is here.
• A Huberman Labs podcast about stress mindsets (at about the 45-minute mark)

Special thanks to Ashley Pantuliano at Loom for reading and providing suggestions to early versions of this post.