One bad meeting isn’t the end of your career

One meeting going badly is not the end of the world for your job, your team, or your career. One day going badly isn’t either. I know this in the abstract. I forget it on a roughly fortnightly cycle and have to be reminded.

The reason it is so easy to forget is that meetings are vivid. You can replay them, sentence by sentence, in the shower. The careful, accumulated work that you’ve done over the months - the project you quietly steered out of trouble, the hire you took a chance on who turned out brilliant, the small kindness to a colleague that you’ll never know mattered - isn’t available for replay. It’s there in the system, but it doesn’t fight for attention. The bad meeting does.

What I try to do instead

On the bad afternoon itself, very little. I try not to make any decisions, send any emails I’d regret, or have any "honest conversations" with myself about my career. This is a tax-evening rule of mine: do not file the return on the day you got the bad letter.

The next morning, I write down what I think actually went wrong, in three sentences, on a paper notepad. Three sentences forces me to pick the real cause and not enumerate every adjacent thing I feel bad about. Usually one of the three is something I can fix this week. The other two are things I either can’t fix or wouldn’t fix even if I could, and naming them helps me put them down.

Then I carry on. Bouncing back is rarely a single dramatic act of redemption. It is showing up the next day and doing the next sensible thing. The contributions you’ve already made are still there. They’ll keep showing up in other people’s outcomes long after the bad meeting has been forgotten by everyone except you.

If you’re reading this on a Friday with a knot in your stomach, take the weekend. The career-ending meeting is almost never the meeting you think it is.