Failure is a big thing that can make us feel like imposters in our lives. No one wants to fail with their work life. It makes them not feel very good and can bring in more self-doubt and other bad things along the way. All of us have a little bit of that nagging perfectionist inside of us, meaning that we will easily take a small failure and blow it up to be a much bigger problem than it should be.

While many of these perceptions will be exaggerated in the moment, it is possible for a small setback to have lasting effects on your behavior in the future. Whether these effects are positive or they turn out to be negative will be up to you. As someone who suffers from imposter syndrome, you are more likely to turn these into a negative thing. But if you want to finally beat the imposter issue, then it is time to learn how to fight it all off.

Mistakes are one of the best ways to learn and make things better in your life. Mistakes can be good when you use them properly. But when you have imposter syndrome, it is easy to take those mistakes and turn them into something that seems bad, something that stops you from moving forward. When you learn how to face failures at work, you can prevent this kind of thinking and move forward.

The first thing we need to do here is dissect failure. You should never internalize the failure, let it define you, or wallow in one small setback for so long that you lose sight of your goals. Often when we face failure, we let all of those things happen. Rather than letting the failure define you and take control, it is important to face the failure. Take a step back after it occurs and do an analysis to see what factors contributed to it.

This analysis helps you to take a look at it without being attached. Pretend that someone else failed and you are trying to help them learn and grow from it. Let your logic take over, rather than the emotions, and really see what is going on that caused the failure. While doing this, make out a list of all the factors that were not in your control. This could be something in the industry that was not in your control, such as a market downturn.

Sometimes the failure is from things you can’t control. It is time to let those go. You couldn’t do anything to make that better. However, if the setback did happen because of a few factors that were in your control, it is now time to think about how you would do them differently the next time. Once you are able to assess these factors, you can make a plan for next time. This is how you learn from your failures. Over time, you will make fewer failures and perhaps feel a little bit less like an imposter at work.

Sometimes it is not possible to prepare for a similar situation in the future, especially when a lot of factors are not in your control. When this happens, It is time to build up your own resilience to help overcome that setback, to not let it take over your life again. How you respond to failure and how you define your failure will be important.

Remember that everyone will define failure in a different way. When you think about how others would react to that failure, you may find that you overreacted in the first place. Another way to approach all of this is to make some changes to how you perceive your mistakes. Were you expecting too much out of yourself?

For example, maybe you received a setback of not getting that new job that you wanted. But there are so many factors that will lead a hiring manager to choose one person over another. It may have nothing to do with you personally. It is better for your mental state to redefine this in a positive light. If you even made it to the interview stage of the process, then you were a strong candidate and you should see this as a success, rather than as a failure. When you can redefine the situation that you once thought was a failure to something positive, you become more resilient and may stop letting these failures define you.