No one enjoys hearing bad news: A key team member quits. An initiative you invested heavily in doesn’t pan out. You lose a client or a big case.
In moments like these, it’s easy to feel like the universe is working against you, to start questioning your decisions, abilities, and maybe even whether you’re cut out to run a business at all. But how you choose to interpret these moments will be the very thing that makes you a successful leader.
I remember reading a book by retired US Navy officer Jocko Willink, Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win. In it, he talks about his response to adversity and one of the most powerful mindset shifts I’ve ever come across.
The secret phrase?
“Good.”
That’s it.
Lost a client? Good. Key team member quit? Good. A major strategy you’ve spent months implementing didn’t work? Good.
At first, I’m sure it seems absurd. How can an objectively negative event be good?
But the event itself isn’t what’s valuable. It’s the lesson that you take from it.
Imagine going through life without any adversities and challenges to overcome. You would have no skills and talents to speak of.
Look over your skillset and try to trace it all back to its source: your resilience, adaptability, pattern recognition, emotional intelligence — the list goes on and on. They were likely all achieved through some sort of challenge, because growth requires friction.
No matter how tiny or how huge, every single setback asks you to become someone bigger and better.
So many things will happen to you that you’ll have had no way of predicting. But that’s not what matters. What matters is how you handle them. As they say, you can’t control the wind, but you can adjust the sails.
A client leaves? Maybe it’s time to improve your service. A team member quits? Maybe your hiring process, leadership, or culture needs attention. A strategy doesn’t work? Good. You just eliminated one path that wasn’t going to get you where you wanted to go.
The result will be better client services, a culture that everyone is bought into, a team that others envy, and systems that people want to copy. None of that would’ve happened if everything went off without a hitch.
The problems you face as a leader won’t disappear as you grow; they’ll just change.
Whether you have a five-figure firm or a nine-figure one, there will always be issues and setbacks to deal with. The good news is that as long as you reframe your mindset, they won’t last. You will.
Resilience isn’t just given or inherited. It’s earned. It’s what happens when your desire to be a business owner, a good leader, or a successful lawyer outweighs your unwillingness to deal with discomfort — when instead of doubting your capacity, talent, and potential, you understand that setbacks and failure are a part of success, not the opposite of it.
You could always close your firm when things don’t go your way. Let everyone go, reassign the cases to other firms, and shut off the lights for good. That would certainly guarantee that you’d never deal with any business issues again.
But if that’s not the option that appeals to you, if you want to grow your firm and succeed, then simply incorporate this three-word response into every inconvenience: “Good. Now, what?”
Winners aren’t people who never fail. They’re people who know that every setback is a path to a better, stronger, more efficient version of themselves.
