Here's how you can bounce back from setbacks and failures in social impact work.

In the world of social impact, setbacks are stepping stones, not stumbling blocks. Here’s how to turn challenges into opportunities: View setbacks as chances to learn and improve. Reflect on what went wrong and use it to refine your approach. Failure is part of progress. Analyze setbacks, share insights with your team, and adapt your strategies for better outcomes. Stay flexible and explore new ideas or partnerships. Innovation fuels resilience and keeps your efforts dynamic. Reaffirm your mission and keep your goals in sight. Let your passion for change drive you forward. Embrace challenges as opportunities for growth, and you’ll continue making a meaningful difference in your community.

When reflecting on how an initiative or campaign went, I've found it helpful to approach a retrospective with this simple structure: 1. What was our hypothesis? 2. Did we execute it as we'd planned? 3. Did the result match our hypothesis? 4. What did we learn that we can apply to the next time we do something similar? And then I record these learnings in a centralized place to reference down the road. It's not really a failure if we're learning and improving our approach over time. These four questions help me make sure that's happening.

Feedback and the insights over the actions can literally give the boost in the improvement in any social impact project. Moreover, failures and setbacks become the opportunities for growth with the considerate feedback of the fellows. Furthermore, setbacks can only hurt an individual when the identification of the ego or self is too much on anything and the feedbacks and diverse viewpoints with a dialogic method could reduce the overall negative effects and outlooks.

Retaining perspective is fundamental to personal and team resilience. You can build perspective by: 1) Pacing yourself. Not every activity is critically urgent. If you are consistently in firefighting mode, you lose the ability to distinguish between what's important and what's not, depleting your resilience. 2) Regularly reviewing the big picture. Looking back over the past year can help us recognise and contextualise the true scale of today's challenges. 3) Actively pursuing interests outside of our work. Not only does this help prevent myopic focus on challenges, but can also sometimes provide surprising insights to help find solutions.

Those who contribute most to society tend to be lowest paid. Those who contribute least to society tend to be paid most. How we value true contribution is valued needs to change. Do not celebrate those entrepreneurs who do nothing other than create shareholder wealth. They add nothing of substance. Celebrate those who create impact for others selflessly. They are most deserving of celebration. Don’t celebrate the personal gain of others as it re-enforces selfish behaviours. It is possible to run sustainable companies that balance people, planet, profit in harmony. Focus on the values that create a better future for the many, not the few in a privileged position.