Managing setbacks can prove challenging for anyone. You aim to come across as emotionally intelligent, confident, and as an experienced professional. Avoid coming across as insecure. Undermining your own confidence leads to diminished self-esteem, which hinders your growth, likely to result in more missteps. But taking such lessons in stride, learning from them at speed, and improving from your failures shores up your likelihood of success next time. So demonstrate your commitment to holding yourself accountable, analyzing and learning from your mistakes, and integrating those insights into your professional development, while leveraging the lessons you've learned to pave the way for future accomplishments. Have your body language mirror these sentiments, and be fearless in taking ownership of your own development.

Sedgwick's executive chairman, Dave North, said, "Own it. You may think that one decision doesn't matter. You may do the wrong thing and, after the fact, try to convince yourself you were misled or not given all the facts and therefore you shouldn't be held accountable for the choice you made. In these cases, you are wrong. Own your decisions. Learn from mistakes."

In one of their blogs, Sedgwick goes on to say, "Every single choice you make becomes a part of you. The big choices will be a reflection of who you are. There will be choices you make that you will be proud of and some that you will not be proud of. The ones you are not proud of are the ones you have to learn from."

"A while back, I made a terrible mistake when I incorrectly looked up the policy of a client who wanted to increase their policy coverage. They gave me their name, and I punched it in. But I hadn't noticed there were two separate customers with the same first and last name. So I pulled up the wrong policy, and this generated a lot of confusion throughout the rest of the phone call. As the conversation progressed, this customer grew more frustrated. Then they said something that made me realize their address was not the same as this policy and started to uncover my error. Once I realized the mistake, I apologized profusely but had lost credibility with this client. After that incident, I always ask for their full name, and verify their information more thoroughly."