Mindfulness and Learning from Project Failure
Mindful organizational members keep emotions caused by entrepreneurial project failure in check, handle emotions regarding project failure with curiosity and open-mindedness, and maintain a balanced understanding of the failure event by keeping things in perspective (adapted from Neff 2003b). Employees who are less mindful tend to be strongly influenced by personal feelings (Neff 2003a: 88). For instance, when a person concentrates on an entrepreneurial project failure, his or her focus can move away from the failure itself to the negative emotional experiences stemming from the event, thus increasing his or her negative emotions (Nolen-Hoeksema 1991).
We are not suggesting that mindful organizational members do not show emotional reactions to entrepreneurial project failures. Instead, mindful individuals can place these emotions in a larger context and see the significance of these emotions with a broader perspective (Neff 2003a: 89; Teasdale et al. 2000). Because this larger context is unlikely to jeopardize individuals’ self-esteem, there are likely few ego-protective obstacles to learning . It appears that mindfulness helps people end the cycle of self-absorption as well as escape ruminations. For instance, Shapiro et al. (2005) showed that an intervention over eight weeks, which was based on mindfulness and aimed at reducing stress, effectively improved health -care professionals’ self-compassion and decreased their stress. In the organizational context, mindfulness helps in reducing the significance of the negative results from entrepreneurial project failures and thus reduces individuals’ negative emotional reactions to it (Shepherd and Cardon 2009).
Instead of concentrating on the negative thinking and emotions associated with project failure, employees with high mindfulness do not connect project failure to their own self-worth. These employees can accept the event for what it is (i.e., a chance for learning ) and become consciously aware of it (Hayes et al. 1996) without severely judging or criticizing themselves. Mindfulness enables individuals to view emotions as a signal that a failure event is an important learning opportunity (Lazarus 1993; Weick 1979) without letting negative emotions overtake their information-processing capacity (Matthews et al. 1990; Wells and Matthews 1994), which would diminish their learning abilities related to the failure. The balancing of emotions in such a way is an essential element of self-regulation and the core aspect of mindfulness . As explained earlier, an individual can balance failure-related negative emotions and improve learning , for example, by oscillating between a loss orientation and a restoration orientation (Shepherd 2003; Stroebe and Schut 2001). Of course, people are heterogeneous to the extent to which they can control their emotions (Tugade and Fredrickson 2004); thus some individuals can better utilize emotion knowledge (i.e., mindfulness ) to handle stressful situations (Barrett and Gross 2001).
By keeping ruminations and overidentification under control, mindfulness helps individuals more effectively discern important information regarding project failure and then interpret and learn from that information (Shepherd and Cardon 2009). At one level, mindfulness represents a type of detachment like the non-judgmental perspective therapists take when interacting with clients (Bohart 1993; Neff 2003a). However, it is not independent of evaluation ; instead, mindfulness entails separating one’s assessment of a particular event from assessments of the self .
Conclusion
In this chapter we have explored the influence of emotions across different stages and tasks of the entrepreneurial process. We illustrate that emotions play a key role in understanding entrepreneurs’ opportunity exploitation decisions . Further, we also find that supervisor-managers’ emotional displays can impact the motivation of employees to engage in entrepreneurial action . Particularly when entrepreneurial projects within organizations fail, employees often experience substantial negative emotions which diminish motivation and learning from the failure experience . However, we also show that these effects are contingent on the organizational environment normalizing failure, as well as individuals’ coping orientations , self-efficacy , and self-compassion .
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