What do Demi Moore, Timothée Chalamet, Robert Downey Jr. and Andrew Cuomo have in common? All of them made career comebacks with heart-warming, bounce-back stories, many playing out on Oscar night. After her career spiraled downhill, Demi Moore got an Oscar nomination this year for The Substance. She was considered the favorite to win but lost to Mikey Madison for Anora. Yet, she had already made her comeback with the Golden Globe, Critic’s Choice Award and Screen Actor’s Guild Award for best actress.
Chalamet persisted through early rejections, snagging a 2025 Oscar nomination for best actor. Downey had to fight for auditions after drug addiction caused his career to hit rock bottom. But he bounced back last year winning an Oscar for best supporting actor for Oppenheimer. And Andrew Cuomo, former New York Governor, announced he’s throwing his hat in the ring for New York City Mayor, following his 2021 downfall and forced resignation.
How To Turn Setbacks Into Career Comebacks
You might wonder what career and leadership lessons you can learn from these highly-successful personalities to bounce back from career challenges–a lousy review, a missed promotion or raise, loss of your biggest customer or your job. No matter how extraordinary you are, at some point in your career, you will encounter a setback. Here are ten tips to help you overcome challenges, obstacles, hardship and adversity.
1. Develop a winning frame of mind. Baseball great Babe Ruth, arguably one of the best base ballplayers of all time said, “Every strike brings me closer to the next home run.” Highly successful people like Ruth cultivate a winning frame of mind, also known as a growth mindset—the belief that defeat happens for you, not to you. With a winning mindset, you consider success and failure a package deal—like a hand and glove, milk and cookies, flip sides of the same coin—twins, not enemies. You understand that avoidance of failure morphs into avoidance of success. You develop thick skin and commit in advance to face the many smack downs you will encounter.
2. Don’t be too quick to throw in the towel. Take the towel you want to throw in, use it to wipe the sweat off your brow and get back in the game. You can turn a no into a yes by persisting like Shark Tank’s Barbara Corcoran, who refused to take no for an answer. Initially being turned down as a judge on the show, she wrote a letter listing three reasons she should be reconsidered, and they ended up hiring her. “I’m smiling bright today about the letter I wrote to the big boss that turned my fortune around and the 12 wonderful years I’ve spent helping entrepreneurs make their dreams come true on “Shark Tank,” she declares on LinkedIn.
3. Be a card-carrying optimist. “The most amazing thing happened when I replaced the tape in my head from ‘You’re not smart enough,’ or ‘You can’t compete with them,’ to ‘You’re f-ing amazing, Barbara!’” Corcoran says. “I started believing it.” Studies show that optimists, compared to pessimists, have lower stress levels, move faster up the career ladder, have fewer health complaints and live longer. After a big letdown, underscore your triumphs and high-five your “tallcomings”—all the things you’re great at. Make a list of all of your talents and skills. Read it back to yourself often. Give yourself a fist pump every time you reach a milestone or accomplishment.
4. Substitute self-compassion for self-judgment. Demi Moore says she went through a low point in her career, having trouble finding where she belongs. She climbed out of it by shifting her mindset and embracing her self-worth. Two weeks later, her career took a sharp turn when she was offered The Substance. Studies show that self-judgment prevents you from bouncing back. It’s like attacking the fire department when your house is on fire. If you really want a career comeback, put down your gavel. Place your hand over your heart, and talk to yourself with kindness, something like, “I care about you and what happens to you. You are awesome.” Self-compassion neutralizes self-judgment, helping you see that setbacks are neither personal nor final, that they are temporary and that you can overcome them.
5. Practice past recall. Pinpoint the personal qualities that helped you withstand and surmount adversity in the past. Science-backed research shows that reflecting on how you overcame past hardships widens what neuroscientists call the resilient zone. Past recall is a personal resource that strengthens your belief in yourself. Point to lessons learned and underscore ways past hard knocks have made you grow stronger.
6. Send your limitations packing. Canadian country music artist, Paul Brandt said, “Don’t tell me the sky’s the limit when there are footprints on the moon.” After his forced resignation for sexual harassment, comeback kid, Andrew Cuomo, is entering the New York City Mayoral race. In a campaign video, he acknowledges his past mistakes as most resilient people do when they accept failure as an essential stepping stone to success.
7. Turn obstacles into opportunities. Think of a setback as a lesson to grow from instead of failure to endure. Michele Sullivan, former president of the Caterpillar Foundation, was born with a rare form of dwarfism that created many challenges in her daily life. She once told me: “Where I had once seen obstacles, I changed my perspective and viewed them instead as advantages. I now call this the ‘Looking Up’ philosophy, and it is how I live my life each day.” The winning mind asks, “How can I make this situation work to my advantage?” and “What can I manage or overcome in this roadblock?”
8. Enlarge your perspective. When threatened, the human brain is designed to constrict and target the threat like the zoom lens of a camera. A myopic perspective limits your ability to see the bigger, more accurate picture. Expanding your outlook with a wide-angle lens enables you to treat a problem as a challenge instead of a personal threat, steering you beyond doom and gloom to bigger possibilities. Look for the upside of a downside situation, identify the gain in the loss and focus on the solution, not the problem. “I have to pay more taxes this year than ever before” becomes “I made more money this year than I’ve ever made.”
9. Be chancy and take small risks. Approach adversity instead of avoiding it. You move yourself outward into new, uncharted territory instead of inward into retreat—getting out of your comfort zone, sticking your neck out and actively seeking solutions to problems. Moore recalls her Hollywood comeback in The Substance as a gamble. She told herself the role would either make or break her career. She took the chance anyway, went out on a limb and won acclaim.
10. Hang out with a positive tribe. “Negative thoughts and negative people are like thieves in the night,” Corcoran states. “They steal your energy and give you nothing in return. Surround yourself with positive people, and you’ll be amazed at how far you go.” Positivity is contagious, and when you surround yourself with optimistic people with a shared purpose, career possibilities are endless. Align with people who have a shared purpose and work as a team for a common good versus individual gains.
How To Sustain Career Comebacks
People with a higher degree of mental resilience are less susceptible to burnout and psychological distress and able to sustain career comebacks. One of the best ways to cultivate pit-bull resilience is to think of defeat as your personal trainer that gives you the opportunity to grow and learn. You want to give up, but you don’t really want to quit. You want the hurt and disappointment to stop, understandably so.
Career comebacks are possible when you pick yourself up, brush yourself off and persist with spring-back sustainability after a knock down. Like an elastic band that bends and stretches to a certain point before springing back, you will bounce higher than you fall.