How do you get out of a career dip? You shorten the time you spend stuck in it. The dip is not the failure itself, it is the long stretch after the failure, when your early optimism has worn off and the wins have not shown up yet. That is where most careers and goals quietly die. The people who get out are the ones who fail faster on purpose, pull the lesson from every failure, and use it to climb into what I call informed optimism.
I am Bryce Kenny, a Guinness World Record holding Monster Jam driver and leadership keynote speaker. I did not learn this from a book. I learned it during a two year span where I wanted to quit driving monster trucks entirely. Every time I jumped the truck more than twenty or twenty five feet in the air, the shocks would rebound so violently they would throw the truck over onto its roof. I went through crash after crash, roughly a hundred of them, before I found the way out.
This is the story of the worst stretch of my career and exactly how I climbed out of it. If you have lost a major client, been passed over for a promotion, or watched a product launch fail, and you have been stuck ever since, this is the method that got me out.
Watch the full story below:
What is the dip in leadership, and why it kills most goals
The dip is the low point that arrives after your early excitement wears off. I lived a violent version of it in a twelve thousand pound truck, and it taught me something I now build entire keynotes around: momentum is your friend, but only if you can survive the stretch where it disappears.
Here is how it works. You start something new with what I call uninformed optimism. You are excited, and you do not know what you do not know. Then you start hitting roadblocks. Pessimism sets in. And at the end of that pessimism is the dip. That is where most dreams, goals, visions, and careers go to die, because that is where most people quit.
There was one crash that put me at the bottom of mine. It was not even an aggressive jump. It was a basic, slightly bigger than normal jump, and the truck rebounded so hard it went over on the roll cage. If you are wondering, a crash onto the roll cage really does hurt. There is no suspension on that side of the truck.
I laid upside down, completely defeated. Back in the pit area I walked up to my crew chief and told him the truth: I do not have any new information or new ideas to give you. I do not know what else to do to get this truck to land without immediately throwing me into a crash. I threw my hands up and said maybe today should be my last day driving a monster truck. That is the dip. If you have been there in your own career, you know the feeling before you know the word for it.
How to bounce back from failure at work: speed beats grit
The lesson most people get wrong about resilience after setbacks is that getting out of the dip is about endurance. It is not. It is about spending as little time inside it as possible.
When pessimism sets in, treat it as your signal to work faster and fail faster, not to slow down and protect yourself. On the other side of the dip is informed optimism, the point where you finally know what you did not know before. The faster you reach the lessons, the faster you get there. Grit keeps you in the dip. Speed gets you out.
I did not climb out by trying harder at what was already failing. I climbed out by changing the question. Sitting with my crew chief, I said the momentum this truck generates is rebounding straight up, so how do I get it to rebound forward instead? We started studying motocross. We looked at dirt bikes and at other drivers who always seemed to get big air.
That is when it clicked. Each tire on the truck weighs six hundred pounds. If I could increase the tire speed while the truck was in the air, so that tire speed matched the ground speed of the truck at the moment of landing, the truck would bounce forward instead of flipping up and over. My crew chief heard that and said if the truck is going to rebound forward, then I can adjust the shocks to absorb the landing that way instead of fighting it. We stopped fighting the truck. We unlocked the formula we had been chasing for years, and slowly started to climb out of the dip.
The Atlanta jump that proved the comeback was real
Once we cracked the code, my confidence skyrocketed. We were at Atlanta Motor Speedway in 2024. Before the event even started, I looked at one jump and thought: this thing has the perfect height, it is cut perfectly, and there is a ton of run up room to build ground speed.
I hit my freestyle run. I nailed the perfect backflip, got the truck whipped around, lined up on that big jump, gave it one hundred percent, and never lifted. We jumped that truck about fifty feet in the air. It was, without a doubt, the biggest jump anyone there had ever seen, the biggest jump in the sport of Monster Jam.
When that truck was fifty feet up, I remember how small everybody in the stands looked. It was the most surreal feeling I have ever had. I looked down past my feet to pick a landing spot, and as the nose came down, because gravity is undefeated, my only thought was tire speed, tire speed, tire speed. I gave it throttle to match the tire speed to my ground speed, the exact lesson I had learned the hard way for two straight years. The truck landed, it pulled itself out, and we celebrated harder that night than we ever had.
Here is the point. I could only make that jump because I had already made it through the dip. Every crash over those years, and then the successes that followed, told me that if I threw the truck fifty feet in the air, it would land the right way. The comeback was not luck. It was built in the failures.
How to get out of a career dip: don't waste the pain
If you are going to go through something hard and painful, get the lesson from it. Do not waste the pain. That is the single most valuable principle I carry into every leadership keynote, whether I am speaking to a franchise conference or a corporate team: pull the lesson out, apply it, and start winning again.
Here is how to put it to work the next time you are stuck.
Treat pessimism as a trigger to move faster. The moment the excitement wears off and the roadblocks show up, the dip is coming. Do not freak out and do not slow down. Speed up your failure rate so you reach the successes sooner.
Change your Monday-morning question. Most people wake up on Monday, look at the desk, the inbox, the stalled projects, and ask how do I get a couple quick wins. Instead ask: what is one thing I can fail at this morning by giving it my full effort? Failure done on purpose surfaces the lesson faster.
Invert the problem. This is the tool the best investors use. Take the project stuck on your whiteboard and ask the opposite question: if we wanted to guarantee this launch fails, or guarantee our biggest client walks away, exactly how would we do it? List every answer. Then simply do the opposite.
I have run this inverted thinking exercise inside a real franchise organization that had been stuck on the same problem for two months. They mapped out every way to guarantee failure, built a plan around the exact opposite, and unlocked brand new ideas almost immediately. The teams that stay stuck in the dip never reach that breakthrough, because they let the dream die the moment pessimism arrives.
This is the R in my G.E.A.R. Framework, Growth, Engagement, Acceleration, and Risk, the framework I teach leaders for building momentum and finding their next gear when everything says stop. The dip is where the Risk gear lives, but the climb out runs through the others too. It starts with the Growth gear and the day I ran out of fuel, it holds together through the Engagement gear and why half commitments are more dangerous than full ones, and it turns into speed through the Acceleration gear and how high-performing teams accelerate.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do you get out of a career dip?
Shorten the time you spend stuck in it. The dip is the stretch after a failure, between losing your early optimism and earning your first wins back, and it is where most careers stall out. Pull the lesson from every failure, apply it immediately, and use speed rather than grit to reach informed optimism, the point where you finally know what you did not know before.
What is the dip in leadership?
The dip is the low point that comes after uninformed optimism wears off and pessimism sets in. You start something excited, hit roadblocks, and enter the stretch where most goals and careers quietly die because people quit. The way through is to fail faster so you reach the lessons, and the successes, sooner.
How do you bounce back from failure at work?
Do not waste the pain. If you are going to go through something hard, extract the lesson from it, apply it, and start winning again. Failure is only wasted if you come out of it without the lesson, and the faster you fail on purpose, the faster you climb out.
How does inverted thinking help you recover from a setback?
Instead of asking how to make a stuck project succeed, ask how you would guarantee it fails, then list every answer and do the opposite. It sounds backward, but it surfaces blind spots and unlocks creativity that head-on problem solving misses. I have watched a franchise organization break a two-month stall in a single session using this exercise.
The core insight
Getting out of a career dip is not about surviving it, it is about getting through it as fast as you can. Learn the lesson, invert the problem, and let your failures build the confidence for the jump that changes everything. That is the Risk gear of the G.E.A.R. Framework in action, turning the worst stretch of your career into the launch point for your best.
Bring the comeback keynote to your next conference
Bryce Kenny is a leadership keynote speaker who delivers this story and the G.E.A.R. Framework to franchise conventions, corporate conferences, and association events. Audiences have included Deutsche Bank, Chick-fil-A, Great Clips, and KOA. If your team is stuck in the dip after a hard quarter, a lost client, or a failed launch, this keynote gives them a concrete way to fail faster, find the lesson, and get back to winning. Check Bryce Kenny's availability →