When Senator George McGovern decided to cease supporting Hillary Clinton yesterday, that must have hurt her. Of course, she’s a street fighter, and no doubt she has gotten past it as she has other defections from her side. That is one of the impressive things about her. You can see the pain on her face sometimes, but she gets through it and a day or so later she is looking relaxed and rising to the challenge again. Few things bother an opponent more than that skill.

How does she do it? Where does such strength come from?

I’ve been reading a book, The Female Brain, in which Dr. Louann Brizendine, neuropsychiatrist at the University of California, San Francisco, explains that women have superior brain wiring for communication and emotional tones — even as infants. We see more relational subtlety. She argues, as do other researchers, that women and men have different brain sensitivities to stress and conflict. We could argue this for a lifetime, but there is a general perception that women have greater difficulty rebounding from disappointments in close relationships at work.

InThe Secret Handshake and It’s All Politics, though, I’ve written about women becoming “street fighters” and how important that capacity is to moving upward at work. So how do we go from being ultra-sensitive to being able to take a slam at work and get up again tomorrow ready to move on?

It takes a lot of learning the hard way, but here are a few important components: learning from watching others, including men, experience deep disappointment yet successfully move on, thinking about how someone you admire would handle it, getting some mentoring from street fighters, learning some defensive and offensive techniques, and learning how to read between the lines so you can anticipate such negative events before they even happen.

This is a tall order. If handling disappointment at work is one of the more difficult challenges you face, you could consider asking people about their worst disappointment, how they initially thought about it, who they went to for guidance, what they ultimately did and why it worked or didn’t.

Then you have to begin getting past small disappointments (that may seem large at first) so you can prepare yourself for bigger ones. No one escapes pain at work, but you can become better at putting it into perspective. As one T.V. commentator said of politics recently, “If you want a friend, get a dog.” While I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s impossible to make friends at work, it’s wise to know that work usually isn’t the place to look for your best ones.

TAGS: handling disappointment, Hillary Clinton, politics at work, street fighters