One of the most important skills we can develop is the ability to deal with disappointment and cope with failures big and small. On this episode of Being Well, Forrest and I discuss what it looks like to experience failure not as falling short, but as an opportunity for growth.

We consider how internalized narratives about how we’re supposed to be or how we define success might make some more failure sensitive than others, and how to manage the pain of failure, adapt expectations, and develop systems of feedback to allow for a greater sense of ease and purpose.

• 0:00: Introduction
• 2:00: What do we mean by failure?
• 5:55: How loss works in the brain and what makes us sensitive to losing
• 8:30: Managing expectations of success
• 10:30: Attributional styles
• 13:10: How some cope with failure with greater ease than others
• 22:30: Deconstructing old narratives and failure as an opportunity for learning
• 28:30: Managing the pain of failure and setting up feedback systems
• 34:20: An example from Forrest’s experience
• 38:20: Poor decisions, lack of foresight, losing your nerve
• 40:30: Willingness to take risks
• 45:00: Defining our notion of success and failure via process vs. outcome
• 48:20: Recap