How to Fail Better

The Science of Bouncing Back

The harder you are on yourself for failing, the more likely you fail again. We suck at losing. Just look around and you’ll see it in sport, work, and especially politics. When we treat failure as a self-defining existential crisis, we never get to a place where we can learn and grow from the experience. We’re stuck protecting our ego.

I want to walk you through 19 tools to help you handle setbacks and failures better.

Process and Deal with the Emotion

1. The 24-hour rule. Feel the pain or glory, then back to work. When we linger too long, we get stuck in either catastrophizing or complacency. The work grounds us in what’s importatn

2. The reflection window opens after the alarm closes. We have a sensitive window where criticism turns what happened into a kind of traumatic threat. The athlete can’t hear you while their ego is still defending. Wait for the dust to settle before you fully debrief.

3. Develop a short memory. In the middle of the action, give yourself a moment to feel it. Then have a reset ritual to shift your focus to what comes next.

4. Sanitize your worst moments. Failures left raw become scars. Failures processed become information. You’ve got to have some way to process the thing: write about it, talk through it, whatever helps you make sense of it. The memory you ingrain is the memory you’ll retrieve.

5. Failure is information. It may sound cliche but the more we can put space between ourself and the result, the more we can treat failure as data we can use.

6. Recall, then rewire. If a particularly bad result still haunts you, rewatch or recall it while listening to your favorite music and trying to see it in a different light. Give it new meaning.

---

Direct the Inner Critic.

7. The harder you are on yourself for failing, the more likely you fail again. The cruelty that feels like accountability is exactly what produces the next slip. Your brain is predictive and you are ingraining a bad prediction.

8. Compassionate self-awareness changes you. Harsh self-criticism freezes you. Honest, kind self-observation isn’t for ‘soft’ athletes. It’s what allows you to see what occurred clearly enough so you can move it to something you can do about. You want to be just kind enough to take the sting off just enough so that you can focus on the next step.

9. Deliberate rumination, not intrusive rumination. The same act of dwelling can grow you or trap you. Deliberately replaying the event so you can problem-solve can be helpful. Go in with a specific goal or intent. But replaying the failure over and over with no control, letting the critic dictate is just a recipe for disaster.

---

Getting to Growth

10. It’s my fault, but I’m going to fix it. Take honest accountability. Not in a way that beats you up, but one that lets you accept what occurred and move towards a plan of fixing the thing.

11. Vent up, not down. As a coach or leader, don’t vent to those you are in charge of guiding. Vent to a peer, your assistant, or your journal if you have to, but losing it on your athletes might make you feel good, but it often just pushes them deeper into the rut. Don’t make them pay the price for your need to release.

12. Make sense of the loss, but be wary if it’s too neat. If the lesson arrives instantly and is generic, it’s probably your brain’s coping draft. “It made me stronger.” “I needed that.” That’s what we’re trained to say. It’s okay if the lesson is messy, that’s real life. Researchers Howells and Fletcher tracked Olympic swimmers through trauma and found two phases: early illusory growth, then real growth. The clean comeback story right after the loss is usually a coping mechanism, not the work.

13. Don’t fall for the “it didn’t sting enough” myth. We assume long misery is the lesson, to show that it mattered a lot. That we’ve gotta feel it for a long time. That’s just rubbish. Research shows that elite performers are great at feeling the thing, then getting out of stressed mode so they can deal with the thing.

---

Putting it in Perspective

14. You are not the result. Hold the performance as something you did, not who you are. When we fuse identity to outcome, every loss feels like a death sentence.

15.Define success on your terms. Too often, we outsource our definition of success. Research on Olympic swimmers shows that when they adopt a more exploratory mindset versus an outcome one, they are more resilient.

16. Embrace acute failure for chronic gains. Muscles only grow when pushed just enough past comfort. Failure is the signal that adaptation is required.

17. The master has failed more than the student has tried. The number of failures is the resume. Don’t read the W-L column as a character report.

18. The car ride home is the practice. The high-emotion moments after the race are when learning gets ingrained. What you say in those minutes lasts longer than anything you said in practice.

19. Sensitive windows: emotion plus attention equals change. After a bad race, the brain is wide open. What you ingrain in that window is what they’ll retrieve next time. Use it on purpose, or it’ll get used by accident.

—

In my lifetime of working with performers at the highest level, if there’s one thing that separates the best from the rest, it’s the ability to deal with failure. Do you let it linger and transform into rumination, or are you able to move on to the next play and learn from what occurred. That’s the key to so much in life.

-Steve Magness

P.S. My book Win The Inside Game is on sale for only $1.99 on kindle! This deal ends soon!