Confidence after failure: how to get back up when things don't work out

“I knew I wouldn’t manage it.”

The sentence comes in the car in a car park, five minutes after the message arrived: “Thank you for your application, but we have decided to go with another candidate.” Or after an exam that was your third attempt. Or after a party you spent a week preparing for, and almost nobody came. Or after the first real parting of ways with a business you spent years building. The events differ, but the sentence in your head is surprisingly similar. It does not say “this didn’t work out”. It says “I didn’t make it”.

A great deal is decided in that small shift — from the action to yourself. It determines whether you try again in a week’s time, or quietly withdraw and never dare to try again. In this post I will write about what happens in us after failure, what research on growth mindset and self-compassion actually says, and how confidence after failure can not only survive but become sturdier.

What happens inside us when things don’t work out

Failure hurts. That needs saying at the start, because we so often try to skip past it with advice like “see it as an opportunity”. When something we have put ourselves into does not work out, we experience a loss: the loss of a plan, of expectations, sometimes of the picture we had of ourselves. Disappointment, sadness, anger and even physical tiredness are an entirely understandable response.

The question is not whether you will feel something after failure. The question is what that feeling will say about you. This is where the difference between guilt and shame matters. Guilt says: “I made a mistake.” Shame says: “I am a mistake.” Guilt looks at the action, and the action can be put right. Shame looks at the whole person, and that is hard to put right, because it seems there is nothing you could change. I have written more about this difference in Guilt and shame are not the same — and the difference matters.

People with fragile confidence often experience failure precisely as shame. And shame has its own logic: if there is something wrong with you, the safest thing is not to expose yourself again. That is why many people do not try again after a failure. Not because they are lazy or lack willpower, but because a new failure would confirm what they fear most. You can read about how shame quietly whispers that something is wrong with us in Shame: the emotion that whispers “There is something wrong with me”.

Growth mindset: what Carol Dweck actually said

The psychologist Carol Dweck spent decades studying how children and adults explain their own abilities. She described two extremes. With a fixed mindset, a person believes abilities are given — you either have them or you don’t. With a growth mindset, they believe abilities develop through practice, learning and help from others.

The heart of her idea is not positive thinking, but what failure means. If abilities are given, failure is a verdict: it has shown how much you are capable of. If abilities develop, failure is information: it has shown where you are now and what you can still learn. The same event therefore carries two completely different messages.

Dweck herself has repeatedly warned that nobody has a pure growth mindset. We all have a mixture of both, and we all have areas where, faced with failure, we quickly slide into a verdict. She also warned against a “false growth mindset”: praising effort regardless of outcome, empty encouragement, and the belief that it is enough to be a nice person with an open mind. A growth mindset is not a feeling, but a way of approaching the next step.

What newer research says about growth mindset

The idea became hugely popular, especially in schools. But when researchers began systematically testing what programmes to encourage a growth mindset actually achieve, the picture became more modest.

In 2018 Victoria Sisk, Brooke Macnamara and colleagues published two meta-analyses. The link between mindset and academic achievement was weak. The average effect of growth mindset programmes on achievement was very small — around 0.08 of a standard deviation, which in practice is barely noticeable. Somewhat larger effects were found only in certain groups, for example among pupils from poorer families or those who were struggling at school.

A year later, a large American study led by David Yeager showed that a short online programme for secondary school pupils improved grades — but again mainly among pupils who had been doing worse, and mainly in schools where the environment supported the new mindset. In 2023, Macnamara and Burgoyne warned in a new meta-analysis that once the quality of studies and possible publication bias are taken into account, the effects shrink further.

What does this mean for someone sitting in a car after a rejection? Above all, that changing a belief on its own is not a miracle cure. The sentence “abilities can be developed” will not give you your confidence back if you only repeat it. What matters is what changes with it in your relationship with yourself: whether, after failure, you are your own opponent or your own ally. And here the research on self-compassion tells us more.

Self-compassion after failure

When we fail, most of us respond in one of two ways. The first is self-criticism: “How can you be so stupid? You’ve ruined everything again.” The second is propping up self-esteem: “You’re brilliant, they were just blind.” The first hurts; the second seems kinder. But it has a problem — it does not let us see what really happened.

In 2012 Juliana Breines and Serena Chen tested a third option: self-compassion. In one of their experiments, participants took a very difficult test and mostly did badly on it. Then one group read encouragement in the spirit of self-compassion (“it’s hard when things don’t go well, and many people experience this”), another read encouragement in the spirit of self-esteem (“you must be capable, or you wouldn’t be here”), and a third read nothing. Before a second test they could study as much as they wanted.

Those who had received self-compassion studied longer than both other groups. In other experiments in the same study, people who had written self-compassionately about a weakness were more motivated to change it, and after reflecting self-compassionately on a moral mistake they were more willing to apologise and not repeat it. Self-compassion, then, did not mean letting themselves off and giving up. It meant they dared to look at the mistake, because looking at it did not destroy them.

Kristin Neff, who introduced the concept of self-compassion into psychology, describes it in three parts: kindness towards yourself instead of judgement, awareness that failures are part of shared human experience, and mindful attention to pain without suppressing it or drowning in it. You can find more in Self-compassion instead of self-criticism: what Kristin Neff’s research shows.

Why self-criticism doesn’t work, even though it seems it should

Many people are afraid of self-compassion because they think that without an inner whip they would become lazy. “If I weren’t hard on myself, I’d never achieve anything.” I understand that belief — strictness often really was what drove them forward. But research shows that harsh self-criticism does not increase perseverance in the long run; it increases fear of failure. And fear of failure leads to avoidance, procrastination and withdrawal — exactly what self-critical people fear most.

The voice that berates us after a failure did not fall from the sky. In relational family therapy, in which I am training, we often see that this voice once belonged to someone else: a parent who was disappointed, a teacher who compared, or a family atmosphere in which love depended on success. When a child lives with something like that for years, they internalise the voice. I have written about this in The inner critic: where the voice that constantly judges you comes from.

This matters because it means you can talk to the inner critic as you would to a person. You can answer it. If you would like to start with something concrete, the exercise Two columns for the inner critic may help.

Resilience is not invulnerability

When we talk about getting back up after failure, we often use the word resilience. And we often picture it wrongly — as a trait of the rare few whom nothing can knock off course. After decades of studying children who grew up in difficult circumstances, the researcher Ann Masten described resilience as “ordinary magic”. It is not rare and it is not special. It comes from entirely ordinary sources: at least one reliable relationship, a sense that you can have some influence over your life, the ability to regulate your emotions, and meaning in what you do.

This means two things. First, a resilient person is not someone who is not hurt by failure. It is someone who, after a blow, gradually returns to life. Second, resilience is not only an individual matter. A great deal depends on whether you have someone beside you who does not judge you after a failure. So calling a friend or talking it through with your partner after a failure is not a sign of weakness — it is one of the ways resilience is actually built.

I am wary, though, of the saying “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”. Failure can teach us something, but not because pain is useful in itself. It teaches us if we have enough support to work it through. I have written about why the saying does not hold for more serious experiences in “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” — why that isn’t true of trauma.

How it sounds in conversation

This is how part of a conversation after a failure might sound (a composite, not a real person):

“I’ve failed the exam for the third time. I think I’m just not cut out for it.”
“What did you say to yourself when you found out the result?”
“That I’m an idiot. That everyone else passed and only I didn’t.”
“If your best friend failed for the third time, would you say the same to him?”
“No. I’d tell him he’d had a really awful term and the exam was hard.”
“Was your term awful?”
A long silence. “Yes. Dad was in hospital. I didn’t even count that.”

That moment matters. Not because the failure disappears or becomes unimportant, but because the whole picture comes into view. Self-criticism sees only the outcome. Self-compassion also sees the circumstances, the tiredness, the care for others — and only when you see all of that can you think about what might be different next time.

Exercise: a letter after failure

You can do this exercise today if something recent still hurts. It takes fifteen to twenty minutes.

1. Describe what happened in three sentences — as a journalist would. No adjectives about yourself, just facts: “I applied for a job. I had two interviews. They chose another candidate.”
2. Write down what your inner voice is telling you about it. Word for word, even if it is ugly. Then underneath, note which parts are a judgement about the action and which are a judgement about you as a person.
3. Write yourself a letter as you would write to a friend you love who has just failed. What would you say about how they feel? What about the circumstances they may not be seeing?
4. Add one sentence about not being the only one. For example: “Almost everyone who goes for something experiences rejection.” Not as consolation, but as a fact.
5. Write down one small step for this week. Not a plan for success, just one step: asking for feedback, sending one more application, booking an hour of tutoring.

The letter is not meant to gloss over the failure. It is meant to make sure you are not left alone with a harsh voice. When this happens a number of times, an experience begins to build in you that you survive even things that do not go to plan — and that experience is the core of confidence.

When failure follows a decision you weighed for a long time, it can be especially painful, because it is joined by the thought “I knew I should have chosen differently”. I have written about how to decide without every choice turning into an exam in Deciding without endless doubt: how to trust your own judgement.

When it is not about mindset

I want to be honest about the limits of what I have written.

Not every failure is a matter of how you relate to yourself. Sometimes we fail because circumstances are unfair: because the outcome of a selection was decided in advance, because we cannot afford further training, because we are caring for an ill parent, or because we face discrimination. The idea of a growth mindset can be misused to place all responsibility on the individual: “You’re just not trying hard enough.” That is not a growth mindset, but blame in new clothes.

Sometimes giving up is right. Persistence is not always a virtue. Research by Carsten Wrosch and colleagues shows that people who are able to let go of a goal that has become unattainable, and redirect their energy to a new goal, report greater well-being and less distress. Getting back up after failure does not necessarily mean trying the same thing again. It can mean finding another path.

Sometimes there is something deeper behind failure. If you cannot pick yourself up for weeks after a failure, if you lose interest in things that used to bring you joy, if you sleep badly and feel that nothing has any point, this is not just a question of confidence. It may be depression that needs professional help — start with your GP. If you are having thoughts that it would be better if you were not here, call the Mental Distress Helpline on 01 520 99 00 in Slovenia (every day from 19.00 to 7.00) or the Samaritan confidential line on 116 123 in Slovenia (24 hours a day). In an emergency, call 112.

What to remember

• Pain after failure is normal; what matters is whether you say “it didn’t work out” or “I didn’t make it”.
• A growth mindset is a useful idea, but newer meta-analyses show that the effects of programmes promoting it are small — changing a belief on its own is not a miracle cure.
• Self-compassion after failure does not lead to laziness: in the Breines and Chen study, people studied longer after it and were keener to put mistakes right.
• Resilience is not invulnerability, but the ability to return to life over time — and it grows largely from relationships that do not judge you.
• Sometimes the right path is to let go and choose another goal; and sometimes behind failure lies distress that needs professional help.