Last year, I attended a three-day expo featuring artists, animators and storytellers. Can you guess what my favorite session was? Nope, not the art of galaxies far, far away — although that was definitely cool. Not how character is story, or even the art of dramatic writing.
My favorite session was about failure. Yep, failure.
One of the speakers, Jorge R. Gutierrez — a Mexican animator, writer, producer, director and voice actor with notable successes — spent an entire session talking about losing. And he didn’t just focus on any failure. He spoke of his failure. His setbacks. All the “no’s” he received over the years.
What made this session top my list? It’s not like failure is fun or exciting or helps me write a better article, right? It was Jorge’s mindset, attitude and outlook. He explained that even when we lose, we still win. His failures had made him stronger because of the experiences, and he told us ours could, too.
I didn’t realize it until later, but what Jorge had done was reframe his losses, celebrate those failures, and identify what he’d gained through them. And while it isn’t always easy to pick ourselves up after we lose, you and I can do the same.
Put your failure in a new frame
What does it look like to reframe a failure? Here are two ideas.
1. Admit that failure is hard and it hurts.
It’s difficult to celebrate failure right after it happens. Very few of us are ready to share with others or even recognize ourselves how loss can make us stronger. It’s too fresh and too painful. So before we can even think about reframing failure, it’s OK and even healthy to sit with the reality that losing stinks.
My husband, Ted, and I recently had to sit with the reality of failure. We live in the Arizona desert, where gardening and tree cultivation take grit. Lots and lots of grit.
Sometimes what Ted plants, grows. Our prickly pear cactus has quadrupled in size. But more often, what Ted plants dies despite his best efforts. We’ve watched a fruit tree refuse to thrive, tomato plants wither, and succulents suffer sunburn. It’s been a frustrating experience.
When it first started happening, I went into encourage mode. “We can try again,” I said. I texted him article links with tips for our region. But his heart still hurt. He wasn’t ready to solve problems.
With time, I realized I’d jumped too quickly into trying to fix our plant problem. Instead, it would have been better for me to start by sitting with Ted in the pain and admitting that dead plants rightly equal sad hearts.
The apostle Paul wrote about how challenges eventually build character in us. In Romans 5:3–5, he says:
We can rejoice, too, when we run into problems and trials, for we know that they help us develop endurance. And endurance develops strength of character, and character strengthens our confident hope of salvation. And this hope will not lead to disappointment. (NLT)
Did you catch the first few words of these verses? “We can rejoice, too.”
While we may not be ready to celebrate immediately, our hearts will get there. That is, if we don’t get stuck in our pain but instead keep taking the necessary steps to reframe our failure. As Jorge said at his session, “When something bad happens, you have a choice. You can go down with it or use it to go up.”
2. Adjust your mindset, attitude and outlook.
Adjusting isn’t about looking on the bright side. It’s about taking stock and asking ourselves: What mindset, attitude and outlook am I bringing to my failure?
We can either approach losing with a fixed mindset or a growth mindset. A fixed mindset believes our potential is limited. It says: We can’t change what we can’t change. A growth mindset views failure as an opportunity to learn, adapt, and try again. It’s a mindset I heard in Jorge’s session as he shared, “Every time we get rejected, I’d say, ‘Can you tell me what I can do better?’”
Mindset directly influences our attitude, or how we think and feel about what happened. For some of us, our default is to nurse our bruised ego. And this goes beyond the normal and healthy grief we feel. It’s when we take ourselves too seriously and feel intense shame when we don’t succeed.
But focusing on ourselves and catering to our injured pride actively prevents us from reframing failure, as it requires humility. Pastor Chad Moore says that pride pretends, or wears a mask, while humility lives in reality and accepts the truth about ourselves and our situation.
A big part of that truth is to acknowledge a failure as a failure. Forbes contributor Dede Henley advises, “Tell the truth — to yourself and others.” She explains:
Naming something a failure and bringing a measure of objectivity to the telling of it takes a certain amount of grit and courage. And that’s exactly what gets built each time you name it. Over time, you not only become more resilient in the face of setbacks, you help create a . . . healthier relationship to failure. As a result, you get more and more comfortable naming it without spiraling into shame.
Humbly naming our failure and living in reality is where our outlook, or how we view the future, comes in. The truth is that, yes, we may have failed, but failure is not who we are. Our identities are not defined by where we win and lose. We are, through Christ, children of God.
Not only that, but God isn’t done with our stories. Just as He promised to bring beauty from ashes for the Israelites, He can do the same for us. And that beauty might be that we grow more like Jesus in how we think or act, or we build more grit and empathy.
When we shift to a growth mindset and adopt a humble attitude, our outlook changes. We can, as Elizabeth Lombardo encourages in her article “5 Ways to Reframe Failure,” shift our attention from how we failed to what we can learn and do differently, both now and in the future.
Plan your celebration party
So if we successfully reframe our failure, how do we celebrate? That’s where the “party planning” comes in. Here are three steps you can use to plan your celebration.
1. Pick the when and where.
When we celebrate depends on what failure or loss we’ve experienced. Some losses, like shrinking our favorite shirt in the dryer or running over the nail in the road, can be celebrated sooner. But others, like a broken engagement or a shattered career goal, may require weeks or months before we’re ready. And that’s OK. Remember, first we have to admit that failure is hard and it hurts.
Once we are ready, we pick the time and place. Is this a celebration that’s just between us and God? If so, maybe we splurge on our favorite latte or chai, and we toast to God’s sovereignty. If it’s with friends or family, our celebration might be a group hike where nature reminds us how big God is and how small we are, and we thank Him that no failure happens outside His control.
2. Choose a mood.
Next, we determine whether to be light-hearted or reflective. What’s the feel of our celebration? It could be a time of rejoicing that this is not the end of the story, focusing on God’s faithfulness in the face of loss, or brainstorming what could be done differently next time. It depends on our individual personalities and the specific failure we’re celebrating.
3. Invite the guests.
It’s important to invite God to all of our celebration parties. Each one needs to be marked by dependence on and trust in Him. But if we also decide to ask friends or family, it’s wise to pick encouragers who speak both grace and truth into our lives. It’s essential to surround ourselves with those who don’t support our inner critic, but instead wisely point us to God and His sovereignty.
It may feel silly to plan a celebration party after you fail. But it’s not. It allows us to tangibly recognize, accept and proclaim that we believe our identity is found in God and not in failure and that the story He’s writing is better than the one we’d pen ourselves. Through celebration, we acknowledge our trust and dependence on Him and His timing.
When you lose, you win
A year or two before this expo, I got word that my second book was going out of print. Sales hadn’t been good. This biggest “loser” moment in my life caused me to take a break from writing and tell myself there were no more books in my future.
So after that session on failure, I waited in line to meet Jorge. I wanted him to know how he had encouraged a discouraged author.
It was Jorge’s expo session on failure that helped change my mindset, attitude and outlook. It was there, in that auditorium, that I started believing that maybe it wasn’t the end of God’s good story for me as an author.
Whatever your failure is, it isn’t the end of God’s good story for you either. So keep trying, keep failing, keep growing stronger, and as you do, give a celebratory nod to those losses along the way.
Copyright 2025 Ashleigh Slater. All rights reserved.
