I’ll let you in on a little behind-the-scenes secret about The Insightful Leader newsletter: every week, I’m a little afraid I’ve messed it up somehow. What if there’s an embarrassing typo? What if I accidentally send it to the wrong recipient list on the wrong day?

There’s a good reason we’re all so afraid of making mistakes, according to Lauren Eskreis-Winkler, an assistant professor of management and organizations at Kellogg.

“Failure makes everyone feel terrible,” she said on a recent episode of the podcast Hidden Brain. “It kind of doesn’t matter who you are, how successful you are, or how small the failure is. I’d say that’s the general conclusion of dozens of experiments that have been run to date.”

And because of how acutely wretched failure makes us feel, we’ll go to remarkable lengths to avoid it, even when the stakes are high. In fact, Eskreis-Winkler noted, one study found that investors will monitor their portfolios less frequently when the market drops. “It could be your life savings are on the line, and you’re not checking the stock market when it goes down, because you’re so scared of getting negative information about yourself or your investments.”

But by avoiding failure, we’re also missing out on essential feedback. Fortunately, as Eskreis-Winkler outlined on the podcast, we can get better at handling and learning from our mistakes.

Why it’s so hard to learn from failure

In a 2019 study, Eskreis-Winkler and Ayelet Fishbach of the University of Chicago developed an experimental task called the Facing Failure Game. In the first round of the game, participants answered several two-option multiple-choice questions, then received either success or failure feedback (“your answer was correct” or “your answer was incorrect”); in subsequent rounds, they saw the same questions again. In theory, participants who received failure feedback in the first round should have known the correct answers.

But they didn’t. Over and over again, Eskreis-Winkler found that people who received failure feedback continued to err in subsequent rounds.

Why? Some of the problem comes down to focus: when we make mistakes, we just stop paying attention. “The people who are told ‘you’re right’ were more likely to retain the answer to the question. Their minds are able to hold on to the information,” Eksreis-Winker said. “The people who were told ‘you’re wrong’ were less likely to do so.”

That’s partly because our ego gets in the way. “Everyone has a really strong drive to see themselves as a competent, good, capable person,” Eskreis-Winkler explained—and failure disrupts that all-important self-image. As a result, we don’t see what failure is trying to teach us.

Separating the work from the self

So how can we start to get more comfortable with failure?

First, cultivate some distance. “I think one of the most effective things you can do is kind of dissociate yourself from the project,” Eskreis-Winkler said. The space allows you to see criticism of the work as just that—criticism of the work, not of you. As a result, you’re less likely to shut down and more likely to retain the feedback.

Giving advice to others can help too. If you ask high-schoolers to give advice on schoolwork to their younger classmates, a study by Eskreis-Winkler found, their own grades improve.

Failing repeatedly “robs you of your confidence,” Eskreis-Winkler explains. But when you give advice, “it’s suddenly restoring you to a position of confidence. … It reminds people of all of the things they already know.” In other words, counseling others allows you to mine the information you’ve gained from your mistakes in a nonthreatening way.

It also helps to remember we’re not alone. By remembering that we all get it wrong sometimes, we can lessen the sting of our missteps. Inspired by other academics, Eskreis-Winkler has begun keeping a CV of failure and encouraging her students to do the same. “Let me tell you,” she said, “my CV of failure, it’s a lot longer than my CV of success.”

You can listen to the entire podcast here.