Sometimes we do everything right and for reasons beyond our control, things still go wrong. What is in our control is how we respond: failure is only the end if that’s what we choose.

The weekend of the 2024 British Grand Prix also saw the England men’s football team face a penalty shootout to stay in the Euros. On the race track, victory would give Sir Lewis Hamilton the most wins at a single track ever – but he hadn’t won a Grand Prix since 2021. On the pitch, Mr Bukayo Saka had the chance to add a new chapter to the story of his penalty-taking for England.

“Lewis’ win and Bukayo Saka’s penalty are the mirroring of each other,” says Mr Owen Eastwood, the author of Belonging: The Ancient Code of Togetherness and a performance coach who works with international sports teams. “They beautifully role model that life is not a highlights package or a fairy tale. It’s mostly hard work, and sometimes you just have to grind it out and stick at it.”

When the Milwaukee Bucks’ power forward Mr Giannis Antetokounmpo was asked in an interview during the 2023 NBA play-offs whether his team’s defeat made their season a failure, Antetokounmpo gave an answer that challenges this perspective of losing. “Do you get a promotion every year?” he asked the journalist, before pointing out that his “no” doesn’t make the year’s work a failure.

“Every year you work,” Antetokounmpo said. “You work towards something, towards a goal; it’s not a failure, it’s steps to success… Michael Jordan played 15 years, won six championships. Were the other nine years a failure? There are no failures in sport.”

The idea that resilience to perceived failings is something we develop on our own isn’t helpful. “I’m pushing against the narrative that resilience is an individual trait you either have or you don’t have, and if you haven’t got it, you need to get your act together and go get it,” Eastwood says. “I’ve been in groups where I feel like a lion. I’m completely fearless and resilient because the people around me care about me and I trust them. In other groups I’ve felt like a kitten – vulnerable and stressed – because I didn’t trust the people around me.”

In high school, Michael Jordan, arguably basketball’s MVP of MVPs, failed to make the varsity sophomore team and was offered a place in the junior team instead. It’s a career start that created the ultimate script flip. “I’ve missed over 9,000 shots in my career,” he once said. “I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”

American psychologist Dr Carol Dweck boiled the impact of growth mindset down to “the power of yet” – we may not have a skill yet, but we can do the work needed to acquire it.

“We tend to learn a lot more when we fail than when we succeed,” says Mr Sam Cumming, head of mental health at the UK Sport Institute. “We spend more effort trying to understand what went wrong and what could be better next time. We should do that reflection all the time. When we succeed, we should ask ourselves what was good about it and what could have been even better?”

Experiencing your emotions in all their beautifully charged glory means working through them after the failure but before the performance review. “You have to experience the negative emotions,” Cumming says. “Remember, if we’re talking about failure, we’re probably talking about the loss of something meaningful. It can feel like grieving.”

Mr Michael Johnson, the only male athlete to win gold medals in the 200m and 400m events in the same Olympics, wrote on X last year: “Admitting failure can feel negative, but doesn’t have to be. Failure is temporary and it does not define you. Admitting failure can be beneficial. Masking it can be problematic.”

When Mr Cristiano Ronaldo scored a penalty in Portugal’s shootout that would see the team knock Slovenia out of the 2024 Euros, it happened just 15 minutes after he had missed a penalty in extra time. “Even the strongest people have their [bad] days. I was at rock bottom when the team needed me the most… Sadness at the start is joy at the end,” Ronaldo shared after the match.

When we’re kind to ourselves, we understand that constant success is impossible and so failure is inevitable – a realisation that should encourage us to give up striving for perfectionism. Living up to a perfect ideal can stifle growth, as we avoid taking risks.

Today’s track-and-measure apps mine our workouts for data that divides our performances into algorithmic lines of statistics. It’s a shift in perspective that can make it hard to value our own subjective appraisal. If, after a run, your body tells you it went well, but your stats tell you it wasn’t so good, do you reassess it as a failure?

“Stats are a quantitative measure, but you’ve got the whole other world of qualitative measures,” says Mr Nathan Sears, founder of his own personal and corporate fitness company, and a former athlete who represented Team GB in martial arts and boxing. “Without them, you’re only using half of the picture. [If I could] I would track happiness. What’s the point of doing any of it if you’re not happy?”