Dr. Melisa Buie is the co-author of Faceplant: FREE Yourself From Failure’s Funk (Practical Inspiration Publishing), and a speaker, facilitator, and organizational strategist with 30+ years of experience in industry, government and academia.
Failure is inevitable.
Not the sanitized Silicon Valley kind where founders wear their bankruptcy like a badge of honor, but the real kind, the gut-punch that makes you question your capability, your judgement, and sometimes your worth. If you’re a woman climbing the career ladder, you’ve almost certainly felt it.
Failure doesn’t just sting, it sends us into what we call the funk. A gravity-like pull of blame, shame, anxiety and fear that drags us away from the one thing that would actually help: learning from what happened.
Why Failure Hits Women Differently
The funk isn’t gender-neutral. Research consistently shows that women tend to internalize failure, attributing setbacks to a lack of ability, with thoughts like “I’m not smart enough” or “I’m not cut out for this,” while men more often point to external factors like bad timing or insufficient resources. That internal narrative compounds over time, quietly narrowing the risks we take and the ambitions we voice.
For women of colour, the weight is heavier still. Roughly 40% are “only” – the sole person of their race or gender in the room. Every failure feels like it carries the weight of representation, amplifying shame and isolation when connection is what you need most.
Layer on a culture that celebrates winners and forgets everyone else, and it’s no wonder so many talented women develop an avoidance strategy: if you don’t try, you can’t fail. Safe, perhaps, but surviving is not thriving.
Your Brain on Failure
Here’s what makes the funk so powerful: failure triggers the amygdala, the ancient, reactive part of the brain designed to keep us alive. It doesn’t distinguish between a sabre-toothed tiger and a botched presentation. Fight, flight, freeze, fawn … the response fires before the prefrontal cortex, the seat of logic and planning, can even engage. Your brain has hijacked you into autopilot, an auto-response.
The good news? Through neuroplasticity, we can build new neural pathways that interrupt this response. Every time we deliberately pause, reflect and choose differently, we strengthen those pathways. It’s a practice, not a one-time fix and it starts with a framework: FREE.
The FREE Model: A Practical Path Through Failure
The FREE model, Focus, Reflect, Explore, Engage, is rooted in the Japanese practice of hansei, or honest self-reflection with a commitment to improvement. It moves you from the emotional wreckage of a setback to genuine learning, one deliberate step at a time.
Focus. When failure hits, our instinct is to look away, scroll, distract, deflect. Focusing means pressing pause on the amygdala’s alarm and turning toward the situation with curiosity rather than judgement. What actually happened? What are the facts, stripped of the emotional narrative? Sitting with discomfort takes courage, but it is the essential first step.
Reflect. This is the engine of the model and the step most of us skip. Reflection is not rumination, not replaying the failure on a loop while beating yourself up. True reflection asks: what am I feeling? what was in my control / not in my control? What assumptions did I make? Studies show we retain 90% of what we practice and reflect on, compared with just 10% of what we passively absorb. Reflection is where the real learning lives.
Explore. With clarity from reflection, we can widen the solution space, investigate experimenting with different approaches, seeking challenging conversations, expanding our perspectives. Exploration asks: What would I do differently? Exploration prepares a growth mindset into action and reminds us that one failure does not equal one fixed outcome.
Engage. Learning without action is theory. Engaging means stepping back into the arena with new insight and trying again, committing to improvement, not perfection. Each cycle builds a failure immune system: a growing body of evidence that you can do hard things, recover and move forward.
The Real Leadership Skill
Self-compassion is the thread running through every step of FREE – not the soft, let-yourself-off-the-hook kind, but the fierce kind that says: I am human, failure is part of the deal, and I refuse to let it define me. Research shows that self-compassion triggers a growth mindset, making us more willing to study longer, work harder and try again.
The leaders who inspire us most weren’t forged in unbroken success. They were forged in crucible moments, failures they had the courage to face, examine and learn from. The funk is real, but it doesn’t have to be final.
