It’s easy for us to describe the lofty goal of attaining failure immunity, but getting there is another matter. Here’s an exercise to help you do just that—the failure reframe. Failure is the raw material of success, and the failure reframe is a process of converting that raw material into real growth. It’s a simple three-step exercise:

1. Log your failures.

1. Categorize your failures.

1. Identify growth insights.

I felt embarrassed and afraid that my colleagues wouldn’t keep me on the research team. My thoughts spiraled out to what I would do next, after dropping out of graduate school. This unhelpful reaction points to why each of us must learn how to take a deep breath, think again, and hypothesize anew. That simple self-management task is part of the science of failing well.

Note that healthy attributions about failure not only stay balanced and rational, they also take account of the ways—small or large—that you may have contributed to what happened. Maybe you didn’t prepare sufficiently for the interview. This is not to beat yourself up or wallow in shame. Quite the contrary; it’s about developing the self-awareness and confidence to keep learning, making whatever changes you need so as to do better next time. Each of us is a fallible human being, living and working with other fallible human beings. Even if we work to overcome our emotional aversion to failure, failing effectively isn’t automatic. We also need help to reduce the confusion created by the glib talk about failure that is especially rampant in conversations on entrepreneurship.

You didn’t have to suffer embarrassment or worse. Does this mean we’re able to look more dispassionately at near misses than at actual failures and are thus more able to learn from them? A growing body of research—some of which I’ve contributed to—explores this idea. What you can take away from this research is that framing matters. For instance, how did you think about that close call? Did you see it as a failure (a miss that almost happened) or as a success (a good catch)? If you’ve framed the close call as a success, you’re more likely to tell your colleagues or family about it, making all of you more able to learn from it.

Ironically, as Cohen’s story illustrates, a learning frame is not only healthier, it’s also more rational than a performance frame. It’s more in tune with the uncertainty and constant challenges found in any life or job. We can’t shield ourselves from disappointments and failures. But we can learn healthy, productive responses to setbacks and accomplishments alike.