The Role of Failure in Personal Growth: Why an Honest Practice Must Be Able to Fail

By Guglielmo Poli

Most people come to personal work because something did not go the way they hoped. A relationship ended, a career stalled, a habit refused to change, a body stopped cooperating. And yet much of what is sold as “growth” quietly promises the opposite of what brought them there: a life in which things finally stop going wrong.

This article argues something less comfortable and, I think, more useful. The role of failure in personal growth is not incidental. It is structural. Failure is the only moment in which reality tells us, unambiguously, that our model of it was incomplete. A practice that cannot fail cannot teach. A person who cannot afford to fail cannot learn.

We will look at what cognitive science actually says about error, what philosophy of science can teach an inner practice, why “mindset” is not enough, and how all of this shapes the way we work in the Ad Unum path.

Key definitions

Failure as a signal: what the brain does with error

The prediction machine

One of the most influential findings of late-twentieth-century neuroscience came from recordings of dopamine neurons in monkeys. Wolfram Schultz, Peter Dayan and Read Montague showed that these neurons do not simply respond to rewards. They respond to the difference between what was expected and what actually happened (Schultz, Dayan & Montague, 1997). An unexpected reward produces a burst of activity. A fully predicted reward produces almost nothing. A reward that was expected but did not arrive produces a dip.

This “prediction error” signal became a cornerstone of how we model learning, in animals and in machines. The implication is simple and profound: the nervous system learns most from surprise. Where everything goes as planned, very little is updated. Where something goes wrong, the system receives the one piece of information it could not have generated on its own.

An everyday translation

Think of someone who believes, quietly, that people lose interest in them once they get close. For years every relationship seems to confirm it. Then one friend stays. The friendship survives a conflict, a long silence, an awkward apology. That experience is, technically, a failure: a failure of the prediction. And it is precisely that failure that opens the door to a different self-understanding.

Seen this way, many of the moments we call failures are really failures of our models, and those are the moments in which a model can finally change.

A caution against over-reading the science

Prediction-error research is about specific circuits and specific tasks. It does not prove a philosophy of life, and it would be dishonest to present it that way. What it offers is a well-grounded analogy: a learning system needs mismatches in order to learn. That analogy is useful precisely because it is modest.

When mistakes teach, and when they don’t

The popular slogan “we learn from our mistakes” is half true. The research is more precise and more interesting.

Errors plus feedback

In a comprehensive review, Janet Metcalfe concluded that making errors during learning is not harmful, and is often beneficial, provided that corrective feedback follows (Metcalfe, 2017). The classic fear that making a mistake will “burn in” the wrong answer is largely unsupported when the learner then sees the right one. Interestingly, errors made with high confidence and then corrected tend to be remembered especially well: the surprise does the work.

The value of trying and missing

Nate Kornell, Matthew Hays and Robert Bjork showed that even unsuccessful attempts to retrieve an answer, followed by the answer itself, can improve later memory compared with simply studying the answer from the start (Kornell, Hays & Bjork, 2009). The effort of reaching, and not quite arriving, prepares the mind to receive.

Productive failure

In education research, Manu Kapur coined the term productive failure for designs in which learners first attempt problems they are not yet equipped to solve, and only afterwards receive instruction (Kapur, 2008). The initial struggle, and the partial or wrong solutions it generates, turned out to support deeper understanding and better transfer than direct instruction alone in several of his studies.

Note the word design. Productive failure is not the same as leaving people to flounder. It is structured: the problem is chosen with care, the struggle is bounded, and consolidation follows.

Deliberate practice and the edge of competence

Anders Ericsson and colleagues described expert performance as the product of deliberate practice: effortful work aimed specifically at what one cannot yet do, with immediate feedback (Ericsson, Krampe & Tesch-Römer, 1993). Later research has debated how much practice alone explains, but one feature has held up well: improvement lives at the edge where you fail often enough to learn, and succeed often enough to continue.

When failure does not teach

Taken together, these findings also tell us when failure is useless or even harmful:

• When there is no feedback. A mistake that is never recognised as one changes nothing, or reinforces the wrong lesson.
• When the stakes are overwhelming. Under intense threat, attention narrows to protection. People defend rather than examine.
• When the failure is interpreted as identity. “I failed” becomes “I am a failure”, and the information is lost inside the shame.
• When there is no second attempt. Learning needs the chance to try again with the new information.

Any serious approach to growth, whether in a classroom, a therapy room or a practice room, has to build these four conditions in deliberately.

Falsifiability applied to personal growth

Popper’s criterion, briefly

The philosopher Karl Popper proposed that what distinguishes a scientific claim is not that it can be confirmed, but that it could, in principle, be shown to be false (see the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Popper). A theory that can accommodate every possible observation tells us nothing about the world. Its apparent strength is actually a weakness.

Imre Lakatos refined the picture: real research programmes are not abandoned at the first contrary result, but they must remain progressive, meaning that their adjustments lead to new, testable predictions rather than endless excuses (see the SEP entry on Lakatos).

The unfalsifiable practice

Now apply this to the world of wellbeing and self-development. Consider a practice with the following logic:

• If you feel better, the practice worked.
• If you feel nothing, the practice is working on a deeper level.
• If you feel worse, the practice is releasing old blockages.
• If nothing changes after a year, you were not open enough.

Every outcome is a success. Nothing could ever count as evidence that something is not working. From Popper’s perspective, this is not a strong practice; it is an empty one, and, more worryingly, it transfers every failure onto the person who trusted it.

Making a practice honest

The alternative is not to demand laboratory proof for every inner experience. Many valuable things in a human life are not measurable in that way. The alternative is to adopt the spirit of falsifiability:

1. State expectations in advance. What, concretely, do I hope this practice will change in the next eight weeks? Sleep? Reactivity? The quality of my attention to others?
2. Decide what would count as “not working”. Write it down before you begin, when you are not yet invested in the answer.
3. Look honestly at the outcome. Ideally, include someone who knows you and who has no stake in your practice.
4. Adjust, and say so. Change the practice, the dose, the expectation, or stop. All four are legitimate results.

This is how we try to work at the Academy. It is also, in my experience, the single best protection against dependence on teachers, including us. An honest practice gives the student the tools to find out when it is not serving them.

Why a “growth mindset” is not enough

Few ideas about failure have travelled as far as the “growth mindset”: the belief that abilities can be developed, which is supposed to help people respond to setbacks with effort rather than withdrawal.

The idea is attractive, and its core intuition is reasonable. But the evidence invites humility. Two large meta-analyses by Victoria Sisk, Brooke Macnamara and colleagues found that the average relationship between growth mindset and academic achievement was weak, and that the average effect of mindset interventions was also small, with possible benefits concentrated in specific groups such as students at academic risk or from lower-income backgrounds (Sisk et al., 2018).

This matters for anyone who teaches. It suggests that what we believe about failure is less decisive than the conditions in which we fail. You cannot talk someone into a healthy relationship with error. You can, however, design an environment in which errors are visible, feedback is clear, second attempts are normal and nobody is humiliated. Beliefs tend to follow experience more reliably than the other way round.

For a trainer, that is a liberating conclusion. The job is not to install the right attitude. The job is to build the right room.

The social side of error: safety before courage

What teams taught us

Amy Edmondson’s research on work teams introduced the concept of psychological safety: a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking (Edmondson, 1999). In her early studies of hospital teams, she found something that at first looked paradoxical: some of the better-functioning teams reported more errors. The most plausible explanation was not that they made more mistakes, but that they were willing to talk about them.

Where error is punished, error goes underground. It does not disappear; it simply stops being available for learning.

Inside a single person

The same dynamic operates within an individual. Many of us run an inner culture that punishes mistakes more harshly than any manager would. The result is predictable: we stop noticing. We explain away. We change the subject in our own heads.

That is why so much of honest personal growth begins not with discipline but with a kind of inner safety: the capacity to look at what went wrong without collapsing into self-attack. This is not indulgence. It is an epistemic precondition. You cannot learn from a failure you cannot bear to look at.

The group as a laboratory

This is also one reason we value group work in the Academy’s courses. A well-held group is a place where people watch others fail, recover and continue, and discover that the sky did not fall. For many participants, that witnessed experience does more than any explanation.

Error and the One: the Ad Unum reading

Separation as a mismatch

The Ad Unum vision describes a movement from fragmentation toward unity. Within that frame, failure takes on a particular meaning. An error is the point at which our separate, private model of the world bumps into the world as it is. It is a moment of contact.

We often use images from physics to speak about this path: entanglement as a picture of deep connection, fusion as a picture of integration, the One as a picture of wholeness, and the return as a picture of evolution that comes back to its source enriched. I want to be precise about their status. These are analogies, chosen because they are evocative and structurally suggestive. They are not claims that quantum physics proves a spiritual doctrine, and they are not medical claims of any kind.

Used responsibly, the analogy says this: a system that remained perfectly closed, never disturbed by anything outside its own predictions, would never change. Growth, like learning, requires openness to what does not fit. Failure is the form that openness most often takes.

The return is not a straight line

In our framework, the movement toward the One is not a triumphant ascent. It is closer to a spiral: approach, error, correction, return, each time with more of oneself integrated. People who expect the path to be a line are regularly disappointed by it. People who expect a spiral recognise their setbacks as part of the shape.

This is also why we are careful with the language of “healing”. In Ad Unum Energy Healing, as in every practice we teach, the aim is wellbeing, awareness and a better relationship with one’s own experience. It is complementary, never a substitute for medical or psychological care, and nobody who does not feel better has “failed” the practice.

Growth after hardship, handled honestly

Researchers such as Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun have documented what they call posttraumatic growth: positive psychological changes that some people report after struggling with highly challenging life circumstances (Tedeschi & Calhoun, 2004). The concept is valuable, but it comes with two warnings that matter for anyone in a helping role.

• Growth is possible, not obligatory. Nobody owes the world a transformation story in exchange for their suffering.
• Growth and distress can coexist. Reporting growth does not mean the pain has gone.

An honest practice holds both. It does not romanticise failure, and it does not waste it.

A practical protocol for honest failure

What follows is a simple structure I use with students and in my own practice. It borrows from the research above and from years of teaching. It is meant for ordinary setbacks, not for crises; in a crisis, the first step is always to seek appropriate professional support.

1. Name the prediction

Before examining what went wrong, write down what you expected. Be specific. “I expected the conversation to calm things down.” “I expected to feel more centred after four weeks of practice.” Without the prediction, there is no error to learn from, only a vague sense of disappointment.

2. Separate event from identity

Rewrite any sentence about yourself into a sentence about the event. “I’m hopeless at this” becomes “This attempt did not produce what I hoped.” The second sentence contains information. The first contains only pain.

3. Look for the surprise

Ask: what exactly surprised me? The surprise is where the learning lives. Often it is small: a reaction you did not anticipate, a feeling in the body that arrived before the thought, a response from someone else that did not fit your story about them.

4. Get outside feedback

Error without feedback teaches little. Ask one person you trust what they observed. In a course, this is the role of the group and the teacher. On your own, a journal reread after a week can serve as a surprisingly honest second voice.

5. Make one adjustment, and one only

Change a single variable: timing, intensity, context, expectation. Changing everything at once makes it impossible to know what helped.

6. Try again, and set a date to review

Schedule the second attempt and the next review. This is the step most people skip, and it is the one that turns a failure into a learning cycle rather than a memory.

A short example

A participant in one of our groups (details changed) began a daily practice hoping to feel calmer at work. After a month, she felt no calmer; if anything, she noticed her irritation more. Her first interpretation was that she was “doing it wrong”. Working through the protocol, she noticed that the surprise was not the irritation itself, but how early she now noticed it: minutes before it escalated, rather than afterwards. The practice had not failed to calm her; her original prediction had simply measured the wrong thing. She adjusted the expectation, not the practice, and set a new review date. That is what an honest practice looks like from the inside.

What this means for teachers and trainers

For those of us who teach, the role of failure in personal growth carries a responsibility. We are tempted to present our methods at their best, to curate success stories, to explain away what did not work. Every one of those temptations makes the method less learnable for our students.

An anti-dogmatic teacher does three things. First, they tell students in advance what a practice can and cannot be expected to do. Second, they create conditions in which reporting “nothing happened” or “it made things worse” is as welcome as reporting a breakthrough. Third, they are willing to change their own teaching in response. A teacher who never publicly corrects themselves is, in effect, teaching that correction is shameful.

This is not a weakness of a serious tradition. It is its immune system.

Conclusion: the dignity of being wrong

There is a quiet dignity in being able to say “I was wrong”, and an even deeper one in being able to say “this practice, which I love, did not do what I hoped here.” Both statements keep us in contact with reality. Both leave the door open for the next attempt.

If growth is a movement toward wholeness, then failure is not a detour from that movement. It is one of the main ways reality reaches us. The task is not to fail less, but to fail in conditions where failure can speak, and to become the kind of person, and build the kind of community, that is able to listen.

If you would like to explore this way of working in practice, the Personal Growth pillar and the Ad Unum Experience are good places to begin.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the role of failure in personal growth?

Failure is the signal that an expectation did not match reality. When it is noticed without shame and examined honestly, that mismatch becomes information, and information is what allows a person to update beliefs, habits and ways of relating. Growth without failure is usually growth that has not been tested.

Does research show that we learn from mistakes?

Yes, under specific conditions. Reviews of the learning literature show that errors followed by corrective feedback improve retention, and that even unsuccessful attempts to retrieve an answer can enhance later learning. Errors made without feedback, or under strong threat, help much less.

What does falsifiability have to do with self-development?

A practice that can explain every outcome as success cannot learn anything. Applying the spirit of falsifiability means stating in advance what you expect a practice to change, noticing honestly when it does not, and adjusting. It is a safeguard against self-deception and against dependence on teachers.

Is a growth mindset enough to turn failure into growth?

Not on its own. Large meta-analyses have found only weak average links between growth mindset and academic achievement. Beliefs about ability matter less than concrete conditions: clear feedback, psychological safety, the chance to try again, and time.

What is “productive failure”?

It is an instructional design, described by Manu Kapur, in which learners first attempt problems they cannot yet fully solve and receive instruction afterwards. The bounded struggle prepares them to understand the solution more deeply. The key word is design: the struggle is intentional and followed by consolidation.

How does Ad Unum approach failure and error?

Ad Unum treats error as part of the path toward unity rather than as evidence of personal inadequacy. Practices are offered as experiences to be tested in one’s own life, with honest reflection on what changes and what does not, and never as promises of guaranteed results.

Can energy practices replace therapy after a painful failure?

No. Ad Unum practices are wellbeing and awareness practices. They can complement, but never replace, medical or psychological care. Anyone struggling with persistent distress after a loss or failure should seek qualified professional support.

Sources

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2. Metcalfe, J. (2017). Learning from errors. Annual Review of Psychology, 68, 465–489. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-010416-044022
3. Kornell, N., Hays, M. J., & Bjork, R. A. (2009). Unsuccessful retrieval attempts enhance subsequent learning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 35(4), 989–998. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0015729
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7. Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383. https://doi.org/10.2307/2666999
8. Tedeschi, R. G., & Calhoun, L. G. (2004). Posttraumatic growth: Conceptual foundations and empirical evidence. Psychological Inquiry, 15(1), 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327965pli1501_01
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This article is for educational and wellbeing purposes. It does not provide medical or psychological advice, and the practices described are complementary to, never a substitute for, professional care.

Guglielmo Poli
Director of Reconnective Academy International
Author of Consciousness and Healing
Founder of Ad Unum Experience