So, you failed. It’s natural. It happens. Success tends to lie at the top of a mountain of failures, and you’ll need to climb up to reach it.

What matters is not the scale of your failure, but how you respond to it. It’s tempting to wallow and spiral, declaring yourself defeated and deciding you’ll never move on. We don’t need to tell you that this reaction isn’t ideal. Instead, it’s best to keep going. Not to ignore the mess-up and pretend it didn’t happen, but to acknowledge where you went wrong and use that knowledge to grow and stride onwards.

That might seem easier said than done, though. So how exactly do we use our failures as climbing rungs rather than weights that drag us down?

“How we cope with failure could be the difference between our ultimate success or failure,” Fiona Harrold, a top executive coach, business mentor, consultant and author of Be Your Own Life Coach, tells Stylist. “Life becomes very tough if we struggle with setbacks and can’t move on from disappointment. In 25 years of coaching, I’ve seen people diminished by failure, living a reduced life because, in one instance, they never recovered from a bankruptcy ten years previously. Being able to bounce back from failure is a must in life.”

Below, Harrold shares her ‘three P’ approach to rebounding from a dip.

How the ‘3 P’ method could help you bounce back from failure