OK, so we know that when you’re already feeling rubbish about your career, ‘failure’ is not a word you want to think about. But stay with us. Having a look back at where things have gone wrong can be extremely beneficial.

“In 2016, Professor Johannes Haushofer published a CV with a difference,” explains Kahn. “Instead of listing all his achievements and publications he listed all his rejections, all the funding he did not receive, all the projects that had failed. He did this to balance the visibility of failure. Most of the things that don’t go well occur out of sight; we don’t talk about the things that haven’t gone to plan. This work received a huge amount of praise and attention; Haushofer joked that it got more attention than his full body of other academic work. But his action caught on because it spoke to our relationship to failure and the need to revisit it.

“We all fail and feel that we could have done better. Spending time thinking about your own failures and what you learned can help you get unstuck, eg by recognising unhelpful patterns of behaviour and noting the way in which you decided to work differently as a result of the failure.”

Kahn suggests asking yourself the following questions:

What did I learn about myself when this failed?
What do I understand better about my strengths and where do I need to develop?
What action did the failure inspire?
Did this failure make me rethink my role?
Could I reinvent myself because of these failures?

Feeling stuck at work? Try these 4 steps to break free and move forward