How to take action to change the role failure plays in your life. In this episode we provide practical guidance on concrete failure-related steps that start with you: from writing your CV of failures to finding a mentor (or a mentee) and making and testing out an alternative career plan. We conclude with contributors’ answers to the question ‘what does failure mean to you?’.

Overcoming a Sense of Academic Failure

What to do About Failure: Personal Actions.

Many of us have phases where we have no idea what we’re doing, or everything feels like it’s going wrong: that we are failing, or even that we are failures. Sometimes such phases feel less like phases than a permanent default. And often we assume – wrongly – that no one else ever feels the same. This is an initiative intended to help make it OK to think and talk about failure. It includes five podcasts and a workbook. Find out more about the contributors, download the workbook, and give feedback at http://www.careers.ox.ac.uk/overcoming-failure/.