What does failure feel like, and what happens when you sit with it? This episode explores why it matters that we acknowledge our feelings of failure if and when they arise, not least in academia. We describe how this initiative came about, and provide a sequence of exercises that may help you investigate what you’re feeling and why, and what changes when you accept the feeling. We hear from contributors at many phases in their (outwardly highly successful) careers who have experienced objective and/or subjective failures and have developed varied ways of responding to them. Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/