Failure is not the end. It’s the beginning.
In this New York Times Athletic article (no cost, but need to create a free NY Times login), the journalist interviewed five youth sports coaches who were all once professional athletes (Jenks, 2026). The interviews consisted of one question, “What’s the one thing you wish kids knew about the mental side of sports?” The journalist said, “I heard one word over and over again.” Ask your students to guess the word.
This example will work when covering emotion, therapy, or even the first day of class. Better yet, cover it on the first day of class and then revisit it when you cover emotion and again when you cover therapy.
The word was “failure.”
Drew Stanton, who spent 14 years as an NFL quarterback, said,
We’re apprehensive to fail because we think the short-term failure is going to stay.
That’s what I talk to my kids about: “Look, I’m going to try to make this uncomfortable for you.”
Our motto last year was “seek discomfort.”
You only grow when you get outside your comfort zone, and that’s mentally, physically and emotionally. When you push past that threshold, you’re like: Oh, I’m capable of doing that. But you only find that when you take those risks and are not worried about messing up.
I encourage people to make mistakes.
You’ll one day say: “That failure I had to endure sucked, but it made me better.”
What an important message for kids—and college students—to hear.
On the first day of class, share Stanton’s words with your students. Describe the safeguards you have in place so that students can take risk without tanking their grade in your course. For example, do you allow students to submit assignments early for comment and revision? Does a better score on the comprehensive final exam replace all unit exams?
If you have an example of a time when you failed, but became better for it, share it with your students. In college, I took Theories of Sociology. On the first exam, I got a D-. That was a new experience! The exams in that course were all essays, and I learned that my bullet points weren’t going to cut it. On the next exam, my answers expanded from bullet points to short answers. I was now up to a C. I kept working at studying and writing. For the comprehensive final exam, I took the entire two hours and was the last to leave. I finished the course with either a B+ or an A-. More importantly, I can now say—quoting Drew Stanton, “That failure I had to endure sucked, but it made me better.”
In the emotion chapter, describe five emotion regulation strategies: situation selection, situation modification, attentional deployment, cognitive change, and response modulation (McRae & Gross, 2020). Revisit Stanton’s quote, and ask your students which emotion regulation strategy best fits Stanton’s advice to his players and why.
Lastly, in the therapy chapter, when covering cognitive behavioral therapy, describe cognitive reframing (or cognitive restructuring, whichever term you prefer) (Mennin et al., 2013). Again, revisit Drew Stanton’s quote as an example of cognitive reframing. Failure does not mean that you are a failure. It means that you have not mastered this. Yet. You have work to do.
References
Jenks, J. (2026, September 11). One thing former pro athletes wish kids knew about the mental side of sports. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/7581610/2026/09/11/youth-sports-pro-athletes-advice/
McRae, K., & Gross, J. J. (2020). Emotion regulation. Emotion, 20(1), 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0000703
Mennin, D. S., Ellard, K. K., Fresco, D. M., & Gross, J. J. (2013). United we stand: Emphasizing commonalities across cognitive-behavioral therapies. Behavior Therapy, 44(2), 234–248. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.beth.2013.02.004
*Featured image created by Claude.