Here is an excerpt from an article written by Whitney Johnson for the Harvard Business Review blog. To read the complete article, check out the wealth of free resources, and sign up for a subscription to HBR email alerts, please click here.

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You’ve started a company and it goes belly-up. Or you launched a new product and not only does it fail to sell, customers actually hate it. Or you get fired.

What happens when you dare to dream, make that dream real, and then fail?

There’s the plucky Henry Ford quotation which admittedly, and almost embarrassingly, I have used: “Failure is only the opportunity to begin again more intelligently.” Since Ford was eventually wildly successful, this aphorism does reassure, but it also jauntily skips over the emotional precipice on which we teeter when we fail. No matter how many chirpy quotes I may tweet out, when I fail my initial response is despondency, pessimism, and the feeling that perhaps I need to relocate to another city because I can never show my face in public. Ever. Again. I tend to identify with Margery Eldredge Howell, who said: “There’s dignity in suffering, nobility in pain, but failure is a salted wound that burns and burns again.”

As I have grappled with my own this-just-may-break-me failures, I am increasingly convinced that dreaming must be a process, an engine of experimentation. As we practice innovating we are propelled up a personal learning curve — and we begin to accomplish our dreams. But implicit in daring to disrupt the status quo is daring to fail. As we learn by doing and do by learning something will eventually (and inevitably) not work. As former DARPA official Ken Gabriel said, “An important part of disruption is having the nerve to take on a really big failure.” At this critical juncture in the process of dreaming, we must decide how we will approach failure: Did I fail my way into a black hole? Or is failure a tool that will help me innovate more effectively?

For those inclined toward the latter, consider the following:

[Here is the first of three eminently sensible suggestions.]

1. Acknowledge sadness. When you start a company, launch a new product, or take on a job, there is the fantasy of a simple linear world: you will work hard and your dream will happen. And then it doesn’t work. My whales of fails have ranged from not making cheerleader during high school (mortifying at the time) to bombing a speech in front of hundreds of people (still mortifying). Then there was the experience of being fired and backing a business that imploded. Apart from feeling mortified, I was heartbroken. I had been all-in. I had envisioned a future in which I would achieve a goal, perhaps be hailed as the conquering hero. And then I wasn’t. I’ve learned it is important to grieve. When we sublimate the sadness, we risk losing our passion, an essential lubricant for the engine of innovation.

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I say it’s time we put failure in its proper place. For most of us, the mere prospect of failure is a take-no-prisoners mind game, pushing us to the edge of an emotional cliff, where shame would happily push us over. But in a world in desperate need of innovation, it’s time to bury shame and to see failure for what it is — an opportunity to learn valuable truths and a signal that our start-up, job, product or idea matters, really matters, so much so that we are willing to invest not only our minds, but our hearts. That’s something worth dreaming about.

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Whitney Johnson is a founding partner of Rose Park Advisors, Clayton M. Christensen’s investment firm, and is the author of Dare-Dream-Do: Remarkable Things Happen When You Dare to Dream. To receive an email when she posts, click here. To see other posts, please click here.