Week 2 Part 1 - Failure
Let's Talk About Failure
Welcome to the third post of The Mindful Athlete. This installment will consist of two parts associated with each other. The topic of concern is failure. When someone thinks of the definition of failure, they may think about not succeeding or doing poorly. However, the best thing about failure is that it's never always negative. Failure is a fundamental part of life. Everyone fails no matter who you are or what your experience is. Professional athletes fail every day of their lives. What separates them is how they deal with it. The way I see it there are two different types of people. It goes back to the classic question of “Is a glass filled half full or half empty.” Perspective is everything when it comes to failing. Let’s take baseball for example. Failure is built into the support, as a hitter you're going to fail more times than you succeed. That’s just how the game works. But as mentioned before, the separator is how someone is able to look back and think about where they went wrong. The better athlete is going to look and learn from their mistakes rather than get frustrated by them. It’s easy to get angry and frustrated but it's difficult to remain calm and composed. To succeed it requires failure, so get used to it.
Week 2 Part 2 - Failure
How Can We Handle Failing?
In the second part on the topic of failure, let's talk about some ways to deal with it. As mentioned before, failure is a big part of our lives. It teaches us valuable lessons. There's an adage that says “If you're not winning, you're learning.” When we fail, we need to look for how we could have improved and what we could have done to change the outcome. You can’t change the outcome of failure, you can only build from it to succeed next time. Soon enough when you are able to understand your failure like the back of your hand, you can become successful. In my life, I’ve learned that the best way to handle failure is to have a short term memory. In the darkest parts of my baseball career, I tried to think way too hard. I put so much pressure on myself to succeed and was scrambling to fix all the wrongdoing. But that’s just not how it works. I’ve realized and I am still understanding that I am going to fail. I’m going to have bad days, but it's how I can bounce back and come back the next day even better is where I can make a difference. Instead of getting frustrated with a bad at bat, I look back at what I could have done differently and move on from it. I try my best to not let it affect the rest of the game. You never know if you're in a bad head space and all of a sudden the whole game is on your shoulders to make the last play on defense. Sports are a great way to learn about ourselves and how we handle adversity. The great athletes are able to handle adversity the best and that's what makes them so great.