500 Words a Week - How do we see our failure?

Too often in S&C we are too afraid to fail. We stick to what’s comfortable, what we have always done, what has been done before us and remain stagnate. In order to better ourselves we must change our thinking toward embracing failing. We must seek it out and put ourselves in situations where we can fail, but we must not look to fail at the expense/ harm of others. A beautiful point brought up in Dr Carol Dweck’s book Mindset, is how we confront failure, when we fail, we can think in terms of two ways:

I have failed

or

I am a failure

By seeing when we have failed for what it is, an action, a single point in time that we can learn from and grow, we are embracing a growth mindset. If when we fail, we immediately see ourselves as a failure, we are going to actively prevent ourselves from feeling/ looking that way again. We won’t try new things or experiment with our work in order to better ourselves for fear of failing, and so remain in a fixed mindset.

Too often we are afraid to fail in S&C for fear of looking like a failure to our peers. I would argue that at times the approval of our peers has now start to come to fruition ahead of the service we provide our athletes. Far too often we can get swayed by online debates between members of the S&C community and we feel we must be in one camp, as a result our athletes get put in one camp. Rather than seeing what is best for our athlete.

When I got my first full time S&C role, I was determined to write the perfect programme and I believed it was going to be the best one around. A few months down the line, one of our boys got a stress fracture in his back. This was perhaps one of the moments that has most impacted me. Sure, we know injuries are multifactorial, especially injuries related to chronic stress/ overuse, however I took this one to heart. Immediately I saw myself as a failure, my perfect programme couldn’t stop this player getting injured. Anytime an athlete said their back was tight or a little sore, I was petrified. It took me awhile to see this failure as a development opportunity. The injury happened, nothing I can do now can change that injury but I can learn from it and make my programme and practice better for the future. I failed, but I’m not a failure.

Expanding on this, we shouldn’t wait for failure to occur for us to assess and change our programme. This should be built into our programme and done at regular intervals. The assessment should be completed with the help of objective data. This is why I’m a big fan of embedded testing, as we can quickly see how athletes are responding to the programme and whether they are improving/ stagnating or getting worse.

“Even in the growth mindset, failure can be a painful experience. But it doesn’t define you. It’s a problem to be faced, dealt with, and learned from” – Dr Carol Dweck

You may have failed, but you aren’t a failure.