Learning From Failure
Failure really is a terrible word. It has such a negative connotation to it. We think of failure and we instantly think something of epic proportions in which we will never climb back out of. It is really easy to build a case against yourself when things don’t go well, to tell yourself that you are mediocore, you don’t belong, or that there is no way you will ever be good enough to get it done.
Here is the thing, failure is important. We need to fail, to mess up, to have things not go the way we planned or wanted because we learn the most during those times. One of my greatest races came during a time when I also felt like one of the biggest failures as an athlete, the 2017 world championships. I went into it with such high expectations of myself and when I fell flat on my face (thanks to being very sick the week of the race) I found myself feeling like such a disappointment and worrying more what others would think of (or rather what I believed they would think of me) during the race that it just kept spiraling. It wasn’t until I pulled myself together and got rid of those thoughts that I was able to finish the race strong. So here I was expecting to have run the 3:20 marathon I had trained for and instead I was walk/jogging an 11 min mile and barely going to make it in 4 hours that felt like such a failure to me. But I learned more about the strength I have inside me on that day than on any sub 3:20 Ironman Marathon day.
To rise above failure takes a lot of strength because in order for failure to be beneficial you have to do one of two things 1) you can’t wallow in it and 2) you can’t dismiss it. If you dismiss your failure as “oh these things happen” well then you aren’t going to learn anything and if you wallow in it then well the same thing happens, you just spiral deeper into a bad trend.
Failure is good for a lot of reasons but the most important being:
It is the opportunity for redirection, it shows you where you shouldn’t be or where you need to head. It allows you to change and make change
It is an opportunity for reevaluation and a chance to come back with stronger and better reasoning.
It is a chance to try again. It is a second chance (or a third, fourth, and fifth) to try again and make improvements.
When you do feel like you fail the best thing to do is first off give yourself some time before you analyze, don’t make decisions that instant because you will make them emotionally and usually with the wrong emotions. Give yourself 24-48 hours to feel all that you need to feel then after that sit down and write out exactly what happened. It is important during that first recap that you don’t analyze anything, just brain dump what you felt like happened get it all out on paper, this allows you to really process what is going on.
Once you’ve done those two things then it is time to start asking yourself some important questions:
How did I prepare for this? Was there something I could have done differently during the preparation? Do I need to work on something specific?
How was my mindset going into the race? Was I too confident? Did I have too high expectations? Etc
How did I react when things started to go wrong?
What could I have done differently going into it? What could I have done differently during? What could I have done differently after?
What were my goals and objectives going into this? Do I need to revise those goals? Did I lose track of my goals?
Do I need to ask for help? Is there something or someone I can learn from?
These are some guideline questions to help guide in analyzing what went wrong. It is also important to talk with someone, your coach for instance, during this time frame. Now it is important that you as the athlete don’t try to shift blame from yourself to your coach and if you are a coach it is important to not shift blame from yourself to the athlete, with failure the only way you learn is if you totally and completely remove any form of blame from the equation.
if you can learn to take failure with grace and as a chance to gain some good personal feedback on what it is that you are doing you will find that eventually failure doesn’t hurt as much and that you make faster and stronger gains in whatever it is you are trying to do. Learning is very exciting turning your failures into learning can be really exciting in the end. For our failures can help us to learn to imagine, hope, and work towards goals that maybe seemed impossible or improbable.
So fail and fail often! It is good for you! It builds strength, resilience and a little bit of character!!! And lastly remember that when you fail you are in good company we’ve all failed many times and most of the time we all get back up so so can you!!