 |
Issue #39: August 30, 2004
To our readers:
The Olympic Games are a treasure-trove of life lessons. Especially for anyone who harbors the mistaken notion that champions don't make huge blunders; that winners never cover themselves in embarrassment and shame; that real winners are perfect.
Case in point is Paul Hamm, the 2004 gold medalist in men's all-around gymnastics. While other gymnasts tried with varying degrees of success to "stick" their vault landings and make not even a slight step backward, forward, or to the side, Paul Hamm actually fell down. His 9.137 score dropped him to a mind-numbing 12th place in the standings. The announcers trumpeted, "He's not going to be an Olympic Champion!", "He's thinking about the vault; he'll play it over and over," "It's a disaster", "Shocking!" and "You can't fall like that and win an Olympic Gold!"
That hurts. A Romanian gymnast made a 9.737 on the very same vault Hamm had just flubbed. Ouch. Sounds like a good time to go hide himself in a closet and cry. Hamm didn't do that. "In one of the most amazing comebacks in Olympic history, Hamm performed the two most spectacular routines of his career Wednesday to win the gold medal by the closest margin ever in the event," according to an Associated Press article.
|
 |
There are three important lessons here: 1) It is possible to come back from a humiliating defeat, 2) nobody is perfect, and 3) the only loser is the one who lets a loss keep her or him from doing her best work ever.
The only people who "never" make mistakes are those who refuse to make a decision, state an opinion, create something new, take a bold approach--people who refrain from doing possibly great things for fear of doing wrong things.
Last month's Brief Tips preached the importance of coming clean about errors, mistakes, bad judgments. This month we'll look at the vital next step: moving on after facing the music.
Three Tips for Moving on From Olympic-sized Failures to Doing Your Best Work Ever
1. Give yourself an appropriate amount of time to wallow in your feelings of failure, humiliation, embarrassment.
Moving on from failure doesn't necessarily mean you won't endure bad feelings. Sometimes you need to feel bad because you've done something remarkably stupid or thoughtless, or you've failed to do your homework and a project has suffered because of it. It's appropriate to feel bad about those failures. Miserable feelings are often a necessary part of the learning process -- they can motivate you to do better in the future. Feel the feelings, milk them for wisdom, and then let them go. For Paul Hamm, it was a matter of minutes before he had to move on. Sometimes that's all the time you can give yourself because you're in the middle of a project or facing a deadline.
|
|
2. Shift your focus from your feelings--as bad as they are--to what you can learn from your foul-up.
You've felt your feelings, now it's time to think. Identify where you went wrong, what you left out, how you took the wrong track. Determine how you can avoid similar missteps in the future, and get back to doing your best work.
3. When the uncomfortable feelings return, let them fuel your better performance.
When uncomfortable feelings push their way back into your consciousness, use them as the fuel that focuses your behavior on better performance. Let those feelings be your cue to focus on the here and now. Concentrate on your task at hand, and as you take the steps necessary to perform that task you'll replace the bad feelings with the pleasure and satisfaction of doing a good job. In this case, the best therapy is performing well, which happens in the here and now, not in reliving the past.
It's safe to assume Paul Hamm suffered under the weight of miserable feelings of failure and humiliation after his fall. It's also clear he put those feelings aside and concentrated on the task at hand as he performed his two final routines and garnered some of the highest scores of his career. You can accomplish the same feat in your own career.
|
|