Setbacks suck.
It's inevitable we will face a setback during our pursuits. Be it a job-layoff, injury, divorce, failed business, embarrassing fumble, or something else - it's a matter of fact that we will come short of our expectations in life.
It hurts, and often carries a level of shame with it. We can't believe we did that.
But how do we at least get something out of it?
"Resilience is lost with unprocessed failures," - Hap Davis, Canadian national swim team psychologist
In 2004, Davis and researchers mapped the Canadian swimmers who failed in the trials to qualify for the Olympics. The swimmers watched replays of their race while their brands were scanned with imaging.
What's not surprising is that as the swimmers watched their loss - potentially swim career-ending loss - the areas of the brain for deep emotional pain and distress were lit up.
What is surprising is that the area of their brains for premotor cortex (movement) showed a decrease in signaling, meaning that while going through immense emotional pain replaying the loss, the athletes felt a sense of lethargy in their arms and legs - which impacted their motivation to get back to work in the pool.
Any one of us can relate to the feeling of having no desire to try again after a crushing defeat.
What's interesting is what happened next.
Davis and the team tried an experiment with the swimmers to see if they could disrupt this pattern.
They made all the swimmers watch the race again but instead of simply being "fans in the stands" viewing the face, they were asked to:
- Evaluate their race,
- Diagnose key points where their technique got off
- List what they do differently next time, and
- Treat the viewing like a football team would a post-game film session in preparation for the next week.
(This is one reason I named my leadership skills email The Film Room, which you can join here.)
Not only did the brain scans this time show less emotional distress activation, their premotor cortexes were lit up.
The swimmers were motivated to get in the water and work on what they learned watching film.
This experiment led to others proving that our ability to bounce back and improve comes down to our commitment to critically reviewing our missteps.
It's common to feel rushed to go again without taking the time to replay what you did wrong in the first place. None of us like the feeling of replaying our mistakes (emotional distress) - it just doesn't feel good.
But when we take the time to critically review the steps, identify where we got off and what we'd do differently next time, we can actually create momentum toward our next attempt.
It's not "woah is me, here we go again."
It's more of a "heck yea, let's go again."
Mistakes are inevitable.
But when we build a practice of reviewing those mistakes critically, we can strengthen our resilience and speed up our growth and determination to overcome it in our next attempt.
Don't let what knocked you down once keep you there. Learn and get back to competing.
