Have you ever not had a result you didn’t expect? How did you respond?
One weekend my family and I took our oldest son to a regional Taekwondo tournament in Ohio. This was a brand-new experience for him. Previously he performed well in a smaller local tournament.
Let me explain how this tournament works. During the tournament athletes are grouped by their belt color to compete in both proper form technique and then they spar one another. Imagine the end of Karate Kid without the contact and you have a picture of what sparring looks like. In this tournament there were six people competing for this belt level. 
Before beginning my encouragement to him was to give his best which he did. When the competition concluded they learned their ranking. In sparring he earned a bronze medal while in form he did not earn a medal.
Although I was proud of him for doing his best, the tears flowing down his face demonstrated his devastation. On one level I was glad he cared enough to be upset because he is a pretty light-hearted young man and not overly competitive naturally. While the tears flowed I briefly comforted him and then walked away to allow my wife to console him and provide me with a moment to think of what to say.
Helping Him Process His Failure
This was an important moment and I wanted to do my best to get it right. As I saw it I had a few options of how to handle the situation:
- I could blame the judges and tell my son they were bad and he really did much better.
- I could unintentionally encourage his sadness and feed it to the point he wallowed in self-pity the rest of the day.
- I could show not empathy and say, “suck it up and get over it.”
Two Responses
What came to me was another option. I took this as an opportunity to encourage him to see how he could respond to failure. I tried to be as gentle as I could empathizing with the fact it did not feel good to lose and telling him I was glad he cared. Then I told him he had two options:
- Give up and stop trying
- Use this as motivation to learn and continue to grow and get better.
Thankfully he responded by stating that giving up was not an option and that he would keep trying to improve.
Author Maxwell Maltz in his book Psycho-Cybernetics states:
“When you thoroughly accept that you are not your mistakes, you are freed to acknowledge them, learn from them, set them aside, and move on from them without being mired in them.”
I don’t know about you, but I have to remind myself of the same options I gave my son when I fail. Will I give up and think I am a failure because I failed or will I look at it, learn from it and grow? What about you? What helps you respond positively to failure and not be “mired in them”? If you found this helpful for you leading yourself or others please share it. Lead well.
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