When You Aren’t Ready to Learn, Failure is Just Failure
It’s common to hear parents and coaches tell young athletes after they lose that there’s no such thing as failure, only learning. Of course, this sounds good, but it isn’t a factual statement. The reality is when you aren’t ready to learn, failure is just failure.
When an athlete fails by making the same exact mistake they made previously, something isn’t clicking. Furthermore, if they keep making that same mistake, they aren’t ready to learn. At this point, failure is a habit. Indeed, something must change or that habit will remain.
So, the question is what must change in an athlete who repeatedly makes the same mistake to help them learn? It’s their mindset.
The Mindset Change Athletes Need to Learn from Failure
Making the same mistake over and over is obviously a mental mistake. One so prevalent that psychologist have given it a fancy name: inhibitory control. Inhibitory control describes one’s ability to keep themselves from choosing a habit when a better behavior is available. Consequently, you must develop inhibitory control to learn from failure.
So, if an athlete is not learning from their failures, you must ask why they aren’t choosing better behaviors that facilitate the process of learning. Furthermore, for their behaviors to facilitate the process of learning, they must learn to question their habits.
Athletes who learn from failure force themselves to choose better, non-instinctive behaviors over less effective habits. However, everyone is born with a temptation to select the instinctive, obvious behaviors that form their habits. Especially when they have done something a certain way habitually in the past.
Therefore, learning how to exhibit inhibitory control is a skill not a talent. In other words, no one is born with a talent that makes them automatically good at inhibitory control. It’s something athletes must develop through practice, and this practice starts with questioning their habits using the strategic mindset.
This starts with the practice of asking metacognition questions as the athlete reviews video of their performances. Questions such as:
- What are the things I do because that’s the way I’ve always done it?
- Is there a way to make a small change so I can do it even better?
- How else can I do this by taking a completely different approach?
- How can I be more effective in my preparation before I even start?
- How can I keep track of how effective my approach is going forward?
These questions are only examples of metacognition questions, as there are many others that athletes can practice. The point of a metacognition question is to make it a practice to think about how you think and then use what you learn to improve your thinking. When you improve how you think, you can eliminate repeat mistakes.
This is the best way to help athletes prepare to learn from failure. In summary, this can only be done by using:
- Video review
- Metacognition questioning
- Inhibitory control
- Strategic Mindset