Three Practice Elements Athletes Need to Learn from Failure
The best way to help athletes learn from failure is to start with how they practice. Moreover, the best way to do this is to incorporate the following three elements into the athlete’s practice process.
1) Video review
Most athletes will only review video when they do something well. Often, they will only review the video of their mistakes if a coach deliberately sits them down and plays the video directly for them. Therefore, this is what coaches must do by making video review an intentional part of their practice schedule.
Football coaches are known for being masters of video review. Typically, the best football coaches review every play, every player, every practice, and every game every day. Then they take what they learn in those videos and transfer that learning to their athletes.
While this may seem extreme, I suggest coaches in other sports consider the science behind why this extreme method of video review works. This science starts with the research on self-efficacy pioneered by psychologist Albert Bandura.
Bandura defines self-efficacy as the exercise of control over things that affect your life. I like to describe self-efficacy as the mindset you use to control your destiny.
Bandura’s research shows that higher levels of self-efficacy equate to higher levels of effort and belief in that effort producing results. Moreover, depending on the context, self-efficacy can either go up or down. For example, an athlete who plays basketball can have high self-efficacy on defense and low self-efficacy on offense. Or a wrestler can have high self-efficacy scoring with takedowns, but low self-efficacy escaping when on bottom.
Because self-efficacy has a direct correlation with effort and belief, it also has a direct correlation with results. In sports, seeing is believing. What’s more, belief leads to effort and this combination is what increases self-efficacy. Correspondingly, the first step to learning from failure is using video review to get athletes to believe.
Specifically, athletes must use video review to believe two things:
- There are things under their control that can make them better by using muscle memory to be more accurate, faster, and efficient.
- They can turn what they see on video from a mental model into a skill they can master.
2) Inhibitory Control
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. Moreover, this particular type of habit has a name psychologist call inhibitory control.
Inhibitory control describes one’s ability (or lack thereof) to stop choosing a behavior when a better behavior is available. Consequently, athletes must develop inhibitory control to learn from failure.
There is always a temptation to select the instinctive, obvious behavior. Especially when you have done something a certain way multiple times 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 you must develop through practice, and this practice starts with questioning your habits using the strategic mindset.
3) Strategic Mindset
The strategic mindset is a mindset that allows one to identify the levers of performance improvement. What’s more, those with the strategic mindset can see the “why” behind those levers as well as use that “why” to recognize and overcome flaws in performance.
Research suggests that those who employ a strategic mindset make more progress towards their goals than those who don’t. The research concludes with the following summation:
Our three studies pointed toward the role of a strategic mindset. Across the three studies and 864 participants, this mindset predicted people’s tendency to generate and apply metacognitive strategies as they pursued challenging goals. Moreover, the more people reported employing such strategic behavior during goal pursuit, the more progress they actually made toward achieving their goals across different domains of life. These included students’ college grade point averages (Study 1), adults’ professional, educational, health, and fitness goals (Study 2), and performance on a novel task (Study 3). Thus, as we hypothesized, a strategic mindset indirectly predicted goal achievement.
In addition to this conclusion, I think it’s important to note the types of questions those with the strategic mindset ask themselves. The research specifically points to one’s ability to question themselves as a key indicator of having a strategic mindset. Furthermore, the research also suggest that people can be taught how to ask themselves questions and in turn learn to apply the strategic mindset.
Within the notes of the research study, I found 7 specific questions those with the strategic mindset used to improve their performance. Without doubt, these questions are not an end all be all list. They only represent a type of question. Metacognition questions to be exact. Metacognition is when you think about how you think and then use what you learn to improve your thinking.
In short, these metacognition questions facilitate the process of learning, whether it’s learning after a failure or a success. I recommend all athletes keep this list as a reference. Having a primer list of questions to help an athlete think about how they can get better is priceless. Especially when stuck in a performance plateau or when facing a decrease in performance.
- What can I do that’s within my control to improve?
- Is there a way to make a small change so I can do this even better?
- How else can I do this by taking a completely different approach?
- What can I do that’s within my control to help myself master the concepts giving me the most trouble?
- How can I be more effective in my preparation or execution?
- How can I keep track of how effective my approach is going forward?
- What can I do differently right now that will help me in the future?