The spirit of competition is something that is in each one of us in one form or another. As much or as little as we understand this part of our inner psyche, the bottom line is simple. Losing sucks.
In the world of strongman, powerlifting, traditional team sports, or even business, there will be on more than one occasion where you will “screw the pooch”. This happens to everyone regardless of if you are competing against other people, other companies, other teams, or just yourself. You will drop the ball and things will not go your way.
There are many ways you can go about reacting to this sort of life event.
You can be sad, feel sorry for yourself, and expect the world and everyone else around you to give a shit enough about your situation to lend a hand.
You can get overly aggressive and mad at the world around you or yourself, break things, throw things, and blow off steam in the most destructive way possible.
You can make excuses and take the whole situation in stride while dodging any sort of blame or possible affiliation with the negative ramifications of failing. Blame the tools, blame the referee, blame your parents for creating this combination of traits you carry around. The key here is to never take responsibility.
Though, after reading all the POSSIBLE ways that you can react to failing in your day to day life, there is only one EFFECTIVE and BENEFICIAL way of acting when it comes to dealing with the inevitable failures and bumps in the road you will be facing throughout your remaining years.
Learn from it.
The only way we can truly grow as humans and as intelligent life forms is to learn and adjust to life. As a baby, we stick our fingers in a cup of coffee or on the stove, you burn your finger, it hurts, then you know not to do that (some of us touched it multiple times, but the point still stands…). We receive information from our environment and out surroundings and we utilize it and learn from it to put ourselves in a better position to succeed in the future.
This struck me right between the eyes last week when I was burning the candle on both ends and did not take the necessary steps to succeed in the gym. I did not have my diet in check, I wasn’t getting enough sleep, and I was worried about other parts of my life that were putting stress on me. My focus was elsewhere and I did not give the workout the respect it needed and it showed.
Below is the footage of the exact point in the workout where I realized that I had screwed up.
So, what did I do? Well, I wrote this blog post about it, but besides that what did I do? Well, I am at the point in my training lifespan to know that bad days happen. I used to let them eat me alive and let them consume my life (Yes, I am very competitive and very fortunate that I can do that), but I know now that is not the best way to go about things. What I did was put pen to paper and write down what I was thinking about the situation. It became blatantly clear what I needed to do…
As you can see, the basic structure of making mistakes or screwing up is essentially the same regardless of the situation. You screw up, you learn, you move on. It is as simple as that.
Utilize the experience to educate yourself on what you can do to become a better person, a better player, a better athlete, a better trainer, a better business man, or a better friend or family member. You need to always have that insatiable thirst for knowledge and live your life forever as a student. There is always something new to learn or some new habit or ritual we can develop in ourselves. Thinking we know everything and thinking that we are masters of our craft will leave us open to stagnation and degradation. If you are not moving forward, you are moving backwards because the world is not waiting around for you.
Treat your mistakes as if they are an educational experience. Take what productive and beneficial parts of the experience with you, toss the rest away, and move on. You will find another pothole to fall into, another order to forget, or another ball to drop. That is inevitable, so do what you can do with the situation at hand and learn from it.
Bring on the mistakes.
Bring on the learning.
Bring on the success.
PS. 99.9 % of the problems we think we have are nothing compared to the problems people have across the world or in our own neighborhoods. People are starving, dying and being blown to pieces in terrorist attacks in what seems like daily occurrences. I do not want my viewers to think that any of the “problems” that we have are worth a second thought on. Just wanted to share that.
Sam Brown
www.SamBrownStrength.com
Looking to change your life and find the strength you know you are capable of?
Email me at Sam@SamBrownStrength.com and we can get started today!