Let's Talk About Failure

Welcome to the third post of The Mindful Athlete. This installment will consist of two parts associated with each other. The topic of concern is failure. When someone thinks of the definition of failure, they may think about not succeeding or doing poorly. However, the best thing about failure is that it's never always negative. Failure is a fundamental part of life. Everyone fails no matter who you are or what your experience is. Professional athletes fail every day of their lives. What separates them is how they deal with it. The way I see it there are two different types of people. It goes back to the classic question of “Is a glass filled half full or half empty.” Perspective is everything when it comes to failing. Let’s take baseball for example. Failure is built into the support, as a hitter you're going to fail more times than you succeed. That’s just how the game works. But as mentioned before, the separator is how someone is able to look back and think about where they went wrong. The better athlete is going to look and learn from their mistakes rather than get frustrated by them. It’s easy to get angry and frustrated but it's difficult to remain calm and composed. To succeed it requires failure, so get used to it.