After the Whistle: Never Waste a Failure

How do great performers respond to failure without becoming defined by it? In this After the Whistle segment, Zach expands on a powerful lesson shared by Louisville volleyball head coach Dan Meske: “You have to take more from failure than it takes from you.” With references to Nick Saban and another former guest on the podcast, Amy Morin, this episode is designed to help you learn from and respond more effectively to failure.

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Transcript

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Time and time again, one of the biggest questions that I'll get from coaches or parent is this How do I help my athlete or my son or daughter respond better to failure? Now the challenge is that failure will often nudge all of us to question whether or not we're good enough, whether or not we're capable, or whether or not we're cut out for whatever it is that we're pursuing in the first place. And as a result, it's often viewed as this like almost form of poison that we strive to avoid or reduce at all costs. But if you talk to anybody that has been in pursuit of mastery or any form of sustainable excellence, they're gonna tell you many times that failure has been riding shotgun with them throughout the entire journey. So today on the podcast, we're gonna discuss how to never waste a failure and how to respond to it in a way so you don't allow it to define who you are ultimately as a person. Hey coaches and leaders, I got a quick question for you. You spend a lot of time building game plans for those you lead, but when was the last time you built one for yourself? If you're looking to sharpen your leadership skills, strengthen your team culture, or find better ways to support and challenge your athletes in the mental game, I'd love to help. I'm offering a free coaching call where we can talk through your current challenges and create a simple game plan for what might move the needle most for you, your players, and your program. Most coaches I know obsess over developing their team, but they neglect the person in the mirror. This call is a chance to invest in you because a better you is going to produce a better them. And if that sounds helpful, you can grab a time at Callendly.com slash Zach Brandon. That's Callinly.com slash Zach Brandon, or just check the link in the show notes. I'd love to connect and explore how I can best support you. So much of our success and impact in life will be directly related to our ability to navigate inevitable failures and how we choose to not let those moments define us. Now I think this is actually particularly interesting right now because at this time of the year, usually, you always start to see these clips and sound bites emerge on the internet from commencement speeches. You'll hear different leaders, athletes, celebrities, coaches, speakers, all trying to offer some perspective to graduates stepping into a new chapter of their life. And I think one of the themes that almost always emerges is related to failure. Failure will be described as an important component of growth. Sometimes it'll be described as like critical feedback that helps us achieve our goals. I even had talked about this a little bit going all the way back to episode 14, where I shared a soundbite from Derek Jeter's address to the University of Michigan last year, because here's what he shared as it relates to failure. You, me, every one of us has to learn to deal with failure. I wouldn't have had the success without the failures. It is your job to make sure that a speed bump doesn't become a roadblock. Despite it being widely referenced and tons of advice on how to navigate it online, I still think many people struggle immensely with how to actually deal with failure when it shows up. That's why I was really excited in the start of my conversation with Dan Mesky, the head volleyball coach at the University of Louisville, because right out of the gate, when I invited him to reflect a little bit on his first season as a head coach of the program and some of the lessons that he's taken from it, one of the very first things he said pertained to failure. Here's what he shared.

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And um, one of the best things I took from that is like failure, you have to take more from it than it took from you.

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You have to take more from failure than it takes from you. Gosh, that's so good. This is the difference to me between a failure being painful or useful to any of us. And unfortunately, many of us get stuck in the former. Most of us walk around hoping that we can armor ourselves or at least minimize any damage from failure. But what it does is it leaves us very susceptible to, I think, sometimes a bigger problem, the failure to actually learn from it. Now, before we talk about how to effectively learn from it, I think we need to understand, well, why does failure feel so personal to all of us? Part of this is inherent in who we are as just human beings, because we are naturally wired to avoid threat, uncertainty, rejection, uh, any form of pain, anything that in essence threatens our survival as a mere species or within our relation to our tribe. However, failure touches all those things. It's why some people become risk averse, it's why some people stop um stepping into spaces of discomfort, and it's why many will stop trying or not putting forth the same effort or drive that they once did after they encounter setbacks or adversity. Failure oftentimes doesn't just feel like one specific singular outcome, it can become personal for us. However, the goal here isn't to become failure-proof. The goal is to become more skillful at how we move through it and all the discomfort and uncertainty that gets packaged with it. Now, one of my favorite ways to think about this is something that I once heard from Nick Saban. I'm sure others have referenced this as well. But one of the things that he would talk a lot about with his players is to never waste the failure. In other words, make sure that there's never a mistake, an error, or a failure that you don't take a moment to extract the lesson from it. So let's say that you've confronted a failure of some kind, whether it be for yourself or somebody that you lead currently. Here's how I would invite you to kind of help them kind of move through it. Now, one thing to add here, bear in mind what I'm discussing today is more kind of like the bigger picture perspective towards it, not exactly like in the moment hard like reset skills that you can actually use. Um so again, that's kind of a conversation for another episode. But what I want to talk about is that once a failure happens, again, whether that's a mistake, poor performance, missed opportunity, setback, and so on, we're gonna all immediately arrive at, in essence, a fork in the road. And at this fork, we can choose between two different P's. One is perspective and the other one's personalization. Perspective says something like that was a failure or that was a failed attempt. But personalization, on the other hand, basically says that failure, or it basically says that I am a failure. And those two paths lead to very different directions. Perspective allows us to see our failures as feedback or data, which is all, as we know, part of the growth process. But personalization will begin to fuse failure to our identity. It fuses our identity to the outcome. And once outcomes stop being experiences that we've had and they start becoming conclusions about who we are, it can get very difficult to move forward productively. Perspective though creates some distance for us. And the moment you can keep failure in perspective, now you can actually process it productively. That's the next P. Um, so once you get to this fork in the road, my hope is that you choose to give some perspective towards it. Right because then what that now allows you to move forward with is how do you process it instead of emotionally react to it. Now, this is where I think it also ties into um my other most recent guest interview where I I chatted with um Amy Marin and we talked a little bit about her new book, the mental strength playbook. And one of the the practical exercises or tools that she shared in it is something that she calls a victory vault. The conversation kind of centered around uh how can coaches or leaders help instill more confidence in those around them. A victory vault is basically a place where you store evidence, it's where you store proof of your growth, of um successes, of how resilient you've been. And I thought this was a great concept. And I don't know about you all, but one thing I would say with a lot of confidence for myself is that my failure vault is probably significantly bigger than my victory vault in some ways. I've made plenty of mistakes as a coach, as a leader, in communication, as a husband, as a parent, just as a human being. And what I think here is an important distinction is a vault is where we preserve things though that are valuable, but it's not a closet. A closet is where we shove things that we don't want people to see. It's where we hope things stay kind of hidden, like you know, out of sight, out of mind. And I still think a lot of people do exactly that with failure. They suppress it, they hide it, they tuck it into a closet, and then they avoid sometimes revisiting it or even talking about it. But a vault is completely different. A vault preserves the lessons, and I think that's an important shift that we all can make, not treating our failures like things that we're ashamed of, but preserving them for the feedback, the perspective, the resilience, the lessons that come from them. Failure only becomes wasted when we refuse to learn from it. So if you want to start making failure more useful instead of just painful for you, here's a few questions that I think are important to kind of check in with to make sure that you're getting the concrete lesson that's gonna most serve you as you move forward. The first one though is backing up and just making sure that you answer what's within my control. Because I one thing that we know is that one of the fastest ways to just spiral after a setback is when our attention gets consumed entirely on variables that we couldn't influence anyway. That will always make the pain of failure even more challenging for us when our attention goes to something that we really didn't have that much influence over in the first place. Perhaps. But once you're clear on what's in your control, now you can ask yourself, what's this experience taught me? Has it revealed a blind spot, exposed a weakness, maybe helped shape something that you can use or refine as part of your preparation? Um, maybe it's developing a new habit. That's all feedback. And then finally, the third question is what do I want to remember from this moving forward? Or what lesson do I want the future me to carry forward from this experience? So hopefully those are helpful. Those are three kind of just general questions that you can use uh to help you kind of make sure again that you're not wasting any any failures, you're extracting the lessons. Um and again, don't forget to occasionally visit your failure vault. Okay, as we talked about with Amy, I think a success vault is awesome, or a victory vault, I should say. Um, anything that you can do to remind yourself of lessons, and I think this is also where, and I know Dan mentioned this and in at the end of the episode, he kind of talked about like a team mantra that they would use, which is this idea of I either win or I learn. Um, and I've often not been a huge fan of that phrasing, and this is no shade to Dan at all. What I actually find though is that it's really about win or lose, I learn. Because as we've talked about, whether it's a victory vault or a failure vault, there's lessons in both.