Learning from Loss

In our ruthlessly competitive culture, there is a huge premium on winning. Unfortunately, there are some pretty obvious negative consequences to this emphasis. First and foremost among these consequences: 'always be a winner' turns quickly into 'winner takes all' and then into 'win at all costs'.  But another insidious cost of this attitude is that losing becomes unacceptable.  In the arena of youth sport, we have managed this shame often by veering toward the equally unrealistic position of 'everybody's a winner', with score-less games, equal playing time for everyone, and trophies for all.  So, how is a young athlete to sort out this contradiction?  My answer: preach a gospel of losing.  We shouldn't preach this gospel for its own sake, but given that losing is more common than its opposite, we should remove the shame from it and celebrate it for all the things it can teach us not only about life but, well, winning.  By being better losers, we can in fact become better winners.

           In the very first post of this blog (“Scott’s Lytham Opportunity”), I wrote about Adam Scott's collapse in the last four holes at the British Open in 2012.  In that post, I suggested that if he really wanted to contend again in a major championship, he would do well not to shy away from the bitter sting of that defeat, but to really approach it, expand it and investigate it closely in order to mine it for all that it could teach him about how he handled himself in that situation so that he could master it the next time.  We'll, if his 2013 year is any indication, he did just that: winning the year's first major in a nail-biting and gutsy playoff, contending again at the British, finishing very high in the season's standings, and just completing a torrid stretch of three major victories in his native Australia.  In short, rather than shriveling up in defeat, he gained strength from it.  Indeed, he even stated at the time, as reporters were asking him if his terrible loss meant that he wasn't destined to win a major, "No, in fact, it has shown me just the opposite: that I can win a major, that I belong to be there down the stretch, that my hard work is paying off."  Now, unfortunately for me, I'm not Adam Scott's sport performance guy, but if I were, here is what I would have preached to him in 2012 that I think every athlete needs to know about the value of losing.

                       Learning from loss: Every loss has a crucial juncture, a crisis point that we would like to go back to and re-do if we could.  Those moments are the ones to investigate. Did they come from a technical weakness or from a psychological one, or, from a combination of the two?  Or, did it stem from improper preparation?  Put the loss on an x-Ray machine and go through it, detail by painful detail.  Doing so will both teach you to avoid those mistakes in the future, and will inure you to the shame of losing.  Because one thing I can guarantee you of for certain: if your performance is only motivated by the fear of losing, you will lose often, gain little satisfaction from your victories, and not grow as an athlete or person.  You cannot go for broke when you are clenching the till so fearfully.

                       Practice to lose.  In our winner culture, we have become so loss-averse that we think that in order to have winners, we must train winners.  But, often a top athlete is only tested in defeat.  And so, the top athletes often train under conditions where winning is almost impossible, so that flaws and mental weaknesses can be exposed rather than hidden.  Such practices include playing against stronger players, devising pressure situations in practice, and most of all, analyzing what broke down in those situations.  In order for such an analysis to be truly effective, it should be conducted with a ruthless honesty and relentless compassion at one and the same time.  Shame breeds fear which increases the odds that we are going to play from a protective rather than an appetitive position.

                       Losing and dying:  Many athletes equate losing with dying.  They might not be conscious of this association, but it is there.  And how could it not be, if they have  been bred to be winners, if their culture celebrates winners so extravagantly, and if they have lived sheltered from the real consequences of loss?  Perhaps even their parents, in synch with their culture, have adapted an ego orientation with them with regard to their sport participation (“Ego&Mastery”).  Often this athlete reveals himself by the temper tantrums he throws upon losing.  For him, we should burn the ring of falsehood that surrounds him by over-exposing him to loss.  Doing so will test his determination and love for the sport, and will burn away the protective carapace which he has built around himself, sealing him off from learning the lessons of loss. 

        I am not preaching losing for the sake of humiliation.  I do not think humiliation is a good training method.  But, on the same token, there are very serious negative consequences to training our young people with an eye toward winning rather than with an eye toward process.  I will leave you with a quote from one of sport's most loss-averse losers, a character whose downfall is only mirrored in the pages of Greek tragedy, Lance Armstrong, and his attitude toward losing: "I like to win.  But more than anything, I can't stand the idea of losing, because to me, that equals death."  So, let's raise athletes with a stronger sense of themselves than that.  Let's look loss right in the eye, so we are winning with joy rather than relief.  Let's learn from loss.

Selfish v. Self-full

Young athletes are often introduced to the old saw that there is no “I” in team.   On its surface, the message seems obvious: the team only succeeds when the individual puts his or her own needs aside.  Those needs generally mean thinking that we should be playing a certain desired role, get a huge portion of playing time, and receive the lion’s share of the attention.  Instead, this dictum succinctly reminds us to sublimate the self in order for the common good to succeed. Any thought of the self, this statement suggests, is selfish.

The problem is that this statement is often offered to rather young athletes, people for whom the concept of joining a collective is not yet developmentally appropriate.  We may remember that becoming husbands, wives, co-workers and citizens is a pretty advanced developmental step, because doing these tasks successfully involves already having a pretty fully formed sense of self to bring to those relationships.  But, young athletes, from pre-little league to almost the end of college, are caught up in the tasks of defining self-hood.  That is their full time job.  So, telling a latency-aged or adolescent athlete to have no thought of themselves is a developmentally confusing message.  Furthermore, ignoring athletes’ developmental level often leads to behavior that seems downright selfish.  That is, the more we try to tell the athlete to not have a big self, the more we will see that self asserting itself in ever more frantic ways.  

So, what am I saying?  Am I suggesting that young athletes cannot join teams?  Absolutely not!  But, what I am suggesting is that parents and coaches help clarify for young athletes what their role is in any given team situation so that the young athlete can be invested wholeheartedly in mastering that role.  Fulfilling that role to the best of the young person’s ability, then, can be the way they show up in their full selfness for the team or athletic moment.  In essence, I am arguing for a concept of self-fullness over selfishness.             

To make this difference between more clear, let me give a simple chart comparing common forms of selfish behavior in an athlete and how that can be redirected to more a more self-full orientation.

The Selfish Athlete	The Self-Full Athlete
The selfish athlete feels as though s/he needs and deserves to play the starring role (quarterback, pitcher, batting clean-up, short stop), get the lion’s share of playing time, make the winning play.  The selfish athlete does not see the value of practice.	The self-full athlete knows his/her role on the team and delights in learning and excelling at that role.  The self-full athlete enjoys both practice and game time, and sees them as both valuable opportunities to master their role.
The selfish athlete cannot tolerate setbacks, and blames teammates and referees for them.  The selfish athlete throws temper tantrums in the face of these setbacks.	The self-full athlete feels but manages intense disappointment, and has a balanced appraisal of blame and fault.  S/he does not make a spectacle of him/herself in victory or defeat.
Since, for any athlete, a loss represents a threat to the self, the selfish athlete takes losing as an opportunity to quit.  Quitting is never far from the mind of the selfish athlete.	The self –full athlete abides a loss.  And based on that perseverance, s/he can mine the valuable data that a loss presents.  The self-full athlete gains strength from a loss.
The selfish athlete can’t really identify any reason they play the sport.	The self-full athlete can quickly identify several reasons why they love playing their sport, aspects that make them feel more alive.

There are a few important lessons here for coaches, and parents, and athletes.  

• For coaches: make sure to clarify for your athletes what their role is at every moment, and what success looks like in that role.  Role clarification is not just good for the team dynamics, it’s an essential component of good team performance.

• For parents: from a very early age with your athlete, adopt a mastery orientation over an ego orientation (see http://altiusperformanceworks.blogspot.com/2013/03/sport-parents-ii-ego-mastery_6.html), and make sure to model that orientation in your own life.  If you espouse it, but don’t believe it, your young athlete will detect the difference and be more aligned with your intent than with your message.

•  For athletes: if you notice that the comments in the left-hand column of my grid apply to you, maybe it’s time to re-assess your commitments, and either reconnect with your primal joy for your sport, or, in fact, find another endeavor.   In moments of wavering affiliation, always come back to what you love about your sport, how it feels when you do it right, how uncluttered it feels to have intention and action so closely linked.  It feels great.  It feels like flying.  It feels so full of self, that, at its far edges, it feels selfless.  Those are moments when you’re ready to attach yourself to a bigger canvas, a bigger picture, a bigger plan.

Sport Parents II: Ego & Mastery Orientations

In my last post, I wrote about the importance for sport parents of setting the proper framework for their young athlete.  This framework is the one where the player inculcates the values and attitudes of the parents and uses it as their own internal compass for their ideas and feelings about such important matters as winning and losing, the treatment of opponents and officials, and the overall meaning of the endeavor.  In that post, I called the framework around the young athlete “the amniotic air” that they breathe as they engage in their sport because while parents and children may not think or talk much about it, the athlete absorbs it with every interaction with the parent.  So, as we can see, we are dealing with a very high stakes enterprise and one that bears thoughtful consideration.  In this post, I will discuss the two most common cognitive frameworks that sport psychologists have identified as the ones that parents set for their children.

According to the experts, there are essentially two different frameworks that parents adopt and that they do so by the implicit and explicit systems of rewards they establish around their child’s sport participation.  The first one, often called an ego orientation, places as high emphasis on winning, compares their child’s results to those of other children and sees success in sport as being better than others.  The second framework, often called a mastery orientation, stresses improvement over performance, process over product, and values a child’s sport participation for the larger lessons about life and the self that sport participation offers.*  For ego-oriented parents, sport is about teaching their child to be a winner, while for mastery-oriented parents, sport is about the process of adaptive growth.  The ego-oriented parent judges the success of the endeavor on results, the mastery-oriented parent on how the child’s  sport involvement supports emotional maturation and successful social integration.  People have come to sum up the positions this way: the mastery-oriented parent says, “winning isn’t everything, it’s how you play the game,” while the ego-oriented parent says, “winning isn’t everything...it’s the only thing.”

Now, of course, many parents adopt an ego orientation quite consciously because they feel as though it’s the only way to raise a successful athlete and person, caught as we are in this cut-throat, race-to-nowhere culture.  They feel that in order to raise a winner, they need to forefront winning, and that ruthlessness trumps process every day.  But this is not true, and my research on young athletes and their social milieu suggested this truth to me pretty strongly.  Indeed, psychologists in the realms of both education and sport have strongly argued that mastery orientations provide greater motivation toward goal-directed behavior over a longer duration.**  Furthermore, parents, athletes and coaches who privilege winning to the exclusion of all else often overlook the incredible value of losing for motivating improvement, the data it provides for skill & strategy interventions, and the bright light it can shine on the athlete’s thoughts and feelings in the heat of competition.  Of course, if you have a mastery orientation, you are much more likely to attend to and mine this useful data, whereas an ego orientation seeks to sweep a loss under the carpet of easy excuses as quickly as possible.  (For a view of what some of this work looks like, see my prior post from August, 2012 “Scott’s Lytham Opportunity.”)

The next question, then, is how to put into practice some of these insights.  The first is to frame as many of your interactions about your child’s sport performance in terms of questions rather than statements.  For example: “what do you think it would take to beat so-and-so?” rather than “I think you can beat so-and-so.”  “What do you think happened in that match?” rather than “I think you could have won that match.”  “What do you think you need to work harder at?” and “where would you like to see yourself in your age group?” over “If you’d only do what I’ve been telling you to, you’d be top ten.”  “How do you think you could have better handled that bad bounce/bad call/poor seeding?” over “you were robbed!”  Additionally, you should monitor (and control) your child’s bad conduct, because behind bad conduct lie some of the most ego-oriented cognitive distortions, apart from the fact that bad conduct is almost always the tell-tale sign of poor performance.  (For more on this, see my prior post to this blog “Scattering & Husbanding” November, 2012.)  But, one thing is for sure: you cannot fake it for your young athlete.  If you engage superficially in mastery-oriented questions, but have ego-oriented answers in your heart, your reward structure and your outward behavior towards tournament officials, referees, your child’s opponents and their entourages, then your child will absorb your actions far more strongly than your words.

Often, when people compare ego and mastery orientations, they feel as though the “mastery” people stand on the side of losing over winning; that inculcating process over product teaches complacency with a middling result.  In fact, nothing is further from the truth, and let’s be clear that I’m very pro winning and strongly prefer it to the alternative.  It’s just that winning is only one aspect of successful sport performance and very often isn’t nearly the most salient feature of a particular performance.  I firmly believe, based on my years of competitive play, coaching and qualitative research, that a parent’s adoption of a mastery orientation provides a more stable base for the young athlete’s best performance to emerge, greater enjoyment of the sport for a greater length of time, more successful integration into a competitive and complex world, and even, a better relationship between parent and athlete.  And if that’s not winning, then I’m sure I don’t know what is.

*Roberts, G. & Treasure, D. (1995): Achievement goals, motivational climate and achievement strategies and behaviors in sport. International Journal of Sports Psychology, 26, 64-80.

**Turner, E., Chandler, M., & Heffer, R. (2009). The influence of parenting styles, achievement motivation, and self-efficacy on academic performance in college students. Journal of College Student Development, 50, 3, 337-346.