A Loss May be the Most Important “Win” for a Wrestler
I’ve been wrestling for years now. Only recently have I had a nice long winning streak. 2 seasons ago on a certain wrestling site I was in a championship match and I would have sworn I was going to win against an opponent but I lost miserably. I was devestated. It was the first loss in a long time for me. I thought I was on a great winning streak, I thought I was training harder than most girls but the reality was that my mind just wasn’t in the right place. It took that loss to realize how badly I wanted to win and get me mentally prepared for future matches.
I spend a lot of time in airports, planes, trains and automobiles. I end up picking up magazine and reading a LOT of books and articles. Earlier this year I picked up an “Psychology Today” magazine just for shits and giggles. That magazine had one of the most inspriational and true articles that I have ever read in my life. The article was titled, “Weathering the Storm” and can currently be found online for free. ” Failure, it says, is at worst a mixed blessing: It hurts, but can pay off in the form of learning and growth and wisdom. Some psychologists, like the University of Virginia’s Jonathan Haidt, go even further, arguing that adversity, setbacks, and even trauma may actually be necessary for people to be happy, successful, and fulfilled. ‘Post-traumatic growth,’ it’s sometimes called.”
We’ve all seen those work from home ads or the sucess stories of mulitmillioinaires: ” I had hit rock bottom and had nowhere to got so I started my own business and now I’m a millionaire” I can’t’ say how many of these stories I believe but the story is told time and time again, by famous actors, business men…even Authors like JK Rowling who have gone on to prove that sometimes it takes hitting rock bottom to want to work hard enough to truly suceed.
Failures grab our attention. So many things happen the way we expect them to that mistakes register disproportionately. We’re forced to integrate that new information. This is why Training camps study over and over and over again what made fighter lose certain matches. It is important to see our mistake so we can learn from them but it is even more important to feel the pain of the consequence of making these mistake in order for us to want to get better.
Failure—especially public failure—stirs some of the most potent social emotions we have: humiliation, guilt, shame. Guilt—which occurs when you chalk up a failure to something you did—can be beneficial. Shame, on the other hand—which is present when you attribute failure to something you are—casts a generalized depressive pall on you that’s harder to face, let alone fix, notes Richard Robins, director of the Personality, Self and Emotion Laboratory at the University of California at Davis. Everyone gets laid low by failure sometimes, however briefly. The real difference between people who pull themselves out somehow versus the people who do not. Those of us who really want to win and succeed will. Those of us who want to blame the rest of the world and find excuses for our failures will and they will never learn from them and they will never get better.
2 years ago I lost and I’ve trained harder mentally and physcially than I ever had in my life. I wanted to win, I really wanted to win and last year I did. I learned from my failure and I pray to god that I fail again and again so I can keep improving myself more and more each year.
The article is facinating. Please check it out. It’s truly inspiring.
xoxoxo
Ariel
Tags: failure, importance of failure, magazine ariticle, Psychology today
That is so TRUE, Ariel! Very reflective indeed!
And something I constantly tell the girls I’m coaching: that a loss is often worth far more than a win, as a loss shows areas that need improvement whereas a win can sometimes mask areas of weakness that only become exposed later against a different tougher opponent!
And this true in all areas of life, though sadly not everybody learns from their mistakes.
Meaow hugs
Jessie