Questions to ask yourself after failure: what to do after a loss?

Sports is not only about winning, but also about losing. To move on, the first thing you need to do is to stop calling failure a failure. Whatever happens, whatever the situation, it is just an experience. It can be positive or negative – it all depends on your attitude towards the situation. To do this, it is important to ask yourself the right questions – that’s what we will talk about.

Grigory Bakhin

psychologist, specialist in ecological career and life building, mental coach

If an unpleasant situation has happened in your life, ask yourself these questions. They will help you look at failure in a new way.

Imagine that you didn’t score a penalty in the World Cup final – yes, it’s a shame. But it’s a sport. There could have been another athlete in your shoes who made it to the final. But maybe that experience will be the driver for some other situation, will change you.

Or this moment will change someone’s life, or, for example, in a year or two you will become a coach and motivate the team to score all the penalties in another final.

Our lives are made up of ups and downs. We can’t always be on top. If we look at the stories of great athletes, we will see that many of them had quite tough failures in their biographies.

For example, the famous skier Alexander Legkov broke his stick three or four times in the final stages of the race and stopped one step away from the podium. But the result of all this was a legendary race and victory at the Sochi Olympics in 2014. The athlete did not organize a tragedy, but moved forward step by step.

Here as an illustration I remember the Russian TV series “Trigger”, where in one of the episodes in childhood the hero was yelled at by the coach in the hockey section. Then at crucial moments he constantly remembered his face and his yelling, as a result of which he could not fully play.

After he dealt with this childhood psychotrauma, he was able to live fully again.

2. What was done well? How can it be improved? Don’t beat yourself up for the failure, it is important to analyze the pros and cons, to understand whether everything was done on your part. Maybe you saved yourself somewhere, maybe you didn’t give your best or, on the contrary, you did your best but still lost.

For example, Maxim Mikhailov, a volleyball player of the Russian national team, failed to realize a match point in the semifinal against the USA at the 2008 Olympics in the fifth set. But then, four years later, he made a huge contribution to the overall victory of the Russian national team, repeatedly winning important balls.

That’s why only by working on yourself and cultivating a winning spirit and positive strategy, you will be less likely to face failures, and if you do face failures, you will be able to jump up after them as if from a springboard.

There is a very good book on this topic, “Moment of Truth” by Baylock Sayen, which demonstrates how our psychology reacts to important events and why some people go through them easily, while others experience tremendous stress.