How light is your haversack?

One of the most common coaching needs that most coaches are confronted with, is when a coachee is anchored to their previous successes or failures. Just as previous successes are no guarantee for future success, similarly past failures do not define us. However, many of us fall into this “failure” trap and let a past failure continue to define us into the future.

My advice to people who reach out to me, has been consistent – that past successes are to be celebrated, but left behind as a good memory and a milestone. Similarly past failures must also be left behind after they are analyzed for the lessons learnt, which should be factored into our life, as we move forward. Just like past successes, past failures must also be left behind.

However, as many of us know, it is easier said than done. How does one adopt it (letting go) and make it a part of our life? How do we ensure that the haversack we carry does not bog us down, because that haversack is filled with baggage from the past, that comes in the way of our present and future?

Few things that have worked well for me and my coachees/ mentees to let go and keep our haversacks light, include the following –

1.???Consciously and mindfully push it out of your mind. It is but natural that when a situation, like the situation that led to an earlier failure presents itself, our mind goes back to the past failure and there is a tendency to be frozen in the past. We need to tell ourselves and condition our mind to the fact that it is a new day! A new day of opportunities beckon us and we must not waste it by anchoring our mind to the past, which is done and dusted. This is a new and golden opportunity for us to make amends and prove ourselves, based on lessons learnt from the past.

2.???Go easy on yourself. Sometimes we are our own worst critic. Our standards for ourselves and the constant need to be on top of everything can make us fall short of our internal benchmarks for how we define excellence. This keeps us under constant pressure and we feel that we are not performing our best. And the worst part is, when we do perform, we attribute it to luck or chance, commonly observed in people with an imposter syndrome. We need to understand that as with others, we too will have our good days and bad. And that a good day or a bad one does not define us, forever.

3.???Create a circle of well-wishers. I have found that this strategy works the best, for all that life throws at us. All of us have our circle of well-wishers who could be our immediate family, friends, or colleagues. When in doubt, reach out to them to gain clarity. Since they have our best interests in mind, their feedback will be balanced and will encourage us to move forward and let go of the past. Creating and nurturing this circle of well-wishers is an investment that all of us should make for its multifaceted benefits. For me personally my family is my biggest cheerleader. But they are also my biggest critic, pointing out when I do make mistakes and, in the process, keeping me balanced and grounded, in successes or failures.

4.???Play to our strengths. Each of us are unique and have our strengths and areas for development. When we play to our strengths i.e., doing what comes to us naturally, then we are likely to experience more successes than failures. The success experience thus gained will act as a springboard, for us to experience greater and repeated successes, which can then trigger a self-fulfilling prophecy.

5.???Learn from past failures. It is a fact of life that failures teach us more lessons than successes. These lessons come in handy to help prevent repeating the same mistakes from the past. We should learn from failures rather than let these failures define us. Having learnt our lessons, we must consciously let go of these incidents, such that they become a distant memory and not something that anchors us to the past. Being a cricket aficionado, I always give Sachin Tendulkar as a good example of someone who used his past dismissals as a foundation for future successes. Sachin did not score a century every time he walked out to bat. But he did learn from his previous dismissals which made him one of the most difficult batsmen to dismiss.

It is an attitude that we need to adopt and accept consciously – that as we sail through life, we will have highs and lows, both in our personal and professional life. The attitude that we need to adopt is that both are a part of life and that we need to have the strength to move on. Successes should make us humbler, and failures should make us strive harder.

As we move forward and focus on our present and the future, our mental haversack should be full of positive memories of past lessons learnt that motivates us and not filled with unwanted baggage from the past, that drags us down.