'Learn the Lesson. Leave the Event’

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The World Series is underway with two historic franchises competing for baseball’s top prize, but one of the best lessons of the postseason may have come from a manager whose team was recently eliminated.

After his team’s heartbreaking loss to the New York Yankees, Cleveland Guardians Manager Stephen Vogt was asked how he prevented himself from overanalyzing his decisions when the margin between victory and defeat is often extremely thin.

“The way I do it is I ask myself, ‘What’s true?’ Vogt said. “You can write a narrative in your head, and spin yourself down a negative path, and beat yourself up and second guess. But what’s true is you made what you thought was the best decision in the moment. Then, you leave it behind.”

It’s a critical message for any coach, executive, or decision-maker.

We’re often forced to make quick and complicated decisions in pressure-packed moments with high stakes. While we can do our best to anticipate these scenarios, seldom are the circumstances exactly as we prepared for.

Often, our choices pan out, and we get the result we were hoping for.

But occasionally, they do not.

It becomes easy in these scenarios to beat ourselves up and to become overly critical.

When these situations arise and we’re second-guessing our choices or kicking ourselves over the logic that led to the decision going awry, we may want to apply Vogt’s mentality.

“I have a mentor of mine who says, ‘Learn the lesson. Leave the event.’ You leave the event behind and you learn everything you can from it,” the manager said.

“There’s no going back. Everyone makes mistakes. Everyone makes good decisions, bad decisions, or they just didn’t work. For me, it’s, ‘Learn the lesson. Leave the event.’”