Want to win more? Learn to lose well.

MBA star Giannis Antetokounmpo 's has captured the imagination of the world this week with a post-match interview that went viral.?

Watch the video here

The interview, challenging a reporters naive take on failure, has been celebrated for highlighting Giannis intellect and character.?

Giannis message deeply resonates because of the composure with which he delivers it, but also because of the message itself. How can we bottle up his insight on failure and use it to charge up our daily lives??

In this post, we’ll look at 3 approaches from elite sport that can transform your attitude to failure, allowing you to win more.

Don't take it personally. Losing is NOT an identity?

Does winning a game make you a winner?

Does loosing a game make you a looser?

Clearly this is a play on words, but it displays a tendency in our thinking to shift from performance to identity. In other words, we move in our thinking quickly from,?I won this important game, to I am a winner, and not just of this game, generally!?I am a winner! This shift from performance evaluation to identity evaluation leads us to a poor relationship to failure, and this is exactly what Giannis resists.

Why?

Winning in sport is not controllable, ever! We prepare well and understand the opposing teams tactics, but there is no guarantee of actually winning. In sport, as with most of life, we are in the realm of probabilities and not certainties. Winning always involves variables you cannot control for (so called, ‘black swan’ events). So, when you base your identity on whether you win or lose, you ground your sense of self-worth in something that is not entirely up to you. Not smart!?

Instead, in elite sport, we take time to consciously craft your identity as an individual or as a team, based on things you can control, improve and ideally measure.?

When you base your identity on things you can control, such as our effort or character, there is no performance loss at all that can infiltrate our view of ourselves. We are able to separate our worth from the outcomes we cannot fully control, like winning. Did you prepare? Did you give it your all? Where you true to your identity as a person, as a team, as a club? If the answer is yes, failure can look like nothing but an opportunity to learn.?

Summary: In elite performance, at least in the best teams, players are taught not to shift from performance evaluation to identity evaluation!?This creates a space for learning.?

Expand the timeline?

Ever wanted a moment to last a lifetime?

Ever been so embarrassed that you thought your discomfort would go on forever?

What happened? The moment, good or bad, passed!?

Failure represents one moment in time, in a time trajectory that moves back to the time of your birth and forward to the time of your death. The second way of shifting our relationship with failure is to extend the timeline forward and back. Rather than getting fixated on a loss, as if it were some sort of eternal state, Giannis expands the timeline, explaining?his team won before and will work to win again.?

Expanding the timeline is a way to contextualise setbacks and achieve perspective. Looking back, you can ask, where in your life have you had a similar challenge and won, or where have you overcome a setback? This shows you all the ways that you have earned the right to be confident to face challenges and win. Of course you may need different tools as the nature of challenges shift: the point is only you have overcome obstacles before and so you have earned the right to be confident. ?

Looking forward, you need to ask, will there be another opportunity to win? There will never be the same opportunity to win, as you can’t go back. Perhaps a better question is, will there be another opportunity in the future where you can showcase your skills, hard-work and character? The answer is always, yes.?

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When you shift the timeline It is impossible to think of the failure as characterising you eternally, the failure becomes one moment in a longer line expanding back and forward: you have showcased your skills, hard-work and character before and won AND there will be other opportunities into the future where you can showcase your skills and win.?Looked at in this way, the setback inspires us to seek new skills and new opportunities where we can be challenged once more, to bring our best.?

Summary: In elite performance, at least in the best teams, players are taught to take a perspective on losing which inspires them to seek out opportunities to showcase their talent again and again.?

Alchemising?failure?

Alchemising failure is arrived at by asking, how can the setback help me or the team be better? What does it contribute to my unique lens? What can I become now, because of this setback, that I couldn’t before?

This sounds a bit like searching for the lessons from failure,?but it’s a slightly more challenging framing tool. This approach is not to identify something that you learnt, that you could have learnt from any other experience. It is to recognise, that this particular experience, and no other, is what actually enabled you to learn, and as such respecting the experience for the opportunity it presents for the development of your unique perspective.

This is the perspective from which you can look back an an epic failure, and can honestly say, you wouldn’t change a thing, because the person you became as a result of it is one that you respect even more. This can be difficult, especially when the setback is big, painful and characterised by many black swan events. ?

However, when alchemising?failure is successful, there is a great sense of renewal through the integration of difficult events into your life story. Furthermore, there is no room for regret, because there is an understanding that you could not have developed into a new version of yourself without the particular lens offered by the loss or setback. This is partly what makes this option, potentially, transformational.

Summary: In elite performance, at least in the best teams, players are taught that loss, when integrated well, can be the catalyst to develop into a higher version of yourself.

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