The dead-simple 3-step formula for letting go of mistakes
F*ck ups happen.
A lot, and especially in sports.
Anybody who’s spent a career in sports will tell you that their game is a game of failure. Baseball is the most notorious for this motto, but the reality is every sport has a remarkably high rate of disappointment. The best NBA shooters, for example, still miss around 60% of the time (even though it seems like they never miss on TV).
When you deal with mistakes regularly, you need to become what my colleague calls a “failure factory.” You need to learn to make those failures into something useful.
But before you can do any learning from them, you have to let them go. The reality is the right time to deal with mistakes is after the game, when you’re watching film. Of course you can make some in-game adjustments, but you shouldn’t be doing anything close to a post-mortem while the game clock is still winding down.
To effectively let them go, you need a routine.
The best athletes (and performers everywhere), follow the same 3 steps.
Release
Release is about doing some physical action that signals the letting go of the mistake.
An old sport psychologist, Ken Ravizza, famously had players “flush” their mistakes in a tiny toilet in the dugout. But you could also yell, clap your hands, or do anything else that signals, “it’s time to move on.”
I like using a physical movement here because it takes you out of your head and lets you express yourself. A lot of coping with failure is just learning to externalize, so you don’t drive yourself nuts thinking it through while the game is going on.
Reset
Next is about coming back to center.
Rehashing mistakes takes you out of the present, typically into the past and occasionally into a bunch of future “what-if” scenarios.
We need to find a way to bring our mind back to the here and now. That’s where reset comes in.
I recommend a deep breath, but any kind of grounding activity will do. The key is it should help you regain your poise and feel more in control moving forward.
Refocus
The last step is to get back into the game.
You need to refocus on the single next best, most impactful action you can take.
And the way to do that is to refocus on simply, “what’s important now?”
When you answer this question, and then go do it - you’ve given yourself something to refocus on that will pull you squarely back into the performance.
This of course gives you the best chance to turn it around from that past mistake and succeed.
With a simple routine like this in place, you’re poised to perform better after a mistake.
Routines like this help us get out of our heads and keep us squarely locked in to the performance. If practiced enough, you’ll be ready to turn your mistakes into failure fodder for your failure factory when the games are over.
Your action step:
Build your routine.