Oftentimes when we lose a game we feel like we failed. The same is true when we win: we feel like we succeeded. This, however, wrongly conflates success/failure with winning/losing.

Here is the thing, though, you can fail completely and still win and you can 100% succeed and still lose.

Think of a pro match at the highest level. All players are highly skilled and can hit all the shots, so to speak. Yet one team wins and one team loses. Every single match ends like this. Is that a failure by the losing team? Perhaps the losing team did everything they could to their best of their ability (a success) yet still lost.

It may help to think of it like this. You and your partner are very good 3.5 players. Across the net are two 2.5 players who have trouble hitting the ball over the net. You can play your worst game this year and still win. And they can do everything within their power as well as they can and still lose.

The winning by your team and the losing by the other team tells us nothing about how you played. Or about how they played. It actually provides wrong information if used as a performance metric as it says your team did good and the other team did not. When the reality is completely opposite.

The win/loss column is a result - nothing more.

Success/failure, on the other hand relates to how you played and your execution of your game plan that day. It revolves around your process.

Conflating win/loss with success/failure can lead you to reach the wrong conclusions about your play and, importantly, your improvement as a player.

In this week's episode we discuss this important difference. Credit to Dr. Todd Kays the author of Sports Psychology for Dummies from where we drew the inspiration for this week's podcast. You can find Dr. Kay's book (as well as other resources we use in our approach to the mind) here - click on "Mental Training".

In the riff, we talk about a constructive way of approaching getting hit by the ball (getting "tagged" as it is often called). It is a positive thing - trust me :).

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Stay well,

Tony

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