Failure is not something to be ashamed of, it’s something to be powered by.

By John O’Sullivan, Founder of Change the Game Project

In May 2018, retired US Women’s National Soccer team star Abby Wambach gave the commencement address to 600 women from Barnard College in New York City. Wambach, the all-time leading scorer for Team USA, an Olympic and World Cup champion, and an inspirational athlete known for playing with passion and giving her all every time she stepped on the field, gave an incredible talk to the graduates, sharing stories from her career, and lessons she learned. (You can read the amazing talk here, I think every young woman should read this, my 12-year-old daughter did!)

One of those lessons she learned over decades at the top of her sport:

Make Failure Your Fuel!

As Wambach stated to the attendees:

“Here’s something the best athletes understand, but seems like a harder concept for non-athletes to grasp. Non-athletes don’t know what to do with the gift of failure. So they hide it, pretend it never happened, reject it outright, and they end up wasting it.

Listen: Failure is not something to be ashamed of, it’s something to be powered by. Failure is the highest octane fuel your life can run on. You gotta learn to make failure your fuel.

When I was on the youth national team, only dreaming of playing alongside Mia Hamm… I had the opportunity to visit the national team’s locker room. The thing that struck me most wasn’t my heroes’ grass stained cleats, or their names and numbers hanging above their lockers. It was a picture. It was a picture that someone had taped next to the door, so that it would be the last thing every player saw before she headed out to the training pitch. You might guess it was a picture of their last big win, or of them standing on a podium accepting gold medals. But it wasn’t. It was a picture of their long time rival, the Norwegian national team celebrating after having just beaten the USA in the 1995 World Cup.

In that locker room I learned that in order to become my very best — on the pitch and off — I’d need to spend my life letting the feelings and lessons of failure transform into my power. Failure is fuel. Fuel is power.

Women: listen to me. We must embrace failure as our fuel instead of accepting it as our destruction.”

Yes, Abby, yes! We must embrace failure, and not let it destroy us, but use it as fuel to get better. As fuel to get moving again. As fuel to not let anyone tell us our dreams are not worthy of pursuing. As fuel to put aside the disappointments that come along with pursuing something worthy and great.

Failure is oxygen. Like a fire uses oxygen as a to grow, we use failure as our fuel.  It is a natural part of pursuing excellence. It is supposed to happen.

We have written about adversity here before. In their research on elite and near elite performers, or what they call “Super Champs” and “Champs,” Dave Collins and his colleague Aine MacNamara have found that those who make it to the very top, who play internationally and have the greatest success, have a path filled with struggle. They are presented with both on field and real-life struggle, disappointment, and at times pain, yet they persevere. “The talent pathway,” they conclude, “should not be a comfortable place to be.”

It is a rocky road to the top.

Collins and MacNamara have also found that well-timed character and psychologically based interventions from coaches and supportive adults help these athletes develop coping skills, grit, and resilience. In other words, it is not our job to smooth the pathway of our athletes, to give them plush fields, carry their gear for them, and remove all obstacles from their supposed path to greatness. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. It is our job to help them learn from struggle, and see that the path to the top is not supposed to be easy.

If we really want to help our athletes, students, musicians, and entrepreneurs achieve something great, we need them to understand the path is filled with potholes. And we need to be sure not to pave them, but to ensure each one of those potholes is an opportunity to learn.

For many children in sport, May and June mean tryout season. This is inevitably a season of disappointment for many children, some who do not make the team they want, and others who do not make a team at all. It is a time where they face uncertainties such as new teammates, a new coach, perhaps a new club and whole new friend group. Many families move towns, and young athletes are thrust into trying situations, with no friends or familiar faces to look upon.

They may face failure and adversity this month. They will definitely face it if they continue in sports. I love this image about talent development:

It is not a smooth path nor a straight line to the top. That is where we come in parents. It is up to us that failure becomes their fuel. How do we do that?

We can help our children learn from adversity, and embrace the struggle. To do so, try these ideas below:

1) Help your athletes focus on the process: nothing worth doing comes easily, especially in sports. You will have your good days and bad days, your injuries and your healthy periods, your good coaches and your bad ones. Help instill a growth mindset in your kids by, as noted Stanford Researcher Carol Dweck says in her great TED talk, introducing the word “yet” into their vocabulary. “I didn’t make the top team YET, I need to practice more.” “I have not earned a starting spot YET, time to get to practice early and stay late.”

2) Ask your athletes the right questions when they struggle: though times of adversity can often lead us to criticize, or focus on the negative, a great approach after a struggle is to ask these three questions

What went well?

What needs work?

What can you learn from today that will help you practice better this week and perform better in the future?

These are not only process-oriented questions, but they help athletes realize that it never all goes wrong. There is always some good, and always opportunities to learn. When your athlete faces adversity, focus on ‘what is good about this?”

3) Don’t blame the uncontrollables; instead focus on their response to events: Athletes do not control the actions of officials, or what the opponent does. They cannot account for a bad field or poor weather. Blaming and complaining about those things will never make an athlete better, and they only bring negative energy into the conversation and the team. Help them focus on what they control (effort, focus, training time, etc) and let the other stuff just roll off. As Ohio State Football coach Urban Meyer says, E + R = O. The EVENT plus our RESPONSE equals the OUTCOME. We control our response, so respond well!

4) Help them find things they are passionate about: One of the critical ingredients needed for athletes to overcome adversity is ownership of the experience. As parents, when it comes to sports it is very helpful to assist our kids in finding their passion, instead of determining it for them. When a young athlete loves what she is doing, and is doing it because she owns the experience, she is far more likely to keep pushing through injuries, adversity, etc. It is great when kids fall in love with the sports we love or played, but that does not always happen. You cannot force passion, and passion is what overcomes adversity.

5) Show them how to embrace the hand they were dealt, and play it well: We all have faced adversity, and when our children struggle, it is a great time to share our own struggles, and what we learned from them. Be vulnerable, and teach them how adversity helps you develop grit, resilience, and more love of a sport, or a job, or anything you do. As Wambach shared in her speech, going into the 2015 World Cup, as one of the greatest players and leaders the US National Team had ever known, she was asked to lead from the bench. “You’re allowed to be disappointed when it feels like life’s benched you,” said Wambach. “What you aren’t allowed to do is miss your opportunity to lead from the bench. During that last World Cup, my teammates told me that my presence, my support, my vocal and relentless belief in them from the bench, is what gave them the confidence they needed to win us that championship. If you’re not a leader on the bench, then don’t call yourself a leader on the field. You’re either a leader everywhere or nowhere.”

I wrote this today not only because I just heard Abby Wambach’s inspiring commencement address. I wrote it because I am a coach, and my teams just finished tryout season. I have been coaching for over two decades, and I still hate tryouts. This year, like every other, there were disappointed players. But there was one who was thrilled.

Recently, I had to have a very difficult conversation with this young player who was devastated not to make the top team in her age group. It is a conversation every coach dreads having.

She could have quit. She could have blamed everyone. But she did not. She got to work. She showed up focused and prepared every day. She joined extra practices. She embraced her role as a leader on her new team. She took every opportunity to play up, and gave her best effort every time. She learned from the good days, and from the bad days. And one year later, she was back on the top team in her age group.

Her failure was her fuel. And that fuel helped her earn her spot.

Because in the end, it was not really even a failure at all. Just a bump in the long rocky road to the top.

Help your athletes to make their failure their fuel. Help them navigate those potholes that sports, and life, throws in their way. Not by blaming, avoiding, or paving over those bumps, but by helping your athletes see that there is always a path forward.

Coach O’Sullivan is a former college and professional player as well as a high school, club team and college coach. He is offering a FREE video series that is part of his Coaching Mastery program. For more information about gaining access to that program click the link above or in the image below. The video series includes a wealth of coaching education including some motivational and team building ideas used by some of the most successful coaches.

By John O’Sullivan, founder of Changing the Game Project

A few nights ago I went to a graduation. Not a high school or a college graduation, but one far smaller, and far more personal. In fact, there were only seven kids, one of which was my 9-year-old son TJ. He and six others were being recognized by their amazing teacher for their dedication, hard work, and persistence in overcoming their struggles with a language-based learning disability that strikes one in five children. They all have dyslexia.

The teacher began the ceremony with a talk about self-efficacy.

“Self-efficacy,” he said, “is the belief that your effort and hard work matter. It’s a child’s belief in their ability to achieve their goals and complete tasks. In our schools, in our sports, so many times these kids lose that belief because of a learning disability. They are called slow learners, they are called frustrating, they can’t sit still so they are called disruptive, and yet, in reality, they probably work harder than anyone else in their class. They just have a disability that impedes their progress, through no fault of their own. They work so hard, and yet are led to believe that their work does not matter. So they eventually give up.”

One by one the seven kids were called to the front of the room, and their teacher described their unique gifts, their unique paths, and how they had overcome their own unique struggles in school and in life. He gave each of them an award related to their contribution and development, not just in reading, but in art, in laughter, and in relationships with others. He caught them being good at things and recognized them for it. And as he described each award, I saw an amazing thing: a smile on each kids face that could light up a room.

As the famous conductor and speaker Benjamin Zander says: “Look at their eyes. If their eyes are shining, you know you’re doing it.”

I saw seven pairs of eyes shining that day. Which brings us to an important question:

Are your players’ eyes shining when you coach?

Does your presence make your athletes day a better one?  Do you recognize each and every one of them for their unique gifts and contributions to the team? Or do you only spend time with a few of your players, likely the starters and/or upperclassmen. Have you ever wondered why you had a roster full of talent, but no team? I have.

Many years ago I had a group with lots of talent, but no team. We had players dissatisfied with their role. We lacked effort in training. We were outworked in games. I had front row seats watching our season go down the tubes. Thankfully, I also had a friend and mentor who happened to be a 6x national champion NCAA soccer coach, Jerry Yeagley from Indiana University, whose words stick with me to this day:

“John, coaching isn’t just running practices and X’s and O’s. It’s about culture, and unity, and recognizing every player for what they bring to the table. Your problem is you have a bunch of piano players. Every team needs some piano carriers too, and if you want people to carry the piano in training and games it’s up to you to let them know that they matter too.”

Those words from Jerry nearly two decades ago changed how I coached, how I led, and how I set up my teams. But something far more important happened that day.

The fact that the legendary Jerry Yeagley cared enough to help me – an unknown, unimportant college assistant and youth coach – made my eyes shine.  He made me feel like the most important person in the room. He made me remember how my favorite coaches made me believe in myself and let me know that my contribution mattered. And he made me feel like I was progressing, and I had a future in coaching.

What I realized that day was this: If I can make my players feel like Coach Yeags just made me feel they would run through a wall for me, and for each other. If I could get them to believe in themselves like his words made me believe in myself, then nothing could stop us. I learned that day that coaching isn’t only about X’s and O’s, but about relationships. I realized for the first time that if I could win the relationship game, I could help my teams win the game on the field too.

I realized that I had to make my own players’ eyes shine!

Most coaches ignore the relationship game. They assume that players know when they are doing well and when they are not. They forget how great it feels to get a compliment, or to be trusted and believed in. They forget what it was like as a player to see progress, and have your contribution recognized. Maybe that is the way they were coached, so they assume since they were OK with it, everyone is OK with it. But they are not.

Another mistake coaches make is that they spend too much time focusing on their top performers. Yet what about the other players on the team, the ones who don’t get the recognition? The ones whose names don’t appear in the paper, and may not even appear on the game day roster. They may never score the winning goal, or make the big save, yet they are a vital part of the culture of championship teams. They make practices better. They are the top players #1 fans. They can be your biggest allies, or your worst adversaries. How do we serve them?

I recently had the opportunity to see business and organizational health guru Pat Lencioni  speak about his excellent new book The Ideal Team Player, and he discussed three areas bosses often fail their team members. In essence, he was discussing how we fail to make our people’s eyes shine.

Every athlete, whether a star player or the last one off the bench, needs three things from a coaching staff. The presence of these three things will help get every player to buy in. The absence, or worse, the antithesis, will destroy your culture, and tear your team apart.

Here are three keys to making your athlete’s eyes light up, improving performance, and building a championship culture:

Recognition: Every player on a team needs recognition. I am not talking about trophies for everyone and 8^th place ribbons. I am talking about the absolute need for a coach to take the time to recognize the contribution of every player who comes to practice, gives her all, and fulfills a role. I am talking about the need for catching every player being good, and epitomizing core values. You see, the star players usually get plenty of recognition. They win MVP’s and all-league awards, and they get recognized by classmates and fans. But what about the players who don’t get to play? Without recognition, these players see themselves as anonymous. As Lencioni says, “people who see themselves as invisible or generic cannot love their jobs, no matter what they are doing.” The same goes for every player on every team. No matter how much they love a sport, eventually they will grow to hate it if they do not get recognized for contributing something to the effort.

Relevance: Every player needs a role. Some can be top scorer, others the top defender. Some can be leaders, some can be supporters, some can be the smart guy, others the funny guy. But most importantly, every player must be something. Players without a role feel irrelevant. They feel like their hard work and effort don’t matter. A coach who sends his reserves to work with the assistant coach every day and never coaches them makes them feel irrelevant. A coach who never calls a reserve player into the office and compliments them for working hard, raising the level of practice, improving their shooting, something, anything, will lose that player. You must find something about every player and let them know how that contributes to the greater good, and that their work matters. If you believed at your job that no one would miss you if you were gone, chances are you would jump at the chance to do something else, and rarely go the extra mile. If your players feel the same way they will disengage too.

A way to measure their contribution: It’s easy to measure goals and assists, points and defensive stops, tackles, and fumble recoveries. It’s easy to measure a time in a 100 yd dash or a swim meet. But how do you measure things that are harder to measure? Let’s face it, a defender on a soccer team might never have a measurable statistic beyond minutes played, and if a coach consistently touts the goal scorers and shot takers, that defender can quickly start to believe that her contribution doesn’t matter. But at least she is playing! What about the kid who doesn’t play?

You can have players measure free throws made, or juggling in soccer, and chart progress over a season. You can measure who shows up first or leaves last, and give recognition for that. You can also find tangible ways to measure your team core values. If your team values effort, you can give out hustle points in practice. If you value positivity, you can measure how often a player makes a teammate smile, or gives an encouraging word to a player who is struggling. Every sport is different, but the more things you can measure, the more ways you can demonstrate how an athlete is not only progressing, but contributing to the greater good. We value the things we can measure, so find ways to measure how each and every athlete contributes, or doesn’t contribute, so you can measure progress. In the words of Lecioni, “without tangible means of assessing success or failure, motivation eventually deteriorates as people see themselves as unable to control their own fate.”

If your talented team is going down the tubes, before you look at your athletes, you need to look at yourself. If you don’t like what is happening, it’s not only up to your players to fix it. It’s up to you to fix it.

Do all your players feel valued? If not, fix it.

Do all your players have a role? If not, make them feel relevant.

Do you measure everyone’s contribution? If the answer is no, figure out a way how to.

“Who am I being that my players’ eyes are not shining?” asks Benjamin Zander. Who am I indeed.

Let’s make our athletes’ eyes shine. We might just win a championship. More importantly, we might just change a life.

Changing the Game Project  is a site that is your one stop shopping for  the latest and greatest information, research, and best practices regarding high performance, motivation, Long Term Athletic Development, fitness, nutrition, college recruiting, and more.

These were written long enough again that they are framed in the masculine gender, but I hope there are good messages for ALL athletes and coaches.

Little Eyes

Author Unknown

There are little eyes upon you
And they’re watching night and day;
There are little ears that quickly
Take in every word you say;
There are little hands all eager
To do anything you do;
And a little boy who’s dreaming
Of the day he’ll be like you.
You’re the little fellow’s idol,
You’re the wisest of the wise.
In his little mind about you
No suspicions ever rise.
He believes in you devoutly,
Hold all that you say and do;
He will say and do in your way
When he’s a grown-up like you.
There’s a wide-eyed little fellow
Who believes you’re always right
And his ears are always open
And he watches day and night.
You are setting an example
Every day in all you do,
For the little boy who’s waiting
To grow up to be like you.

The Man in the Glass

Author–Dale Wimbrow

When you get what you want in your struggle for self
And the world makes you king for a day,
Just go to a mirror and look at yourself,
And see what THAT man has to say.

For it isn’t your father or mother or wife
Whose judgment upon you must pass;
The fellow whose verdict counts most in your life
Is the one staring back from the glass.

You may be like Jack Horner and chisel a plum
And think you’re a wonderful guy,
But the man in the glass says you’re only a bum
If you can’t look him straight in the eye.

He’s the fellow to please, never mind all the rest,
For he’s with you clear up to the end,
And you’ve passed your most dangerous, difficult test
If the man in the glass is your friend.

You may fool the whole world down the pathway of years
And get pats on the back as you pass,
But your final reward will be heartaches and tears
If you’ve cheated the man in the glass.

The Man on the Bench

Author Unknown

The man on the bench is the man for me
He’s not the star, but he’s the key .
Without his aid and help each day,
I doubt if there would be a play.
Every run by a team on “big game” day
He holds the dummy and shows the way when
The other team runs that certain play.
When not being clocked, he’s chasing punts.
Or shagging fly balls, and fielding bunts,
Or a hundred and one other useful stunts.
He’s always the “skins” against the “shirts”,
And the night of the game he sits and hurts,
He helps with equipment, and picks up balls.
Sets up the hurdles, and takes the falls,
But is always ready when some coach calls.
He’s not on the sports page every time
When a “dollar” is waiting, he’s the “dime”

He comes to the banquet with a little prayer,
Hoping this year the “letter” is there.
As he squirms wishfully in his chair.
And he suffers a little along with his coach,
As the names are read and no approach
Is made to him there is a wrench
In his heart. But his teeth will clench,
As he says, “next year”, this man on the bench.
What happens to all the men like these.
Who seem, all elbows, thumbs, and knees.
Don’t feel sorry for their frustrations,
They are the men who head corporations,
And sit on the councils of great nations.

They learn the value of raw sheer grit,
The determination that won’t say quit.
The value of facing rugged strife
To face the gun with just a knife,
They learn how to make a fight in life.
To the man on the bench I give my hand
With the greatest respect, ’cause he’s my man,
Please don’t worry, he’ll go far
Be it jet propulison or motor car,
Somewhere in life, he will be a star.