How Quickly Do you Bounce Back from Athletic Disappointment?
Disappointment comes in all shapes and sizes for athletes, such as a loss, underperforming in a competition, reduced playing minutes, falling short of a personal best, or not making a cut for a championship meet.
Every athlete in all sports experiences their share of athletic disappointment. When you allow disappointment to fester inside, it stirs up negative emotions, lowers confidence, depletes your mental energy, and decreases your motivation.
You can think of disappointment as an over-stuffed suitcase. Carrying that weight around every time you go to practice, games, and competitions will wear you down. The more you think about a loss, mistake, missed shot, or falling short of a goal, the heavier the weight becomes, impeding athletic growth.
The key to handling disappointment is to unpack the event. In other words, process what happened and what you can do differently in similar circumstances, then work on that aspect of your game so you are prepared for future competitive situations.
Handling disappointment is freeing and gives you the confidence, focus and motivation to take your game to the next level.
Disappointment may hit you hard, but it doesn’t have to knock and hold you down. The commonality among all successful athletes is the ability to handle disappointment, learn from it, and improve because of it.
The United States women’s national team suffered its first loss in the coach Emma Hayes’ era when Japan defeated the U.S. soccer squad 2-1 to win the SheBelieves Cup title.
The USWNT had won the five previous SheBelieves Cup titles and were battling for their sixth in a row. In the end, the USWNT made costly mistakes, had too many turnovers and struggled to consistently finish when attacking.
After the game, Hayes talked about disappointment and the process of moving forward.
HAYES: “It’s OK to be disappointed. I told the players that. It’s really important to remember moments like this and the learnings that we take from it, and I look forward to the next opportunity we’re together to build on some of that progress and learn the most important things when you play a top-class opponent. I’d rather do that now than much later.”
As Hayes pointed out, setbacks are a part of the learning and improvement process and necessary for an individual or team to reach their potential.
Of course, a tough loss is disappointing, and feeling those emotions is normal.
However, at some point, you need to choose: Am I going to allow this loss or mistake to defeat me or will I take ownership of my part and use this experience to improve my game?
Disappointment is an opportunity in disguise, but you need to look for the lesson, then do the work to improve your game.
The key to getting over disappointment is to DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT.
Don’t react passively and allow disappointment to dominate your mindset. When you take an active approach to handling disappointment, a potential negative becomes a positive.
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