The Failure Playbook: How to Decompress, Debrief, and Grow from Setbacks.

A practical guide to processing failure, managing expectations, and building mental resilience.

She started in the back, where she expected to be, but something changed halfway through the race. She was moving up, and gradually passing one runner after another, keeping a steady rhythm as others slowed. My excitement and enthusiasm grew with each passing lap. “You can PR big! Keep it going!” I’d yell as she passed by me on the far side of the track. On the last lap, I became a maniac, yelling and screaming a seemingly random combination of syllables meant to inform her she was running great. As she crossed the finish line, I looked down and saw that she’d just run by far the fastest 5k of her life. I was ecstatic. A proud coach thrilled for an athlete who just had a massive breakthrough. She was pissed.

As I approached her, I expected to see an athlete beaming with pride, but I was met with a dejected and upset one. In that split second before confronting her, my mind was scrambling for a response. A big “congrats” was what I had intended, but seeing her body language, I stumbled upon “How was it?” She quipped back “Horrible. I got 10^th.” In that moment, I realized that we had different definitions of success and failure. I was judging her performance based on prior versions of herself. She’d just run faster than she ever had, so it was a success. Her judgment was based on competing against others. Where did she finish in the race? 10^th was smack dab in the middle, and a long ways from the podium. So obviously her race was a failure. We’d both watched or been a part of the same exact race. But how we judged it was entirely different, with two contrasting emotional states, joy and sadness, guiding our reactions.

This wasn’t the last time I would encounter a mismatch between my declaration of a good or bad race, and the athletes. Sometimes it’s like this situation where we had different definitions. Other times it’s because one of us has unrealistic expectations. Every time it occurred, I was left with this strange realization; that ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are subjective and that they depend on how we define success, failure, and our expectations.

The first step to improving our relationship with success and failure is to understand how we are defining each. Where is the comparison point? Are we judging it based on prior versions of ourselves, an idealized version, or some other competitor? Where our comparison point lies helps shape whether we will react positively or negatively to a performance. Our definition is often tied to goal setting. We often set goals as a way to motivate us to practice for a performance. Yet those same goals can become a line in the sand, delineating whether we succeeded or failed at a task. To combat this, we need to change how we approach goal setting. Giving us multiple targets to shoot for. As well as adding process orientated goals to the tradition outcome orientated ones.

Process orientated goals do just what their namesake says. Shifts the focus from external results (i.e. how much did my bench press improve?) to the tasks that should result in those outcomes. For example, a gym goer might switch from measuring her goals based on weight loss, and instead switch to how often she showed up. Did she follow through on going to the gym three times a week for 45-minutes each? Another example might be our runner who switches from trying to achieve a certain time goal to executing his race tactics. Did he take a chance by going out the first mile of the 5k a little faster than normal? If so, then regardless of the end result, he can check off that goal. The purpose isn’t to minimize outcomes and never shoot for our best performance or to win the game, it’s to give ourselves different measuring points to bring us more in line with the reality that success and failure isn’t black and white. We can still lose a game, but play to our potential and execute our tasks to near perfection. Broadening our goal setting is one way to bring nuance into a binary world.

Even if we change how we define failure, and convince ourselves that failure is an opportunity to grow, it still stings. Our brain falls into a pattern of emotional upheaval followed by rumination. All of those negative inner thoughts from our little devil on our shoulder that we kept at bay come flooding in. Dealing with the repercussions of failure shapes how we face the same challenge next time. If the experience is negative, our brain can store the memory in a similar fashion to trauma. We associate the unpleasant emotional response with the environment it took place in, so that the next time we are in the same situation, or playing that type of game, our brain hooks on to the environmental cues and sends us signals that danger is near.

We can see this in choking in sport. The extreme version of this is when a player gets the “yips” and is unable to perform even a basic level at a task. The classic example is the baseball player who has spent a decade or more being able to throw a ball with pinpoint accuracy from across the field, and upon getting the “yips” he can’t even complete a simple toss of the baseball. The former Yankees second baseman Chuck Knoblauch might be a familiar example. An all-star player, Knoblauch seemingly lost the ability to make a routine throw from second base to first base. Something that even 8 year olds can do. As I argued in Win The Inside Game, the yips are a kind of protection mechanism gone wrong.

While few of us will experience the yips, we all can ingrain a negative response to an activity or a place associated with failure. I’ve had athletes who after a poor performance at a particular venue will feel an increase in nerves and anxiety the next time they perform at that event. A self-fulfilling cycle can develop where because we performed poorly before, we expect, and do, perform poorly the next time around. To prevent this cycle, we need to develop a plan for processing failure. It begins with defining a time for sulking. I’ve previously mentioned the 24-hour rule, which states that good or bad, you have 24-hours to celebrate or sulk after a performance and then move on. Defining a specific period helps to prevent the rumination cycle that can occur. We give our self the permission to feel negative emotions, but then know we have to move on from them.

In addition to defining when to move on, developing a plan for processing failure is beneficial. In my own coaching, I like to set a debrief time that is far enough away from the event where my emotions have calmed down and I can clearly evaluate it. But for others, they need to discuss an event soon after they experienced it as a way to bring their emotional arousal state back down to baseline. While not the same as acute failure, this phenomenon of a need to talk after trauma is recognized in the research literature on extreme survival. Those who are rescued after a shipwreck at sea, for example, have an incessant need to tell their story. In one such instance, it was noted that survivors of a ship wreck had a “compulsive need to tell the story again and again, with identical detail and emphasis.”

Talking and discussing with others is one way in, which we decompress. When we engage in genuine conversation with others after a performance, our body shifts out of a stressed state, and into a recovery one. Research shows that this sort of social recovery leads to a decrease in the stress hormone cortisol. In a study published in Physiology & Behavior, researchers found that changes in testosterone after a soccer match were related to how connected the players felt socially to their teammates. Interaction after a game not only helps transition us towards a recovery state, but also allows us to process what just occurred. When done with teammates or friends, we can vent or gain perspective in a safe environment. With my athletes, it’s why I prefer them to do a post-race cool down jog with a teammate. This provides the perfect environment to decompress, process what just occurred, and increase team bonding. Other, like famed basketball coach Greg Popovich utilizes post-game meals in much the same way. He goes to great lengths to set up team dinners so that athletes interact with one another. Optimizing the table alignment, picking the number of people at each table, and choosing the food and wine; all in the name of enhancing conversation. Whether it’s through shooting the shit with friends or family, or by journaling, having a debrief strategy to process failure can ensure that lasting negative effects don’t occur.

There’s one other component that will impact our reaction to failure: how strongly our identity is tied to the outcome. As we’ve discussed throughout this chapter, the more intertwined the two are, the more personal we take the reaction. If cooking is our whole world, and diners complain about the meal, that could be a crushing blow to our confidence and self-esteem.

It’s not that we shouldn’t be passionate about what we do. As one of my former coaches liked to point out after we lost a race, “It only hurts because you care.” We need to understand the difference between caring deeply about something and defining our self almost entirely by it. If you find yourself nearly depressed after a loss or criticism of your craft, it might be a sign that who you are is too intertwined with what you do. Cultivating space between the two will not only help your mental health, but also allow you to improve at your craft. By having a little more distance, you can learn and grow from criticism or feedback, instead of ignoring or protecting yourself against it. One of the ways to create distance between what you do and who you are is to gain perspective.

Cultivating Perspective

Imagine standing in front of thousands of fans, with over a million more watching on their TV’s back home, about to compete for a sport on the United States Olympic team. The next two minutes determine whether you get to not achieve your childhood dream of competing in the Olympics, but whether you have a job or not. Finish outside of the top three, by even a fraction of a second and your prospects go from continuing your profession, to looking for a new-line of work. That’s the reality that may of the athletes attempting to achieve Olympic glory phase. They may be one of the best dozen or two in the world in their sport, but fall short and it doesn’t matter. Phoebe Wright, a former world-class 800 meter runner, knows this feeling well.

In 2012, she finished in 5^th place, less than three tenths of a second from making the team. Four years later, she came back and made the final again, falling short with a 6^th place finish. When I asked Wright how she dealt with the pressure of knowing that if you don’t reach your goal, it could mean finding a new job, she has a simple strategy: keep perspective. When she walks onto the track to compete at the biggest stage, she tells herself, “It’s not life or death; it’s track and field.” She continues this self-dialogue by reminding herself that, “The only people who really care how I do are friends, family, a few hundred track nerds, and of course, myself.”

Wright isn’t the only world-class performer who utilizes perspective to reframe their current situation. Matt Billingslea, a world class-drummer who has performed with some of the biggest bands on the planet utilizes the same strategy. Billingslea told me that when he begins to feel what he described as anxiety’s “tightening effect” as he takes the stage to perform in front of tens of thousands of screaming fans, he quietly reminds himself, “This isn’t heart surgery. No one’s life is at stake. All I’m doing is playing the drums.”

The irony is, of course, both Billingslea and Wright’s livelihood’s do depend on how they perform. But by reminding themselves that no actual lives depend on it, they are able to dull the nerves and perform better. By minimizing the perceived pressure, they become more likely to live up to it.

Perspective isn’t solely about downplaying the significance of the event, it’s reframing it to its proper level. Whenever we face a stressful situation, we tend to overestimate its importance. The vast majority will not lose our job is we make a minor mistake or fail to deliver on a singular promise. Even if for some reason we do face such a situation, like Wright did, the worst-case scenario is hardly as bad as we think. After failing to make the Olympic team for a second time, Wright shifted her focus and put all of the passion and energy she used to devote to track into another endeavor: Pharmacy school.

Adjusting your perspective is a way to keep your expectations and the tendency to have a threat response in check. Ask yourself a series of questions including:

1. What’s the worst-case scenario?

2. Will your parents and friends still love and support you if you fail?

3. How many people truly care about how you perform in this activity?

4. Who’s opinions and insights really matter?

In Win the Inside Game, I discussed another strategy that can be utilized to gain perspective: self-distancing. In this strategy, we think in third-person, examining our situation or issue as if it was a friend going through it. By creating another layer between ourselves and our situation, we can put distance between the personal nature of the situation and our emotional response. We’re more likely to see a situation clearer and with greater objectivity when it’s someone else dealing with it, versus ourselves. It’s why when faced with a tough decision, most of us rely on friends opinions to ground our decisions. While that’s still a great option, we can get a part of this effect by thinking in 3^rd-person.

Other ways to create perspective include seeing our limited time and place on this planet. Research shows that astronauts experience something called the “overview effect” when they see the Earth from space. As Apollo 11 astronaut Michael Collins said, ““The thing that really surprised me was that it [Earth] projected an air of fragility. And why, I don’t know. I don’t know to this day. I had a feeling it’s tiny, it’s shiny, it’s beautiful, it’s home, and it’s fragile.” Collins isn’t alone in his experience, astronauts report that they experience the sensation of Awe, and see the earth not as a series of divided countries with different people, but as a whole. We don’t have to go into space to experience this effect. Research shows that going fro a hike in the woods, or even looking at pictures of beautiful places can have not only anxiety reducing effects, but also perspective changing ones.

Changing perspective isn’t about downplaying your situation. It’s bringing your views in line with reality. Decreasing the mismatch between our exaggerated personal view of the world, and realigning it with the reality of living on a giant rock floating in the vast expanses of one of many galaxies. It’s not to say that what you are doing isn’t important or has value. It’s just a gentle reminder of that age old wisdom, “don’t sweat the small stuff.” And that what we see as small, might need to be more encompassing.

-Steve Magness

A Toolkit on how to handle failure:

Framing Success and Failure

1. Defining Success and Failure: Ask yourself the following questions

• How are you defining success? Failure?

• What are you basing your expectations on? What’s your comparison point?

2. Goal Setting

• Give yourself an A, B, and C goal, instead of a simple pass/fail.

• Utilize process-orientated goals in addition to the traditional outcome orientated goals. For example, instead of focusing on running a certain time, have a goal to execute your race plan.

• Utilize goals that you have control of.

3. What’s your process for failure?

• Define your time frame for ruminating on the failure and your plan for processing and moving on from it. (For example, I prefer a one night rule. You have one night to be upset, but then you have to get back to move forward and get back to work.)

• Process the “failure”

  • What information can you take away that makes you a better person in the future?

  • How can you grow from this experience?

• Find Agency: We need to feel like we have some control or can have an impact (i.e., learn from the failure)

• Decompress with friends or family. Conversation is key to processing failure.

4. Put Space Between your Identity and the Outcome:

• How personal do you take losses? Does your motivation in all areas of life plummet after failures?

• Diversify your sense of self. Have something else to pursue.

5. Cultivate Perspective

• Ask yourself the following questions:

  • What’s the worst case scenario?

  • Will your parents and friends still love and support you if you fail?

  • How many people truly care about how you perform in this activity?

  • Who’s opinions and insights really matter?

  • i“Why are you letting someone else have free rent in your head?”

• Think in 3^rd person. Imagine giving advice to a friend, or seeing your performance as if you were a coach.

• Put yourself in the way of nature. Get outside. Experience Awe

• Volunteer. Do something for others.