“One important key to success is self-confidence. An important key to self-confidence is preparation.” — Arthur Ashe
My son gets quite irritated with me after sport.
He’ll get into the car after a match and announce that he was terrible.
And I’ll say: “OK. Where’s the data?”
Which, I appreciate, is probably quite an annoying thing for your mother to say when you’re thirteen, you’re tired, you’ve just played a match, and what you actually wanted was some sympathy and possibly food.
But I spent twenty years in professional sport. And apparently it has made me a deeply irritating parent.
Because “I was terrible” doesn’t tell me very much. What actually happened? Where did it go wrong? What went well? What did you do differently from last time? What happened when you were under pressure? Where’s the data?
One of the things professional sport is exceptionally good at is separating what actually happened from how everybody feels about what happened. And there can be an enormous difference between the two.
A win can contain terrible data. You can win a match and still have played badly. You can lose and have done some things exceptionally well. A player can make a mistake that everybody notices and quietly make twenty excellent decisions that nobody does.
The result matters, obviously. But if the only conclusion you draw from a win is we were brilliant, or from a loss is we were terrible, you haven’t really learned anything. So you review it. You look again. You find the information that’s useful. And then you decide what you’re going to do with it.
The more time I’ve spent outside professional sport, the more I’ve realised how rarely we afford ourselves the same courtesy.
A presentation doesn’t land quite as we’d hoped. I’m terrible at public speaking. We don’t get the job. I’m obviously not good enough. We put something out into the world and nobody buys it. Nobody wants it.
I know that last one particularly well. I run a business now. I can publish something I think is excellent and barely anybody reads it. I can put an offer out and hear absolutely nothing. The temptation is to turn each of those things into a much bigger conclusion. But the data doesn’t necessarily support it.
We don’t have a data problem. We have an interpretation problem.
The psychologist Albert Bandura spent decades studying what he called self-efficacy: our belief that we can handle a particular task or situation. He identified four main sources of it, but the strongest is generally our own mastery experience: the evidence of things we’ve actually done, handled and got through before.
Which is really just the data point again, dressed up in psychology.
The point isn’t to collect evidence that you’re brilliant. It’s to collect evidence that is true.
Sitting there endlessly replaying something in your head isn’t the same thing as reviewing it accurately. Rumination and review are not the same thing. Professional sport taught me the latter. Review isn’t there to make you feel better about what happened. It isn’t there to make you feel worse either. It’s there to make you better informed about what you do next.
Which brings me to failure. I don't think it's true that there's no such thing as failure per se, but that, really, there is only winning or learning and failure only exists if you allow it to. Getting the information and doing nothing with it, that's what turns something going badly into an actual failure. That’s different from something going badly. Something going badly is information. The question is what you do next.
My version of this, the one I’ve carried into my own work, is simple: Analyse. Action. Achieve. What actually happened? What am I going to do with that information? What does better look like now? And then you go again.
Perhaps that’s why my poor son doesn’t get away with “I was rubbish.” Because maybe he wasn’t at his best, but he would not have been rubbish at everything. And even if he was, “I was rubbish” is still an extraordinarily unhelpful conclusion.
So the next time something doesn’t go the way you wanted it to, before you decide what it means about you, your ability, your career, your business or your future, ask yourself the irritating question my children have heard far too many times: where’s the data?
And then an even better one: what am I going to do with it?
PS. This is exactly the work we do inside The Performance System.
Five weeks to get clear on what you’re working towards, establish the standards and actions that will get you there, and build a review process that means you don’t have to rely on motivation or guesswork. Every week you get my eyes on your progress and direct feedback on what I see. I’m taking 20 people through it this September. You can join me here: https://kateoram.co.uk/the-performance-system
I really like the general approach here, Kate, and good on tou or the questions to your kid. Lots to take forward for anyone interested in developing themselves. My main consideration is that for certain times in sport failure is failure. If you made a mistake that caused you to lose an Olympic gold then I would challenge anyone to say, "Hey, I still won today because I learned what didn't work." (And I only have 4 years to wait until I can rectify it!!!)
Sometimes failure is failure, irrespective of what we learn. Such is objectivity that is measured by outcomes.