Total Reading Time: 4 minutes

Happy Monday - and Happy Thanksgiving! No matter our situation we all have things to be thankful and grateful for. Spend time noticing those things and they’ll tend to multiply. This week we’re going to challenge the notion of failure and look at how we export chaos.

So Let’s All be Grateful and Let’s Go!

Table of Contents

• Why Embracing Failure Backfires

• Are You Exporting Your Chaos?

Why Embracing Failure Backfires

It’s super popular lately to say things like “we embrace failure”, “it’s ok to fail”, “you’ve got to learn to fail”… and on it goes.

My question is - in what athletic-competitive-universe are we accepting or allowing or welcoming failure? We seem to say these things in an effort to get our players to embrace the challenges that come with failure, especially in a sport like softball where it’s ever present. But are we REALLY meaning that doing so is OK?

I’m not even coaching at a P4 program and it’s definitely not ok here. So WTH…

What we really mean when we say these things is:

• we are going to fail in our efforts to learn and improve

• hidden within our failed efforts are important clues to our future successes

• going through the pain and efforts associated with failure lie strength and resilience that will help us in the future

• since we tend to fail more often than we succeed we can’t lose our minds every time we do so.

These are all important truths. Critical truths actually. Imagine how our players hear the message that “failure is ok” when we lose our minds if we lose.

I’ve found a much better way to get this whole point across without creating the mixed-message confusion.

What we really mean instead of failure is STRUGGLE. Take all those statements we mentioned earlier, and replace “failure” with STRUGGLE:

“we embrace struggle”, “it’s ok to struggle”, “you’ve got to learn to get through struggle”

Our players understand struggle, and are familiar with it. They “struggle” in the weight room, in class, with their family and friends. So the concept is familiar without being terrifying.

Struggling makes us stronger, smarter, more clever - in a word, better - without colliding with the whole goal they think they’re out there for, which is to succeed.

Help your players notice how they confront struggle on a daily basis, and how doing so makes them better. Things like getting up in the morning, going to weights, doing conditioning, taking chemistry (ha), navigating 24 other female teammates for an entire year…these are all struggles that our players do on a daily basis.

Help them build up their familiarity with Struggle so they don’t freak out when they encounter it, so they can remind themselves they DO have the skill to overcome it!

Are You Exporting Your Chaos?

You’re a competitor and no doubt you get fired up!! But ask yourself: are you transferring that emotional state to your players in an up then down fashion - taking them on a roller coaster of emotions ride?

Our workplace is a competitive environment that’s emotionally super-charged. There is a lot at stake on every play and with every game. It’s easy to carry this emotion into our lives, and to share this emotion with our team.

Easy, yes. But not helpful.

We ask so much of our players in the way of growth and development so let’s ask emotional regularity of ourselves. It’ll not only help our team play on a more even keel, but will help keep us from taking ourselves on an emotional roller coaster.

Clark Lea is the head coach of Vanderbilt Football., currently 9-2 and ranked 12 in the nation. He says his own personal challenge is navigating his own volatility: "I can run the full spectrum of emotion within five minutes." His job isn't to eliminate his own emotions but to process them so he can be a steady presence that sets a steady environment. Leaders who export their chaos create chaotic teams.

His daily reset ritual centers him. When Lea walks through his office door each morning, he's overwhelmed with gratitude for his role. The next breath is: "I don't deserve it, but I can earn it. Here's how I earn it today." This pattern - gratitude followed by recognition of unworthiness followed by commitment to earning - keeps him focused on daily execution rather than position entitlement.

You don’t have to pick Lea’s method for navigating your own emotional irregularity, but you do need to have something that centers you and that calms your own personal competitor enough that you can lead your team with emotional consistency.

Thanks for reading this week’s Curveball Chronicles. I hope you gained some insight, some encouragement, some knowledge or some grace.

Go make this a Great week!

Missed some previous issues? Don’t worry, I’ve got them all on my website: https://pitchingcoachcentral.com/curveball-newsletter/