Facing Defeat

Photo from my defeat on a competitive international stage

 

For competitive athletes, facing defeat will knock us down and moving forward from it can be difficult. A few athletes will just forget about it and decide to jump back into their training schedule after facing a defeat and continue to do the things they did before they faced the experience. I do not think that this is the way to move forward and progress. In fact, I think that athletes that do this will plateau; stay where they are and not move forward.

Other athletes will dwell on their failures and focus on the negativities, including myself. Having faced defeat on a competitive international stage, my main focus was on the negativities and how I had failed to fully prepare to compete at the international level. Dwelling on the negatives too much can stop us from moving forward, but we cannot simply disregard them!

Walking off the badminton court, I received praise from coaches for my performance and yes my performance might have been good but the justification is that; it wasn't good enough to overcome my loss. Obviously, I wasn't satisfied with the result and anyone facing a defeat, would also feel down.

Having sat with coaches, talking about the positives of the match lifts your spirits slightly and almost makes you forget about the negatives. However, I didn't want to forget about the negatives but at the same time, I didn't want to dwell on it. It was important to me that I talk about the "things that went wrong" with my coaches and try to see it in a positive way by learning something from it as I believe that it is the key to moving forward.

When we think about the things that go wrong, we tend to see it all in a negative way and we try to make large changes in our training to eliminate the problem. I think that in reality, it doesn't work that way and we have to make small changes to the way we train to slowly eliminate the problem. Do you agree?

It is noticeable that during exercises in training sessions that I just simply do the routine with no thought behind it and everything feels comfortable, because it is something that I am used to. The change I intend to make is to my mindset within training. I will make training more uncomfortable and not just do the usual routine exercise.