The Athlete's Inner Game
It happened. The play didn’t work. The performance was off. The result was bad.
Now what?
There are two things you can do with a failure. You can let it become a verdict — a ruling on who you are and what you’re capable of. Or you can treat it as information — data about what to adjust, what to work on, what to do differently.
One of those responses ends something. The other one starts something.
Read this passage slowly.
For though the righteous fall seven times, they rise again, but the wicked stumble when calamity strikes.
Proverbs 24:16 — NIVLet that sit for a second before you move.
Seven times. The righteous fall seven times. That’s not a failure of the righteous — it’s a description of them. The falling is part of the story. It’s not an aberration or a disqualification. It’s what happens. The defining characteristic is not that they don’t fall. It’s that they rise.
What’s the difference between a fall that ends you and a fall that becomes part of your story? How you interpret it.
The athlete who treats failure as a verdict — this proves I’m not good enough, I knew I couldn’t do this, this is who I am — is doing something to themselves that no opponent could do. They’re using the failure to confirm a limiting story rather than to generate useful information.
The athlete who treats failure as information — what does this tell me about my preparation, my decision-making, my mechanics, my mental state — gets something from the failure. It costs them, but it pays them back in understanding.
Film session is a perfect example. When a coach watches film after a loss, they’re not trying to confirm that the team is bad. They’re extracting information. What happened, why did it happen, what do we do differently. That’s the right posture for a competitor facing any failure.
You fell. That’s in the story now. Rise. Extract the information. Use it. That’s how the righteous respond to falling.
The athlete who treats failure as information gets something from it. The one who treats it as a verdict only loses.
Think about a recent failure. What’s the information in it — not the feeling, but the actual data? What does it tell you about what to do differently?
Extract the information. Push people away from the emotional response toward the analytical one. Both are real; the question is asking for the analytical.
You fell. Rise. Extract the information. Use it.
This is specifically for after a failure has occurred. Don’t use it preventatively. The reframe only works when there’s a real failure to apply it to.