I’ve been watching Drive to Survive the last few days while I’m catching up on emails and doing admin work, and I. Have. Thoughts.
First is: Anyone with Strengths that like to be the “best”… I so get why you like this sport and this series so much. It reminds me of how I felt after watching Cheer. Like I want to be the world champion.
If you’re not familiar with Drive to Survive or with Formula One racing, let me set the stage.
- Of the three highest-paid athletes in the world, it cycles back and forth between one and two of them being Formula One drivers.
- It’s well-known to be the most competitive sport in the world. There are only 20 drivers, and most drivers don’t have careers too much longer than 10 years, so it’s a very high potential for turnover if you’re not on the top.
- Because of the high speeds, it’s extremely dangerous (adrenaline-producing) and there’s an extreme need for mental toughness. You see it happen, in the show, when drivers don’t have the toughness to be resilient in the face of failure. They just can’t stay at the top. Because the stakes are so high at the top and failure is so much harder when you have more to lose. Yet still, when they have a bad race, they just get back in the seat. The ones who don’t, you see the difference over time.
The levels of competition I’ve seen on this show are unlike anything I’ve seen before, and I’ve coached some elite athletes and coaches in the past. It’s just… unlike anything I knew was out there. The pressure and the drive for competition. It’s really amazing.
But the most interesting part was a pattern that’s extremely common in elite athletes.
Resilience.
So many of the episodes in the first season focused in on the resilience of these drivers and the leaders of the teams. How they handle it when loss happens. How they handle it when adversity happens.
Building resilience is something I’ve been focusing on for about a decade now, and I continue to find new ways to think about how to build resilience. When you train elite athletes, you train them within an inch of their lives. They train for every eventuality. They commit so hard, they are almost single-minded, and that allows them to understand what it takes to win.
It’s one of the reasons we talk about fear so much. Fear is the enemy of resilience.
One of the best phrases from the first season was uttered at the end, when the season was over, and the leader had to inspire his people. He was addressing a team of people who had worked hard–maybe just as hard as the winners–and reminding them why they kept showing up, even when failure happened. They wanted to learn from the failure.
“If we don’t fail, we don’t learn.”
These people are some of the most competitive people in the world. None of them like to fail. But they like to win. And one of the truths of winning is that you have to lose to win. You have to lose to learn, and so in order to get better, you have to lose to win. The mindset here is one I really resonate with because it’s a resilience mindset.
So many times, we hear the catchphrases about failure, and yet, when I fear failure, I want to take the safest bet possible. Failure feels wrong. And I get that feeling. I don’t like failing. But I like winning.
I’ve been afraid to make some moves lately, and I recognize that they are big things. It feels very big. It almost feels “too” big. And when I heard, “if we don’t fail, we don’t learn,” I took another look at those too-big things.
Ultimately, I know that there are places I’m still unproven. I need to know I can do certain things. But I won’t know I can do them until I do them. Until I see whether I succeed or fail. But I also know that if I fail, I will learn from that experience. I will figure out what I can do better, and I will do it better. So ultimately, even my failure is success.
One of my coaches told me, when I was an athlete, that the road to success is paved in failure. Today, I often say to clients a similar sentiment. If you have a certain number of failures in you, we need to get those out of the way so you can learn from them and correct them. But at first, especially young in my life, I really didn’t like hearing that. I just wanted to succeed all the time. I tried, for most of my 20s, not to fail at all. (Hello, Strategic…) But as I realized I wasn’t growing, I started subconsciously taking more risks. I absolutely failed more, but I also succeeded more. A lot more. Because I learned from those failures and developed resiliency.
If I could encourage us in a direction right now, I think I would encourage us to gain the skills that help us with resilience. The more resilient we are, the more we can tolerate the failure when it comes. And as every successful person will tell you: the failure will come.
So let me ask some resiliency questions of you, today:
- Do you have support? If you fail, do you know where to go to break down what happened and do better?
- Do you make energy pennies? In order to be pushing ourselves, we need energy reserves. We need self-care. We need rest.
- Do you answer your rhetorical questions? When you’re worried about things not going well, do you answer the questions you ask? Do you know what you’ll do if things don’t work out? Do you have a plan? (Even if the answer is, “I’ll figure it out.” That’s an answer. And some of us need the reminder that we always do figure things out.)
- Do you have a release valve? Is there a person or a strategy or a place that will make you relax and feel like you’re still in the game? They should be part of your plan to fail.
Yes, I said, “plan to fail.” That’s literally what R&D is about. The research and development phase of any business is all about taking chances and learning from the failures. If you’re still in the R&D phase, there’s nothing wrong with that. Every business has phases, and moving from phase to phase is part of what we’re all about when we’re chasing success.
Some of us are still in the R&D phase. And that’s not a bad place to be. We’re still learning. Learn as well as you can.
And I know, I know, that’s the most Learner thing I’ve said all day…
<3 Becca <3
PS. I completely understand if this post is too competitive for some of us. Not everyone likes competitiveness, and that’s also completely ok. But for those of us who do… this show… it’s just amazing. (Even if your only competition is yourself.)
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