AFRAID OF FAILURE?-WHY FAILING IS GOOD

What! Surely I'm not encouraging you to fail am I?Not at all, but there is something that you need to know about failure that can really change the way you look at your badminton.I found it made me a much better coach, helped me to understand the players well able to keep going and improve a lot quicker than the way I regarded failure before ever let me.I was always the kind of person who was good at most things, and not necessarily used to failure.

So when I tried something new, there was a good chance that I would have some modicum of success with it.But if any kind of failure occurred, I would give up, saying it wasn't for me.To relate this to Badminton, I found that I would ask my players to start the game in a very good state of mind, and this state of mind would continue until they made a mistake, whether in the first point or the fifteenth (that didn't happen very often!).

On the first mistake, player’s confidence would take a little battering, but I told them to continue. And what I found when I started to analyze their game more was that each mistake, each shot that went out, or into the net, was eroding their play a little bit, because they were regarding them as failures.

A player said:“It was as though I had a 'full tank' of ability at the start of the game, and each mistake drained that tank in my mind just a little, making me play a little bit worse”. It was only when they changed the attitude towards failure that they managed to keep that 100% play up all the way during a game (and that makes a REAL difference!).

My attitude to failure became:

 "Failure is natural; failure is not evidence that you are no good, rather it is an excellent chance for you to learn from what is going wrong and move on. T

he more you fail, the more you succeed!"Again, we go into this in much more detail later on, but I will say this here.Say you hit a smash into the net. Most of us would view that as bad, and move onto the next point in a worse state than before.But if you can view that bad smash as a good thing, a chance for you to realize what is going wrong, you will go into the next point in a positive way, and keep that positive attitude throughout the game.

Can you see what a difference to your Badminton THAT would make?