I read the following line in Anthony Klarica’s book, “The Performance Mindset: 7 Steps to Success in Sport and Life” and it stopped me in my tracks:
There is a lot of space between great and terrible.
Oooph, how freeing was that for you to read?
I’m hoping your shoulders dropped a good half-inch as mine did when I first read it.
Simple words, but a meaningful and deep concept.
The Damage of Black and White Thinking
Why in sports are we so black and white?
Why did I learn language at a young age that was built on extremes when it came to my own sport, figure skating?
“Good” practices made me feel like I could climb every mountain, “bad” practices made me feel like a failure – not just on the ice, but in other areas of life.
Anthony writes about this concept as he discusses resiliency and helping athletes jump off the teeter-totter of extremes.
Resiliency and Growth Mindset in Sports
Let’s first discuss how this concept aligns with growth mindset.
If we adopt the idea of there being a lot of space between great and terrible when looking at our “mistakes,” things shift a lot.
We realize that “mistakes” serve a purpose – their main role is a conduit for learning and what I like to call leap-frogging.
In the sport of figure skating, an athlete takes a number of falls daily.
I can remember times when I was learning a new skill, having ice burn on my backside and being wet and pancaked with snow.
Jumping back into the brain of that 10-year-old-girl, I can now see there was a lot of frustration that got swallowed down until it eventually burst out in the form of hot stinging tears.
When every attempt feels like a failure, your practice session feels pretty… terrible.
Seeing How the Pieces Add Up
If I had understood growth mindset as a young athlete, I could have shifted my focus from just outcome to process.
I could have seen the pieces.
Maybe I was making great strides that day at achieving a desirable air position. Maybe I had added speed and height.
Regardless, I was not equipped to see that the falls were serving me – I just wanted an end result, and when it took me a while to get there, I counted the days, the attempts, and questioned if I would ever master the skill.
Enter negative self-talk and we now have a recipe for… you guessed it, thinking things were terrible.
Growth Mindset As a Skill
If any of this sounds familiar, you’re in the right place. I speak to athletes every day who struggle to see through growth-mindset goggles – but I feel confident they can get there.
Growth mindset is a skill we can all learn.
It’s a balm we can apply to the wounds of our pasts and the scrapes of our present.
Everything Can’t Be ‘Great’ if You Want to Grow
On the flip side of that coin, it is good to mention the “great,” from that space between great and terrible quote above.
So if things aren’t terrible… but we cloak them in the “great cape” – we reinforce the extremes.
I am all for accountability at young ages – as long as the feedback and conversation are delivered in healthy terms.
It’s OK for a young athlete to self-reflect and realize that maybe that day they did not give it their all. They played it too safe, or they distracted themselves with easy skills.
Have you ever witnessed overly positive feedback when the result was less than positive?
Think of fall from a balance beam met with “Don’t worry, no one saw that! You’re doing awesome sweetie!”
Or, consider downplaying or overcompensating such as, “You’re the best and today doesn’t matter!”
I use these examples because I’ve actually seen them play out. They are well-intentioned, but if everything an athlete does is great… how are they going to get great-er?
Exploring Between the Extremes
At a recent skating clinic, I was working with a group of athletes and I asked them to self-assign a score from 1-10 after an attempt at a skill.
A 1 meant “that was nowhere near my best attempt” and a 10 meant “I’ve never done that better.”
Girls ages 7-14 were so honest with themselves in those moments. They knew when they could have been stronger, and they started to see that sometimes multiple attempts didn’t even get the same score.
What we did was give them SPACE to explore between the extremes.
Keep Looking for the Good
Sometimes, it helps to teach athletes to think like a detective … what evidence can an athlete look at to prove to themselves that a performance or a game was not simply great or terrible?
Even on bad days, I believe it’s always worth the extra push to find something – anything – that was good, or even decent.
This is especially important when an athlete wants to blanket-statement the heck out of a game, practice, competition or performance.
Sometimes finding something positive has nothing to do with physical skill. Instead, it’s mental:
- “Well, I guess I kept going…”
- “I stayed calm even after those mistakes.”
- “I guess I have gotten a lot better since last year…”
The Language of Growth
To make it fun and use the gift of language, I like to come up with words to help athletes fill the space between great and terrible.
Here’s a quick laundry list:
- Inspiring
- Difficult
- Challenging
- Humbling
- Raw
- Emotional
- Surprising
- Exciting
- Worthwhile
- Fun
- Enchanting
- Mediocre
- Balanced
- Solid
- Wonky
But most importantly for me as a mental performance coach is to identify portions of the game, or parts of the performance that were ALL of these things.
Maybe one skill was great.
Maybe one free throw was actually terrible.
That warm up? Solid.
The sportsmanship? Challenging.
But under the covers of these “labels” we have to go deeper and ask… what did you learn from that?
This is where the growth happens.
The Power of ‘Yet’
Above I mentioned self-talk and I cannot stop writing until we address it as well.
Negative self-talk might be one of the biggest hindrances we have. Truly. My daughter is in preschool, and I heard her mutter “I’m not good at that,” when she tried to tie her own skate.
You can imagine how a mom working in my role is in a place to be completely neurotic in this instance.
I wanted to say “YET, sweet girl. YET.”
“You are STILLLLLLLL learning!!!”
Between Great and Terrible – Space to Grow
The stakes here are low, my daughter is tiny… she has time… but many of us make it well into adulthood and never learn how to speak kindly to ourselves.
I ask athletes to track their self-talk and often they don’t realize HOW often they are speaking negatively to themselves, about themselves, until the tally marks multiply.
The advice, if you wouldn’t say it to your best friend, don’t say it to yourself holds up.
Athletes are so quick to jump from ‘this skill is really hard” to “why can’t I get this” to “I am totally awful at this” to … “I will never ever ever get this. I’m just awful at ‘insert sport here’.”
If we aren’t careful, negative self-talk and only seeing extremes becomes an ingrained trait that over the years gets branded into us.
I’m guilty of negative self-talk and have to work at it every day. My dream is that young athletes gain awareness very early on.
Cue me in mom-mode… YET HONEEEEYYYYYYY!!
But truly, when did I learn to be mean to myself?
When did you learn to beat yourself up? If you aren’t great, then do you think you’re terrible?
There is SO much space between great and terrible.
Try to fill it with truth, insight, and ways to grow.
