When Adron Chambers visited students on behalf of the Your Success Story Program, he taught them that their success in reaching any goal depended upon their ability to turn minor setbacks into major comebacks. Adron told the students his own story of how he did just that to reach his goal of playing in the big leagues. This is great advice for minor league players seeking to do the same.

Adron warns to not let a minor setback ruin your day when you can turn them into major comebacks that will put you right back on the path to success and happiness.  

This is important because happiness is even more than a good feeling—it is also an indispensable ingredient of your success. Athletes who can successfully turn a minor setback into a major comeback are those who define themselves not by what has happened to them, but by what they can make out of what has happened to them. They have the ability and the willingness to move up NOT despite setbacks, but BECAUSE of them.

It’s all about how we define the event originally perceived as a setback. Reality is merely our brain’s relative understanding of the world based on where and how we are observing it. We can change this perspective at any moment and by doing so change our experience of the event.  It’s all about the path that we choose to take following the setback event.

For example, after we experience what we view as a setback, we have an option of taking three different paths.

One path keeps us circling around where we are; the setback event creates no change and we end up right where we started. The second path leads us toward further negative consequences and we feel defeated and even worse off than ever.  The third, and preferred path, takes us from failure or setback to a place where we are stronger and more capable than even before experiencing the setback; this is the path forward.

A professional athlete's ability to find and take the path forward is the difference between athletes who are crippled by failure and those who rise above it.
 
Keep in mind that contained within every setback is an opportunity for growth that we can teach ourselves to see and take advantage of. The most successful professional athletes view adversity not as a stumbling block, but as a stepping-stone to greatness!  

Note: A special thanks to Adron Chambers for sharing his success strategy of turning minor setbacks into major comebacks.

So another New Year has started, and you have things in your life you'd definitely like to change, but you know from experience that traditional New Year's resolutions aren't going to get you very far. How do you resolve the problem of starting the New Year full of ideas about how you’re going to do things differently this year, but avoid fading back to the way things used to be last year?

The answer lies in something called “energy rituals.” Energy rituals are highly specific behaviors or routines that you do at the same time every day (or on the specific days you select). By setting a very special time for your routine, you don't have to spend energy thinking about WHEN to get it done. Willpower is a highly finite and limited resource in each of us, so the goal is to use less of it wherever possible, by making more behaviors in our lives automatic.

If you‘ve been a student of the Progressive Professional Program, you’ve heard about willpower and how it differs from Stillpower. You’ve also learned the difference between time management and energy management, and how energy management is superior to time management in the lives of professional athletes.

Back to energy rituals. You must build an energy ritual that doesn't demand so much from you that you quickly find ways to avoid it, and eventually give up altogether. Remember what happened to last year’s resolutions? How long did they last?

The goal of you establishing and keeping an energy ritual is that you want to feel soooo good when complete your ritual, that you feel much worse when you don’t. When that happens to you, you know that an energy ritual has taken hold of you!

If you find yourself falling off the wagon, or struggling mightily to stay on it, reduce the challenge, but stay the course. Any regimen will serve you well. Repetition, even in very small doses, builds capacity. Any positive change you can make will be hugely satisfying - and a source of inspiration to make the next one.

Adapted from Tony Schwartz, HBR Daily Alert

Here is the last installment of this Blog posting. Be sure to try at least one of the nine...and...don't be shy about sharing one of your own ways. Just post it here as a "Comment."

7. See your work in terms of progress, not perfection
We all approach the goals we pursue with one of two mindsets: (1) the Be-Good mindset, where the focus is on proving that you have a lot of ability and that you already know what you're doing; and (2) the Get-Better mindset, where the focus is on developing your ability and learning new skills. You can think of it as the difference between wanting to show that you are already as good as your're going to get, versus wanting to get better.
 
When you have a Be-Good mindset, you expect to be able to do everything perfectly already, and you constantly compare yourself to others. You quickly start to doubt your ability when things don't go smoothly, and this creates stress. Ironically, worrying about your ability makes you much more likely to perform less than your best.
 
A Get-Better mindset leads instead to self-comparison and a concern with making progress — how well are you doing today, compared with how you did yesterday, last month, or last year? When you think about what you are doing in terms of learning and improving, accepting that we all make mistakes along the way, you experience far less stress.
 
8. Think about the progress that you've already made.
It's not whether we've reached our goal, but the rate at which we are closing the gap between where we are now and where we want to end up that determines how we feel. Think of it as moving from "I Am Not" to "I Am". Take a moment and reflect on what you've accomplished during previous seasons before turning your attention to the challenges of the upcoming season. How far have you come already?
 
9. Know whether optimism or defensive pessimism works best for you.
Sometimes it's hard for players to stay positive when they've got a long hill to climb, with lots of competition along the way from other players vying for that same spot on the roster. Staying positive for some players isn't just hard — it also feels wrong. And as it turns out, they are correct — optimism doesn't work for them.

Promotion versus prevention focus. Some athletes think of their careers as opportunities for achievement and accomplishment — they have what psychologists call a promotion focus. This focus is about maximizing gains and avoiding missed opportunities. For others, doing a job well is about security, about not losing the positions they've worked so hard for. This prevention focus places the emphasis on avoiding danger. It's about minimizing losses, and trying to hang on to what you've got.
 
Understanding promotion and prevention motivation helps us understand why people can work so differently to reach the same goal. Promotion motivation is the desire to really go for it. This is enhanced by optimism. Believing that everything is going to work out great is essential for promotion-focused performance.

Prevention motivation, on the other hand, feels like keeping danger away. It is sustained not by optimism, but by defensive pessimism. Prevention-minded athletes actually work best when they think about what might go wrong, and what they can do to keep that from happening.

So, pick which one works best for you: optimism or defensive pessimism and use it to your advantange. Maybe a little of both is more your style. 

In summary, try one or all of the nine and see how it works. You won't know until you try.

Adapted from HBR's "Nine Ways Successful People Defeat Stress" by H. Grant Halvorson


 

Feeling stressed? Of course you are. You have too much on your plate, people are counting on you, and to top it all off, you‘re getting ready for the upcoming season. It’s difficult to be a professional baseball player these days and not experience times of stress. Yet when it comes to stress, the difference between athletes who are successful and those who aren’t is not whether or not they suffer from stress, but how they deal with it.

In the next few blog postings, we share nine scientifically-proven strategies for defeating stress from a recent article by H. Grant Halvorson, Ph.D., associate director for the Motivation Science Center at the Columbia University. 

Let's begin with number one: Have self-compassion.

Self-compassion is cutting yourself some slack. It's being willing to look at your mistakes or failures with kindness and understanding — without harsh criticism or defensiveness. Studies show that people who are self-compassionate are happier, more optimistic, and less anxious and depressed.

And, they are more successful, too. Most of us believe that we need to be hard on ourselves to perform at our best, but it turns out that's 100%  wrong. A little self-compassion when things are at their most difficult can reduce your stress and improve your performance, by making it easier to learn from your mistakes.

Learning and growing involves making mistakes. So, if you make a mistake. Acknowledge it. Learn from it, and move on. Don't stress over it on into the night, the next day, and so on. Have some self-compassion, and while you're at it, show some compassion for your teammates, coaches, and manager. I'll bet they will be thankful that you did.

Explanatory Style  - Three components make up one’s explanatory style.  Let’s take a closer look at each of them and see how you can use an optimistic explanatory style to become your team’s Glue Guy.

Personal - This involves how a person explains where the cause of an event arises. For example, a player using a pessimistic explanatory style sees himself as the sole cause of an event.  You might hear him say, "I always have trouble hitting that pitch.” A player with an optimistic explanatory style who would say, "I sometimes have trouble hitting that pitch, and the wind made it even more difficult today.”

Permanent - This involves how one explains the extent of the cause.  A player with a pessimistic explanatory style would see the situation as unchangeable and comment to the team, “We never win games at this stadium.”  On the other hand, a player with an optimistic explanatory style would say, “We may have lost more games than we won here in the past, but let’s turn that around today and get a win!”

Pervasive - This involves how one explains the extent of the effects.  For example, if one of your starting pitchers is put on the disabled list, the player with the pessimistic explanatory style would comment, “That blows the rest of the season for us.”  The player using an optimistic explanatory style would respond to that comment by saying, “Well, having him on the disabled list will hurt our team, but we can pick up the slack in lots of other ways.”

In fact, research has linked a pessimistic explanatory style to depression, physical illness and injury, which doesn’t help the player or the team. Studies of athletes from collegiate swimmers to professional baseball players show that explanatory style predicts athletic performance.

Using an optimistic explanatory style will help you become your team’s Glue Guy and support your team’s success. 
Make it your personal goal to become your team’s Glue Guy!  
 
Source: The Happiness Advantage by Shawn Achor