I am afraid of failure.
This is not something I am proud of and it stops me from starting projects that I want to do. I will procrastinate even the simple things so I won’t have to look failure in the face.
Failure is something that can take our motivation and throw it into the trash if we are not careful. So, the question is how can we keep our motivation up after we have suffered a setback?
The answer is in a book that I am currently reading. It’s called “The Fighter’s Mind” by Sam Sheridan.
In one of his chapters, he interviews Freddie Roach who is a former boxer and is now a boxing trainer. In the chapter, he talks about how he failed at boxing because he believed that losing, that failure, was unacceptable.
At one point in the book, Freddie starts telling the audience about one of his trainees named Manny Pacquiao.
For Manny, he could walk away from a fight that he lost and be okay with it while Freddie would get upset and not do well in his next fight because he had been defeated.
“Why did a loss for Manny become a positive thing and a loss for Freddie become a negative one? (Sheridan, 30)”
The answer that he gave was simple. It makes sense.
Freddie said, “Manny knows that every fight has a winner and a loser, and sometimes it’s not his night (Sheridan, 30).”
He continued, “[Getting knocked out] didn’t hurt Manny. It made him better. He learned from it, he knows it could happen.”
When I read that part. I realized that this story works well with motivation. It’s a mental game that we have to constantly look at.
If we believe that we are on top of the world and that nothing is going to pull us down, then when we do get pulled down we don’t handle it well.
Just like when Freddie got knocked out in a fight, the next fight he was beatable because he had gotten beaten. His worse fears happened.
Manny was able to get back up and say, “It’s okay that I lost. It just wasn’t my night.”
In order to handle setbacks or defeats, we have to start now and tell ourselves that we won’t win all the time. There will be times when we get “knocked out” in a way and we have to start from the bottom.
That shouldn’t stop us from achieving our dreams and striving to be better.
In order for motivation to have the ultimate effect, we need to realize that we might fail but that is okay. We can pick ourselves back up and try again.
