How To Deal With Losing
You either Win or you Learn.... at least, that's what everyone says right?
Win you compete as often as Wrestlers do, you're going to lose every now and then. There's no way around it. And in a sport where you win by physically dominating your opponent, there's also no way to just write it off, nor should you be doing so. The loss is going to sting.
Everyone always says that you either win or you learn. The idea being that you're trying to figure out what you did wrong, so that you don't repeat the same mistake the next time. Using the loss to find improvement. Because your loss was obviously due to you not performing well. But that mentality has a major flaw. It implies that when you win, you've done everything correctly. Which is rarely ever the case. There's always going to be ways to improve, and that's exactly what you should be looking for after every single match. Regardless of whether you've won or lost.
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By constantly searching for improvement, regardless of the outcome of the match, you can normalize the routine. This obviously won't take all of the sting out of losing, but it will take out some of it. If you're only looking for improvement after a loss, the process becomes associated with losing, and thus difficult to work through. And an added benefit of this mentality is that by constantly looking for improvement, you should also be actually improving. And not just improving, but improving at a much faster rate than if you had waited until a loss to fix something. This is very important in a seasonal sport where you only have a small amount of time to improve each season.
Could your shot have been set up better? Did you have enough pressure on your whizzer? Did you drive all the way through your double leg? Every little detail matters. Maybe it wasn't your execution that won you the match, maybe it was that your opponent didn't defend properly. If that is the case, then the poor technique that won you your last match will probably cause you to lose your next. Why wait until then to fix it?
Today this holds true even more so because of how we all live. With today's modern technology, almost everyone has access to a video recorder on their phone. This can be a massively beneficial tool for improvement. By recording all of your matches, you can go back and dissect everything you did. You can completely eliminate the trial and error process of trying to recreate a match and then figure out where something went wrong. Having trouble finishing your low single? Go back and look at the video. Instantly pin point where the error is happening.
By focusing on the need for constant continual improvement, instead of only improving after losses, losses should not only be easier to handle, they should happen less frequently because you're fixing problems before they can negatively effect the outcome of a match.
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