We lost, but we will win!
Social media is full of stories of how team India became under-confident in the finals of Cricket World Cup. I don’t know about the players, but I was definitely in a state of panic when we lost early wickets. Why do we panic when facing potential failure? In talent shows on TV, contestants and their families often cry when they are selected as well as when they are not selected — this is perhaps due to the release of intense emotion we carry deep within. I have seen that failing to get promoted in our desired timeline generates a great sense of unhappiness and even panic in many of us in the corporate world.
In sports and other performance related activities, we know that choking under pressure hurts performance. It hurts performance so much that it can change the outcome of the game. However, the stress that comes from the keen desire to win and fear of failure is not always bad. In some cases, it can help us. In cases where the outcome is not dependent on a single performance but instead depends on sustained grind, this stress can make people to work harder and longer until they achieve the desired result.
Still, overall, I don’t think its a healthy emotion to carry on a regular basis. A life spent with this emotion on a sustained basis will hurt our overall happiness and health — failures will make us sad while success will just bring relief instead of joy.
I can think of a few reasons for this mindset:
- -There may be an animal instinct of associating failure with survival. Out in the wild, losing a fight with another animal did mean exactly that. In societies like India, where we had a history of shortage of resources, this animal instinct might have been further strengthened through conditioning
- One potential reason for this mindset could be that many of us have lived around poverty and shortage of resources. At an unconscious level, winning and survival are perhaps the same thing for many of us
- The second potential reason could be that our education system and culture promotes fixed mindset. People are either talented or not. Good performers are good because of their talented. Poor performers are poor because they lack talent. The notion of encouraging people to try, fail, learn and improve is not that common. This fixed mindset possibly is the other reason we are afraid to fail — failure essentially indicates that we are not good enough, and we will never be good enough.
- The third potential reason could be that we are too judgemental as a collective. We all had put a huge weight of expectation on our cricket team and the team knew it. We are very quick in finding fault, blaming people, attacking people at a personal level and writing them off. Cricketers are judged by the nation. At smaller scale, everyone is judged by their relatives, friends and neighbours. This judgement can bog down anyone
How do we fix this mindset: I think parents as well as educational institutes have a big role to play here in bringing systemic change in the mindset of our future generations.
As a society, we have created a few templates of what success looks like. People who are not able to meet those templates are deemed as failures in the eyes of parents and society and often as a result, in their own eyes too. We need to change this. We need to start celebrating every kind of successes. We need to encourage our children to stop comparing themselves with others and instead look at how they are improving over time.
Rather than just celebrating top performers and keep giving them opportunities, we need our schools to encourage every child to try and develop at least one skills beyond core academics. Our teachers and schools need to stop seeing poor performance or lack of interest as a failure and instead make it their mission for every child to learn how to put efforts into something and get better at it over time
We need to teach our children to be kind and fair to each other and not be judgemental.
If choking is a natural human instinct, is it really possible to change it? I think it is — with right training and mindset, behavioral changes are possible. We have ample examples of that evident around us today. While it is common to see teams and people choking under pressure, we also have ample examples of teams and individuals who are able to rise to the occasion and perform without fear. In India, I am really glad to see that more and more fearless leaders are emerging across all domains like sports, politics, business, innovation, science, medicine and more. Our children have more role models to follow today than ever before.
