Failure as a Cornerstone

There are many things in my life that I have learned because for the greater majority of my years I played competitive volleyball. You’re probably thinking, “What the heck does volleyball have to do with anything?” And that’s fair.

But if you’ve ever played a sport, coached a sport, or perhaps even loved a sport, you know what I’m talking about. I learned more about life in small microcosms on the court than I ever did in a classroom, from teachers or from friends. In fact, it wouldn’t be untrue to say that volleyball has shaped the person I am and my understanding of the world around me in ways I never would have experienced if it weren’t for the people I met and the trials I went through as an athlete.

Back home in Colorado, I was sort of a self-made millionaire in the sport. I started from pretty much nothing, no connections, no raw talent, nothing, and became one of the top players in my region and gained the last spot on the number three team in the nation by my senior year. That’s a little brag-ish but I can’t tell the story if I don’t boast a little of my accomplishment, and hey, I’m damn proud of it.

Anyways, back to the story. When I was thirteen, I had my first introduction to the volleyball world. I had never played before, but my mom was always a star volleyball athlete in high school and college. With me as her first born kid, she didn’t know much about the club world yet, but we had to start somewhere. The only club she knew of was Front Range – the most elite club in our region. But… we didn’t really understand the gravity of that.

So I, at the ripe age of thirteen, showed up at the Front Range tryouts. I’m wearing yellow shorts with bows on the side, a t-shirt, and sneakers. I walk into the gym with my mom – just in time for several giant girls my age to walk past me decked out in the full enchilada: spandex, knee pads, Mizuno volleyball shoes, ankle braces, and Front Range t-shirts. If you can picture these badass thirteen year old girls walking in the doors in slow motion with their glimmering gear and Digable Planets “Rebirth of Slick” playing as they strut past little dorky me in my yellow shorts… then you have a good picture of that moment.

I’m assuming my mom realized how out of place I looked, but I, in my thirteen year old mind, knew no better. I just wanted to play.

So I go through the tryout. Looking back I can only imagine what I looked like. I clearly did not fit in. At all. It was basically the equivalent of you just up and trying to join the Miami Heat basketball team – showing up for tryouts like, “Oh hey ‘Bron, just thought I’d pop by for a quick game with you and the boys.” That was me. Yellow bows on my shorts and all.

After the tryout, the head coach came up to me and my mom to inform me, surprise surprise, I wasn’t going to be placed on a team. My mom and I walked back to the car. I have this habit of getting my hopes up as if everything is going to go the way I want it to no matter what. It makes dreams coming true all the sweeter and dreams getting crushed all the more devastating. Anyways, this was one of those moments – where you just kind of think you’ll get lucky, no matter how far-fetched it was.

As my mom and I sat in the car, my mom waited for my reaction. Just as she began to try and comfort me, I turned to her and said these words:

“Someday, they’ll want me.”

Mom just looked at me, looked at the road, and drove us home.

I cried in my room that night. As I buried my face in my pillow, I remembered with embarrassment about how stupid I felt at the tryout and how out-of-place I felt being told I didn’t make it. This is the thing – even as a thirteen-year-old I demonstrated this vital life lesson right from the start.

Failure has a way of polarizing everything we knew beforehand and making it seem unreal. Because of this, we have a tendency to feel the uncomfortable creep of doubt, wrapping its dark hands around our confidence and giving it an anaconda squeeze.

But this was the lesson I learned from that experience: the biggest mistake we can make in facing the adversity of failure, is to doubt ourselves.

Think back to the last time you messed up, you were wrong, or you didn’t succeed at something you thought was a shoe-in. What was the first thing you felt? I’m sure for the majority of you the first thing you felt was doubt. It’s only natural – the minute we face failure we immediately look for why it happened, and we throw ourselves under the bus wondering, “What did I do wrong?” “Maybe I’m not as good as I thought I was” or my personally most used, “I don’t know why I ever thought I could do that in the first place.”

Well these thoughts are totally wrong. They’re the easy way out – they’re the habit we’ve lived nearly our entire lives. Throughout our lives we have gradually conditioned ourselves with the idea that if something doesn’t work out, it’s because we did something wrong, or we shouldn’t have done it in the first place. In retrospect, it leaves us constantly questioning ourselves to a point where taking a risk to be wrong is no longer worth the doubt failure brings. Eventually, we just stop taking risks all together.

This is a habit that can very swiftly take over your life, and I encourage you to practice rejecting it. It’s not easy, in fact, it feels very, very impossible. The next time you fail at something (not to sound like a jerk here but if you’re human, it will happen again and very often) tell yourself over and over statements of confidence. These are some that I use; a lot of them are from my years of volleyball:

I am a champion.

I can, I must, and I will.

I am a risk-taker.

It’s not about how many times you fall, it’s about if you get up afterwards.

One more failure is one step closer to success.

These are kind of cheesy to some; my favorite ones are quotes that remind me I’m not alone in my failure. One of my favorite speakers and author of “Eat, Pray, Love” Elizabeth Gilbert said in a TED Talks speech that failure propels us into a darkness where we are put on the outside of everything, and feel very alone in the process. The objective of many of my statements of confidence are to remind me that failure doesn’t have the power to keep me in the dark, and that if I feel alone being there, I’m far from it.

Back to my story – how does something like volleyball teach me a life lesson about failure? Well, that night I learned an important lesson I would keep with me all the way into adulthood. I would go on to work my rear end off in volleyball, climb my way up the ladder, and of course, have many many many failures in between. In fact, I think it’s safe to say I had more failures than I did successes. However, not a single one of them kept me from my goal, and it was all because I kept that mentality from my try out at Front Range at thirteen years old. No failure was going to make me feel unwanted, undeserving, or under par. I was going to show them.

Over five years later, my senior year of club volleyball, I received a call from that same head coach asking me to be the tenth player on the extremely elite Front Range 18-Black team. Coveted by many, Front Range was one of the top clubs in the nation and dominated the club volleyball scene. It had been my dream to play on this team, with the players I had looked up to as my idols for years. I said yes, and that year was the greatest year of volleyball of my life. The success of playing for Front Range amongst my heroes that year made every failure I had ever gone through completely worth it.

Over time, I had made myself an asset to the competitive volleyball world. I had worked my way up, without connections, simply from hard work and a competitive ethic. And it took countless failures to get there.

They finally wanted me.

Back to the lesson – ultimately, what did playing teach me? It taught me that doubt is the enemy, not failure. It taught me that taking long shots is what life is all about; that hard work is what gets you to the stars even when you were shooting for the moon.

This is something that is not easily learned – I don’t know if anyone truly masters it in their life. I know for me, I struggle with failure on a mainstream level and it certainly has me doubting myself quite often. Even after telling you this fantastic story of a Cinderella-esque magnitude for my club volleyball career, I have failed as a collegiate athlete for three years in a row since. I have failed to lead my team to a successful season, and I have failed myself in becoming the team player I wanted to be.

But – I try as hard as I can not to doubt my essence. Who I am is far more valuable than what I have not accomplished. It’s not to say that failure is acceptable, because anyone who has done anything at a high level in their life knows that it is something we do not expect, ever. However, failure is not always failure. It’s the next step in a long, strenuous line leading you to success, as long as you stick with it, have faith and confidence in yourself, and believe in who you are.

I struggle with this ideology. I can’t tell you how many losing seasons I’ve walked away from wondering, “What the hell is this all for? What am I doing wrong? Why do I care so much about this anyways?”

I can’t tell you I’ve found an answer. I’ve often tried to calm myself thinking, for those who say it’s just a game, that’s all it will ever be to them. This sport is my life; I put passion, heart, time, effort, money, everything into it – so I have a hard time hearing “it’s just a game.”

Athletics are just games, if you let them be just that. To me though, they are a learning experience, teaching me at every moment about myself, about others, and about the truths of the world I live in. It’s taught me how to work hard, how to trust others, how to believe in myself, how to function as a team, how to have discipline, how to make sense of questions you have about life. If that’s just a game, then I’m all for it. It’s a game I want to continue getting better at.

In the meantime, do your best to stay humble but confident. That’s what I’m working on as well – although my bragging about my self-made volleyball career during this means I need a little more humility than I thought ;)

Continue to practice conquering failure’s aftermath, because in the end, “we have nothing to fear but fear itself.”