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.”
