High Performance Mindset | Learn from World-Class Leaders, Consultants, Athletes & Coaches about Mindset - 87: In Praise of Failure with Dr. Mark Anshel

Episode Date: January 29, 2017

Dr. Mark Anshel talks about his new book, In Praise of Failure: The Value of Overcoming Mistakes in Sports and Life, in this podcast interview. Dr. Anshel has written 12 other books, and over 145 research articles. He has applied his concepts with college athletes and coaches, law enforcement, exercisers, sports rehabilitation settings, performing artists and corporate leaders. Mark came to study failure from his own experiences failing. He says we are taught to see failure as harmful, but failure should be viewed as feedback. Failure is a perception, meaning failure to one person is success to another. As leaders, coaches, parents and teachers, Dr. Anshel suggests that we should criticize behavior, not character when discussing failure. When giving feedback, we should praise first, and then discuss what the person did wrong by focusing on only 1 or 2 things. The key is to give people hope – that is what we all need, he suggests.  You can reach Dr. Anshel at [e-mail]. * Tweet this: “Failure is a stepping stone to something better.” Mark Anshel via @Mentally_Strong * Tweet this:  “You need to experience failure to appreciate success.” Mark Anshel via @Mentally_Strong * Tweet this: “We don’t learn unless we fail. Failure is feedback.” Mark Anshel via @Mentally_Strong * Tweet this: “We need failure to learn and continue to be self-motivated.” Mark Anshel via @Mentally_Strong * Tweet this: “Give yourself a break once in a while. Don’t be so self-critical.” Mark Anshel via @Mentally_Strong   To order, Dr. Anshel’s book, In Praise of Failure you can visit Amazon HERE. He also mentions a few other books in this interview including Between Parent and Child by Haim Ginott and Teacher & Child by Haim Ginott. 

Welcome to High Performance Mindset with Dr. Sindra Kampoff. Do you want to reach your full potential, live a life of passion, go after your dreams? Each week we bring you strategies and interviews to help you ignite your mindset. Let's bring on Sindra. Welcome to the High Performance Mindset Podcast. This is your host, Sindra Kampoff, and I'm grateful that you're here, ready to listen to an interview with Dr. Mark Anshul. Now today, Mark is talking about a very important topic of failure. And one of the reasons I had Mark on this podcast is because recently I read his book, In Praise of Failure, The Value of Overcoming Mistakes in Sports and Life. And as I was reading this book, it made me think quite a bit about how I approach failure, how I define failure, and also how sometimes I beat myself up after times I failed. And it also really helped me conceptualize how I help my clients, lead

athletes, entrepreneurs, leaders, championship teams, how I help them define failure and overcome failure when they feel like they've experienced it. So Dr. Mark Angell is very well versed on this topic. He's written a book just this year on failure. He's also written 12 other books in sport and performance psychology as well as 145 research articles. So in this interview, he really talks about how he came to study failure from his own experiences failing. And he says that we should, from a very young age, we're taught to see failure as harmful. But instead, failure should be viewed as feedback. He also describes how failure is a perception, meaning failure to one person is success to another. He provides lots of different feedback and advice in terms of how leaders,

coaches, parents, and teachers can respond to people that they work with when they have failed. And here are a few of my favorite quotes for you just to listen for. Here are a few of the things that I really enjoyed. He said, failure is a stepping stone to something better. He says, we need to experience failure to appreciate success. And we don't learn unless we fail. So it's really a stepping stone to something better. So I look forward to hearing your feedback on Dr. Anshul's interview.

You can head over to iTunes. We'd love for you to rate the podcast. You can head over there and just give us a star rating or a comment. And as always, we'd love to hear from you. You can reach out to me via email at syndra at syndracampoff.com or I'm always on Twitter at mentally underscore strong. So without further ado, let's bring on Dr. Anshul. So Mark, I'm excited to have you on the podcast, High Performance Mindset. So welcome to the podcast. Thank you, Syndra. It's great to be here. Thank you for your invitation. I'm looking forward to talking to you about your book, In Praise of Failure, something that I just finished reading. So I'm looking forward to

that and just picking your brain about failure and how to help us deal with failure a little bit better. Absolutely. And given this culture we live in of perfectionism and not handling failure really well, I'm hoping this is very important information for your listeners. That sounds great, Mark. So just to get us started, tell us a little bit about your passion and what you do now. Well, I am actually a retired professor. I am Professor Emeritus at Middle Tennessee State University after a 33-year career in higher education. And I'm writing, which is my passion.

I write books, college textbooks. And the latest one I've written is the one we're talking about today in Praise of Failure, The Value of Overcoming Mistakes in Sports and in Life. So I am active. I have contracts with other publishers for future books. and it's an exciting part of my career, an extension of my career, in fact. How many more books do you have planned? Well, one publication with one publisher is under contract, and that's with the American Psychological Association. I'm the editor-in-chief of a book called Handbook of Sport and Exercise Psychology.

And it'll be two volumes, about 80 chapters completed, and hopefully due to the publisher by the end of this year. So it'll be a busy year for me. That sounds like an amazing accomplishment, not to only just write 10 in their textbooks. They're not easy to write. That's true. I'm blessed with the ability to communicate in writing and print, and I just have always enjoyed the writing process

and have a number of research articles out there in addition to textbooks and book chapters. So it is obviously something you have to feel passionate about or you just don't want to sit down in front of the computer and get the job done. If you have a story to tell and you think the story you have to tell is going to make a difference in the lives of others, that provides a lot of incentive. Well, just tell us a little bit about how you got to Middle Tennessee State and just a little bit about your journey before we jump in and talk about failure. Yeah. Well, I was a major in physical education at Illinois State University and was a fitness director at the Y in Montreal, Canada in my first career.

So it was great to make a difference in the health and wellness of people that I was leading in exercise classes and teaching sports skills to their children. And I loved it, but I did miss the learning process and missed the campus life. And so I went back to grad school, both at McGill University in Montreal and then Florida State University in Tallahassee, where I got a doctorate in performance psychology and sports psychology. So the journey has really been an opportunity to really help people grow and learn and overcome failure, actually. So it's been a great opportunity to help others. That's always been my mission. Mark, one of the reasons I picked up your book and Prates of Failure was because of what I see in terms of my work and a lot of pro athletes I work with, they have such high

standards for themselves and perfectionism tendencies. They have, I'm just thinking even high level athletes, high school athletes I work with, college athletes, they really struggle with perfectionism and failure. So tell us a little bit about how you became to study this. You're, you know, you've already written 10 books. Why this one about failure? Well, I guess there are a couple of things to say about why I write about failure. Number one is my own personal history in failure, in which I was not a particularly academically endowed student in my primary and secondary education. And struggled, struggled academically. I'm not saying I had a learning disorder, but I certainly did not pass an exam very often.

And I feel that a lot of people struggle with trying to meet standards that other people set for them. And so to have an experience failure and then overcoming it, which is part B, overcoming that failure when I got into a small college to develop my study skills, to develop the intellectual curiosity you need to have to get through a graduate education, where we're always very successful at the college and postgraduate level. So, well, you've got to experience the downside of your mission, of where you want to go, the difference you want to make in people's lives. You've got to experience a little bit of struggle and a sense of failure, if you will, to appreciate your achievements and overcome those initial failures. In terms of why failure, the other thing is we live in a very critical culture. We are a blend of different cultures that come to this country from overseas, from various countries, and we are taught to succeed, that success is the only goal we really need to have to get what we want in life.

And I think that that can be done to a very harmful extent where we're struggling with being all things to all people. We want to make a difference. Now, you, Sandra, just mentioned in this conversation the number of professional athletes you've dealt with who really struggle with failure and really don't consider failure even an option. And, you know, that is a learning mentality. We are taught to expect and appreciate and strive for perfection. And where failure is something that is harmful, should not be experienced, and we should feel bad about it if we do experience it. And this book is about all the reasons why failure is a good thing and contributes to achievement.

I can't wait to dive in more in terms of how do we teach ourselves to appreciate failure. Maybe to start off, just tell us like how you define it because as I was thinking about this interview and reading your book, it's like, well, what really is failure? And as I think about times I failed, I started even questioning, well, was that failure or not? So just tell us how you define it. Yeah, well, first of all, the first thing to think about failure is if it's a perception. What you consider failure for you may be success for someone else. Maybe a teacher is proud of the way, or a coach is proud of the way you've improved over time, or that you're staying with the task despite not succeeding initially and being perhaps having a losing record or not being successful in your definition

of success initially, you have learned and used feedback constructively and have become better at that skill or at that task. That happened to me where primary and secondary education was not successful. I wasn't an idiot either. I was, but I was getting C's, but I was not getting A's and B's. And if I wanted a college education, I needed those A's and B's to fall into place much more so than they did. But I was able to overcome that. So the formal definition is experiencing a process or outcome that does not meet one's own or another person's expectations. And the reasons you don't meet some standard or someone else's expectations may be the lack of effort,

poor skills, bad luck, or some situational factors in sport, the opponent could have been better. But I think we have to be very careful that failure is not viewed as something harmful. And when it is harmful, that is we lost the game or we made an error, we failed at something, that it be viewed as a stepping stone to something better. And that's what separates great athletes from mediocre athletes or those who succeed and go to the top for those who struggle and drop out. That it's really a journey that to fail is a stepping stone to something bigger and better. You know, Mark, you said something about when you were describing the formal definition that failure is when we don't meet our own expectations or another person's expectations.

Do you think that we should work to manage those expectations that we have? And do you think that contributes to our perception of failure or not? It really does contribute to failure. The perception of failure is a bad thing. I'm going to be a little critical right now with people who are unfairly judgmental toward others in a submissive position. For example, coaches who demand perfection from their athletes, parents who demand perfection from their athletes, parents who demand perfection from their children, teachers who demand perfection from their students. All of the people I just mentioned in power positions are making very harsh and often unfair

and even premature judgments toward people in submissive positions. And instead of kind of rooting them on and being a cheerleader for people who are at least trying and giving 100% toward being successful, we get critical, we get judgmental, we give people a reason to fear failure, which we'll talk about later in this interview. And we are unfairly harsh in our judgments. There is something called neurotic perfectionism in the psychology literature. And it's about people who not only expect perfection of themselves, they expect perfection of others at an extremely high level in which they do not view mistakes or making errors very desirable.

So as children, we actually develop a personality trait called fear of failure because we see that there are some very negative and harsh consequences to not meeting the expectations of others and others who call our efforts failure. And that's harsh and premature. So what advice would you have for us, you know, those parents or coaches? Do you have anything off the top of your head in terms of we shouldn't expect our sons or daughters to be perfect? Well, you know, imagine, I'm going to give you a scenario and let you know just how difficult it is to be non-judgmental in how we expect others to be perfect and not fail. Imagine being blindfolded and being given a set of darts and being asked to hit a bullseye.

And so there are five darts you're given and you're trying to hit a bullseye on the bullseye affixed to the wall. And your performance doesn't improve one iota, not one bit. The errors, a number of inches away from the bullseye are as extreme in the first toss as in the fifth toss. There's no learning occurring because there's no visual feedback. But if I was to tell you with the blindfold on and another five darts to throw at the target, how many inches or even centimeters you are away up and down, left and right from the bullseye, your performance will get better. So your initial performance, whether we're using the blindfold and giving feedback or using the blindfold and not giving feedback, all that matters in terms

of our ability to learn and not to fear failure. But we are a culture in which we're not very good about giving the feedback, and that's called learning. So when you ask, well, what advice can we give people in power positions in which failure can be beneficial, being a good teacher, a good mentor, someone who gives good feedback in which failure can be beneficial, being a good teacher, a good mentor, someone who gives good feedback in which the person can, instead of feeling punished by it, feeling a sense of growth and development from it. And that's the first thing we have to do. The second thing is expectations.

We live in an error-prone world. We are not perfect. Humans are less perfect than machines, and we have to be very careful before we judge others on their performance too harshly and unfairly. That's really good, Mark. Your book is called In Praise of Failure, so why don't you just tell us some of the benefits of failure? You've already mentioned the importance of learning and growth. You know, could you expand on that and tell us a little bit more? Yeah, certainly we don't learn unless we fail. I mean, getting what's called performance feedback is one of several well-defined elements we need or components we need to learn. And so we're in a position of giving feedback, and I've mentored students in improving their writing as a professor.

I've given students feedback in terms of the proper study skills they need to be able to perform successfully on exams, especially exams that are essay in nature in which they have to develop concepts and reflect on the content correctly. I would say learning is one of the benefits attached to failure is that we get from failure, we get better. We learn. Learning is defined as a permanent change of behavior. And we is defined as a permanent change of behavior. We can't have a permanent change of behavior unless we make mistakes. So it's the mistakes we learn from that allows us to improve.

The other benefit of failure is self-motivation. We need motivation to make the effort to practice and improve our performance. So motivation and learning are two outcomes from failure that if the feedback from our failure is positive, specific, quantitative, and ongoing, it's continuous, not constant, by the way, but continuous, but it's regular, then constant, by the way, but continuous, but it's regular, then we will benefit from early failure. That's good. When I'm thinking about how I apply it to myself or the clients I work with, I see when someone has a bad game, they're more motivated

for the next game. And sometimes that next game is their career best game because they're upset that the game didn't go very well. Yeah. And if you're looking at elite athletes, they are especially vulnerable to having very harsh responses to not winning. One of the things that coaches do so wrongly is that they view winning as the sole criterion for failure or success, as opposed to the components of the athlete's performance that contribute to that outcome. So, for example, let's say you're a quarterback on the Minnesota Vikings and you hit on 20 of 30 passes, but you lost the game. Well, you're going to be self-critical as an elite athlete that you didn't hit on 30 out of 30 passes and won the game. So going back to my earlier point of the decision makers, who tells us when we are failures and when we're successes?

When do we know the difference and who is the source of that information? I think one area of coaching that needs to be improved is that we inform our athletes of the things they did well, the things that they should feel good about before they get too self-critical. I used to consult pro athletes in rugby as a sports psychologist when I lived in Australia. And one of the things I noticed about the elite athletes in rugby was that they would be very critical if they weren't perfect. One guy in particular, when I asked him after the game, after he had a chance to relax and recover and all, you know, about how he thought he played, he said he was terrible. But turns out when I asked him all the good things he did,

the list went on and on and on, because we both knew by the end of the conversation he was very successful. But he was just so harsh that it wasn't perfect, and it didn't end with a victory, resulted in the perception of failure to this guy. So I think we have to be, especially kids, especially youth sports, are very much susceptible to dropping out

when they view themselves as failures. When children say to themselves, I don't do this very well. My skills are not very good in this sport. They don't continue to play. You know, the self-esteem is very fragile. The extent to which you value yourself as a person, as an athlete, is very fragile and susceptible to destruction, self-destruction.

If people go around, athletes go around saying, I'm not very good at this. I don't have the skill. I don't have the ability. So we have to be very careful before we go around as adults and coaches and teachers and pin these labels on these kids as failures before we give them a chance to learn and get better. Yesterday, I was working with a high school hockey player. And he told me that on offense, he's just he's fearing making a mistake. And so he doesn't play big, he doesn't play aggressive. So, you know, you had mentioned, Mark, how fear is connected to failure. Tell us how you see that and what your thoughts are about

that. Yeah, it's a great point. Because fear leads to anxiety, which leads to muscle tension and a misorientation of attentional focusing and concentration. So the whole fear issue is very, very much a part of the reason athletes don't get better and often even quit sport. There is a personality trait called fear of failure. And it's based on the contention that we do not handle failure very well. We are afraid of it. We have past experiences that lead us to think that failing will harm us, will be something very undesirable, and even embarrass us. And I think we have to do a much better job to our students and our coach and our athletes

by informing them that failure, that is to say not meeting standards and expectations, is part of the journey. It's part of what we want you to be able to handle. And that handling of failure is called coping. Coping with perceived failure is about when to think about it and deal with it and confront it and when to discount it and not be overly concerned about it. I've worked with a couple of police departments in my career, and one of the things that they fear, of course, is they're making mistakes on the job, some of which can lead to either self-harm, in which they get very hurt or killed, or they harm someone else

and cause great damage, including loss of life. So they have to be able to know when to cope using what I call approach strategies and getting into the situation and dealing with the situation head on very quickly, or when to discount it, when to let it go. Your elite athletes have to do the same thing. When does an error become so important that they have to make sure it never happens again? And when is it something that's beyond their control? There is something in the sport called an opponent, and those opponents want to win too. And sometimes they're going to beat you. They're going to be better than you on a given day.

You know, opponent A will be so far better than opponent B that opponent A has every right to claim victory and to be very successful and to cause you to lose. Is that losing failure? Well, they were the better team. Perhaps what you could do is learn from your performance and do a better job of preparation. What did you learn? You look at football players and they come off the field and on the sidelines, almost invariably, those football players are talking to each other, talking to a particular member of the defense or offense

or talking to a coach about getting feedback on what is going on on the field that we need to know and incorporate so we could use that information to promote success for the rest of the game. So, yeah, how we deal with failure, whether we approach it, we avoid it. Fear of failure is something that is taught. It's learned. It's something that athletes and all performers are something that they have to be able to control. And it's potentially very destructive. You know, I'm thinking about how kind of what you're talking about, especially how we define failure as losing. There's so many things that are outside of our control in terms of if we

lose or we win. Yeah, we can't control the opponent, right? So what would you tell a team or, you know, I'm thinking about how what we're talking about just isn't for athletes and coaches. It can be for anyone, you know, business leaders. So let's just say your team experiences a difficult loss or a setback. how would you suggest that they approach that? First of all, after a performance bout, that bout can be an event. It can be a situation. Most of the time, you need a little period of recovery. You need a time to just settle down and allow your emotions to reside and to become even. If we don't allow for recovery and we go on the offensive, on the attack immediately after an unpleasant situation, then our emotions will prevent us from remembering the situation, remembering what we've learned from it.

So I won't call it relaxation, but certainly before the coach goes into the locker room and psychs up the players for the rest of the game or gives performance feedback too suddenly after a situation that was undesirable, give the athlete time to settle down and be receptive to the messages that you want to provide that athlete. The other thing is to make sure athletes are receptive to the information. And that means starting with praise, starting with a positive. I could see, quote, I could see you're doing all that you can to stop the other team from scoring, end of quote. I know you're giving 100%, Susan, end of quote.

You are doing some things really well out there. I like the tackling. I like the placement of your pitches for the most part. They're going well. All right. So we have some things that are going well. So why, now I'm speaking to you, Cinder, why are coaches not starting positive? Because of their own emotions, their own need to deliver information and feedback. And they're delivering feedback sometimes to athletes or to workers, to performers in any area prematurely before the worker or athlete is prepared and receptive to the information. So if you're going to discuss failure with someone, that's not a problem. Start with a positive and make them receptive to the message.

Tell them what is going well first. Because right now, immediately after performance, they're pumped up, they're stressed, they're anxiety prone. And all that is creating a lot of self-talk in their mind, in their head, that's interfering with processing information. First, settle them down, relax them, compliment them on something that's going well, and then propose one or two, not much more than that, one or two issues or concerns that they need to know and remember to prevent future failure. Okay. So take time. Don't do it immediately after the failure. Start with praise and then just address one or two issues or concerns you have. And we're talking a lot about coaches and athletes here,

but I'm thinking of how this applies to leaders who have to give their, you know, their employees feedback or teachers who have to give their students feedback. You know, it just isn't, isn't just athletes and coaches that we're talking to or talking about. That's perfectly correct. And, and it's great that there is such transfer that leading in sport has great implications of leading in business and leading in education and any business venture. The same principles, you know, because the human machine works the same and very similarly,

emotionally and notoriously in all these performance areas. You've got to know when to go deep and get critical and be constructive and when to leave it alone. And sometimes you have to be patient in leaving a situation alone. It doesn't have to be long, but I've seen coaches come into locker rooms. I've seen business people, leaders, managers in business deliver very harsh feedback in meetings without soliciting feedback or input from the recipient, from the athletes, from the workers, from the students. And so we attempt to be these excellent deliverers of information, but sometimes that is a process,

and we have to reduce our own anxiety as leaders or reduce our own sense of emotion and even a sense of betrayal. That's the word. Yeah. You know, the leaders and coaches and business folks in leadership positions often feel betrayed by their subordinates for not performing better. And I think there's a process for getting people proper motivation and commitment to make change in their behavior. And Mark, what would you suggest in terms of, we've been talking about how leaders can help the people they lead do with failure and give them feedback, but what about us as individuals? What would you suggest? What advice would you give us in terms of how we can handle failure, how we should approach

it? Well, I'm going to get very personal with you and admit something about my own situation that I think has a lot of implications for your listeners and for others. And that is give yourself a break once in a while and stop being so self-critical. Because if one of the areas that I continue to struggle with, and I've been blessed with great success in a number of areas in life, and I won't get into that right now, but I have no reason to feel that I have failed in my career, and every reason to feel just the opposite, that we not be self-critical over everything and realize that patience is a virtue, which is a cliche, but nevertheless, very true. We need to be patient, not only with the people we supervise and who we adore and love,

but also for ourselves, that we are not too self-critical. Because if we're self-critical, we're going to develop that fear of failure personality trait. And, you know, the result of having a very strong fear of failure, which also transfers into high anxiety, is quitting. You know, it's so painful to experience failure, to not achieve and meet our expectations and to be self-critical as a result that we just stop trying and we just want to keep ourselves out of that environment. So I am sure there are some very excellent performers in all areas of our culture who left the dream, departed from the dream of success at the highest level because they were

impatient with themselves and were included they were not good enough and I think that that's something that we have to really overcome and we're taught to be self-critical this is something that we learned from childhood John was a bad boy Susan is a bad girl we have to really do a better job of giving kids a sense of hope about how things will turn out better and to be patient about it. How would you suggest us to do that? Do you have any thoughts or advice for us? I do. First of all, I'm going to recommend some reading. There's an unfortunately deceased psychiatrist by the name of Gannott, G-I-N-N-O-T-T, Haim, H-A-I-M, Haim Gannott, who wrote a few books back in the 60s and 70s, but still so incredibly relevant to how we treat each other in terms of giving feedback.

The book's title is Between Parent and Child. He also wrote Between Parent and Teenager in the third book called Teacher and Child. And they're all three are brilliant. One of the things I learned is praise and criticize behavior, not character or personality. So I might say, you know, Ginger, I did not really enjoy the way you carried out the assignment. You clearly could have been more successful in the way you attacked this particular task. You know, I asked for three pages, double spaced, then you gave me one. And this could have been done much more efficiently.

And I'm going to ask you to do it again. As opposed to, Sandra, that was a terrible piece of work. You know, you're looking really dumb right now. You've disappointed me and I think you should be embarrassed about the kind of work you're doing. So you see the two different angles here, and you talk to people this way in all lines of work. I remember a police captain in Chicago, which is where I was born and raised, a police captain telling his subordinate, hey, you idiot, don't you know you're supposed to do this and that and the other? You jerk. And the name-calling is quite accurate. He did not hesitate, this captain,

by making very character-destroying comments and words to his subordinate. And that's abusive and also very ineffective. So when you say, how do we use failure more constructively, let's not punish people for not meeting the expectations of what they're doing well. This is a sophisticated, changing human behavior is a very sophisticated science and it doesn't happen easily. Let's help people make those changes. So if you're going to give somebody feedback, do that on their behavior, not on their character. I think that's a really good point that anybody can apply. Another, another point is try to give them what they wish for, not necessarily what you're prepared to give them.

So I might say to a player, an athlete who's not performing well or not starting, you know, Jane, I know you want to be able to get in there and play, and I want to give you some playing time. Right now, we've got Audrey, who's playing better at that position, and she's got to be our starter at this point. Let's keep working at your skills and see if we can't get you in eventually at some point when you could start contributing to the team to a greater extent. And so you're giving the athlete or any performer what they wish for,

what they want, what they hope to achieve, but not promising that you're going to give them everything they want as well. You give them what they hope for rather than what you're prepared to actually do. Without a sense of hope about what I can achieve to be better. And one of my former schoolmates from Chicago was the assistant police chief of Chicago Police Department. And I asked them why all the destruction and all the terrible things that are happening, all these kids getting killed and all the guns. And he gave me a couple of answers, one of which was alarming, that to be a member of a certain gang, you actually have to kill somebody with a gun. It's really alarming to hear something like that. But he also said these are kids who were never taught the value of hope, of feeling

the promise of something better to come if they apply themselves in a certain way. And without hope, without a sense of future, then the perceptions of failure will persist. And there's going to be absolutely no sense of promise of a better tomorrow. And so it's this helplessness and hopelessness, especially the hopelessness in which the hopelessness is it's not going to get better. It's bad now. I have no control over my destiny at this time. That's helplessness no matter what I do. But hopelessness is it's not going to get better.

I'm not going to be able to ever achieve, ever get out of the culture of, and just not contributing to the community. The only way I can see myself getting better at what I do is by being a better gang member. And that means doing what the gang tells me to do. So this assistant police chief said it's extremely culturally driven and all the violence we're having out there in the streets. And these are kids, and they are often just teenagers, who are totally wrapped up in getting through the day alive, as opposed to extensive failure, not achieving what they want to achieve with time. And the only way to achieve what they want to achieve is with a weapon, unfortunately. Yeah, so it's really a matter of giving people hope. You asked, Cinderella, the issue of how do we get people to feel hope and how do we prevent

hopelessness? And I think it's very important to give people a sense of control over their destiny. And this is where good coaching, good mentoring comes in, whether it's the business community, sport, or exercise. I used to be a fitness director at the Y in my 20s. And one of the things I noticed that people who dropped out was they had no more hope of losing weight or getting fitter. They just felt that the expectations of the fitness classes were so high and everyone was there to kind of show off and model their improved bodies that the new arrival, the unfit person, the overweight person fell totally out of place. And there was a total

sense of failure there when they wouldn't get fit and thinner in a hurry, like in a few weeks. And the dropouts just accumulate when people don't feel they're going to get better. So, you know, the bottom line is to get people a sense of hope, give them good feedback, feedback based on performance, praise when you can, and give people a sense of accomplishment when they've got, when they have improved. You know, I think, Mark, really the major argument I think we're making today and the theme of what we're talking about is that we should condition ourselves to see failure as a good thing, that it can provide us feedback, and it's an important part of us moving forward. And you said earlier that we need failure to be self-motivated and to be successful. So tell us, how do you think we can condition ourselves to see failure as a good thing?

You know, I like using quotes, and one of the things that I really liked was something that Abraham Lincoln said. He says, whatever you are, be a good one. And I think that if we view failure as part of the journey of being competent and achieving at the next level, but always remembering that failure is inevitable, that we're going to be much better off than if we fear failure and view it as something that's very undesirable and even unnecessary when in fact it is necessary. We also have to remember that failure is a perception. And we have to stop calling things failure when, in fact, they're a building block. And that's one of the biggest things that's culturally based. You've heard the expression,

failure is not an option. Well, yeah, if you're trying to put three to five astronauts on top of a rocket and send them off to the moon or send them off on a space station, then, of course, failure is not an option because their lives are at stake. But we are very rarely in that position. And the other thing about failure is to always remember plan B. If you have plan B ready to go, the chance of failure is far, far less likely to occur. But I'm going back to my early main point, Cindra, is that we are too ready, too prepared, too motivated to call something failure when it's really not. And to remember what we've achieved,

what we've done well, to balance the perception of failure, the not meeting the standards with other opportunities in which we did meet standards. Okay, so I got a D in history, but an A in English. Okay, I got to work on my history, but I feel great about my English grade. So what can we hang our hat on? What can we respond to that says there are areas of my life, areas of this particular performance that I feel good about, that I am getting better at, that I'm learning and improving on? And that's where we have to get our unskilled younger people to recognize that the journey isn't over until it's over. Thomas Jefferson said, I'm a great believer in luck. I find the harder I work, the more I have of it. I think it goes back to what you're saying earlier about not being so judgmental on yourself when things don't go perfectly or, you know, when it doesn't go as you

planned or as you expected. So Mark, you'll appreciate that everybody on the podcast, I always ask them to share a story about a time they failed and what they learned from it. And the reason I do that is because to kind of demonstrate the same point that you have throughout this book is that, you know, there's a lot we can learn from failure and it's not a bad thing. So just tell us a story about yourself, a time that didn't go so great for you. Oh, the list goes on and on. Well, I mean, it could be as harmless as an incident in which I struck out four times in the game and learned from a coach on the other team of all things that one problem having, he said, while you've struck out four times in this game,

I was about 14 or 15 at the time, is that you're not anticipating the pitch. So where I saw failure as the primary explanation, or outcome rather. The outcome is failure and striking out four times. What I was able to do is take a message. You're not anticipating the pitch. You're reacting to the pitch. And you've got to think to yourself, swing, even before the ball, before you decide to swing. Think swing.

And sure enough, all major league hitters know that they have to be in position to swing rather than react to the pitch and to react sometimes quite late and not be successful as a hitter. So that's a small sport example. But I think for me, in terms of my life and why I even wrote the book was the transfer from elementary and secondary school to college. And I think going from being a mediocre student to one who made dean's list every semester of college and graduate school, that to me was eye-opening. Not only was, well, let me put it this way. I've studied so hard that no one was going to take away the opportunity I had of being a professional in whatever area I wanted to go, and in this case, it was teaching.

You know, if I had teaching and even coaching in mind, but mostly teaching, it was because I made the effort to get the grades I needed to get. And after three years of being a fitness director and teaching sports skills at the Y in recreation, I decided that I had such a satisfying career in higher education as a college student that I wanted to go back to school and get my master's and doctorate to be a professor. And even now, when we have these reunions, people cannot believe that Anshul has a Ph.D. It just is way beyond the comprehension that this guy,

who was pulling all C's and a few D's in high school went on to get both a master's and a doctorate and publish 140 research articles and write 10 books. Amazing. And that to me was really just eye-opening. And I feel blessed every day that I'm able to reflect on this level of accomplishment. I don't talk about it much, but I feel it. And I think that it shows your resiliency and how you've practiced what you preach in terms of what you've been writing about in the book that you learned from the failures as you went along.

So, all right, the book we've been talking about is called In Praise of Failure, The Value of Overcoming Mistakes in Sports and Life. Tell us how we can get a hold of that book, Mark. Thank you for that, Sandra. I do know that Amazon.com sells it because I've seen it on there as long as you put in my full name of Mark Anshel, A-N-S-H-E-L. And, of course, the publisher, who's Roman and Littlefield, their main office is out of Maryland, but Roman and Littlefield, of course, have a website like all publishers do, and you can get through that as well.

It's in hardback, and I'm only speculating the price, but I like to think that the message there is profound and something that I've discovered is not published very often. I did my best to look at other books that were in this genre of failure, and there are very few out there. So I hope it makes a difference for some people. Absolutely. It made a difference for me already, so I appreciate that. And I'll make sure for those who are listening to put those websites and those books listed on the show notes page under Mark's interview. So you can head over to Dr. Sindra. It's D-R-C-I-N-D-R-A. So you've given us a lot, Mark, in terms of how to see failure as part of a journey to help us get to the next level. And it's really a perception.

So just tell us, you know, what final advice do you have for, for those people who are listening? No, I guess one of the things I want to emphasize is that be patient with yourself. We all need extra time and practice and feedback to improve and get better. We lack patience often, often because others are prompting us to do something better. And we don't want to lose, we want to win. And we get very self-critical when things don't go our way very quickly. You know, I used to be

in the fitness industry and people quit their exercise after just a couple of months trying because it didn't go well enough. It wasn't satisfying enough. They didn't lose enough weight quickly enough. And so we have this lack of patience. And if you have a sense of the need to achieve is something that we all have, but it takes time to achieve, then we're going to successfully not view failure as so inevitable and so hostile and negative for us. So that's very, very important. Be patient with yourself. Obviously, look for the good in others. Praise when you can. We're all on the same team here. We're all taking the same journey and give people opportunities to improve.

Recognize competence. One of the things we don't do well is appreciate competent behavior and achievement. We probably just need to be more aware of the need to praise others from competent performance and achieving at the next level. And I think we're going to find people far more receptive to our message if they realize that we're on the same journey. And how could people reach out to you, Mark, if they're interested in connecting with you in any way?

Okay, well, what I don't have is a consultancy. I'm a writer and I enjoy that and I'm under contract to write a handbook for a very large publisher. But I am open to email. And if anyone wants to write me my personal email, I have a university email, but I prefer to use the personal one in this situation. I'm going to give you that email address. It's my three initials, MHA, followed by 333 at comcast.net. MHA333 at comcast.net. And I promise a response to every inquiry. And it's free. This is not for money. This is a free service for anyone who would like

to contact me. That's excellent, Mark. There's so many things that I wrote down when you were talking. Some takeaways that I just took from it was the importance of really seeing failure as part of our journey, that it's helping us get to the next level, and how it can help us be motivated. It can help us learn in this building block just to help us get to where we're intended to go. Mark, I just want to thank you so much for your time and your energy and all of the books that you've written

to help people just learn more about how they can better themselves and how they can use the principles you talked about today. So I appreciate what you've contributed to our field. Yeah, you are more than welcome. It's been a pleasure to be your guest today, Cedric. Thank you, Mark.

Thank you for listening to High Performance Mindset. If you like today's podcast, make a comment, share it with a friend, and join the conversation on Twitter at Mentally Underscore Strong. For more inspiration and to receive Cedric's free weekly videos, check out drcedra.com.