What can the Olympics teach you?

Okay I’ll admit it, I have Olympic fever!

Why?

Well there are so many reasons…

1. I love sports

2. I love watching people dig deep

3. I love hearing how people ris above injusries and circumstances that seem insurmountable

4. I love what I can learn about success and mindset and strategies of success

I love all of these things…

But there is something else, and that is what I’m going to focus on today…

5. I love seeing how differently certain athletes handle defeat

Lindsey Jacobellis is the perfect example…

In the last Olympics she was certain to win a Gold in the Snowboard Cross Event…

I mean she had it tied up and was so far ahead of the pack that all she had to do was stay up on her board and she would have the gold…

That’s when she made her mistake…

She went into the air, and caught in the moment she went to do a little extra to celebrate…

AND FELL…

She still got silver, but this was a situation where the Gold was hers to lose and that is exactly what she did…

• You’ll get 8 million people sounding off about how it was the mistake of youth or showboating…
• You’ll get an earful from just about anyone about how stupid she was to do this…
• You could throw a rock in the middle of the desert and chances are you would still hit someone who would be more than willing to judge her for what heppened…

To be honest, I don’t care about that…

We all make mistakes, it’s a fact of life…

What I’m interested in is what we do after the mistake…

How we handle ourselves…

What we tell ourselves this mistake means about us and our future…

And this is where I am so impressed with Jacobellis…

She had to endure some pretty tough interviews — each time having to answer the question of ‘What Happened?’ –

Of course she would explain — of course she wished it hadn’t gone the way it did — I’m sure she learned a serious lesson –

But she also seemed to let it roll off of her…

The best thing I heard from her was when she said that she didn’t know how to explain what happened other than to say that she fell down.

I love that!

That’s the best success lesson you can find…

You’re going to make mistakes and you are going to do things when you should have known better…

Do you have to learn from these mistakes?

YES

But, do these mistakes mean that you are stupid, have ruined everything and now you’ll never succeed?

NO NO NO!

Learn from her…

Sometimes the most honest answer to “What happened there?” is

“I fell down”…

Leave me your comments about how you can learn from this…

Go Big!

Kristen