Athletes confront failure as often as success during competition.
For professional and Olympic athletes, those shortcomings can play out in singular and devastating fashion in front of worldwide audiences.
From seven-time Olympic gymnast Simone Biles’ bout with “the twisties” during the 2020 Tokyo Games, to former Boston Red Sox first baseman Bill Buckner’s infamous error in the 1986 World Series, fanbases never cease to dwell upon these painstaking moments.
Philadelphia Phillies pitcher Orion Kerkering joined that club when he mishandled a bases-loaded comebacker that led to his team’s elimination from the MLB playoffs.
“Just kind of keep going with it. It’s hopefully starting a long career,” the third-year pitcher said through blurry eyes when asked how he was coping after the game. “Just keep in the back of my head. … Get over this hump. Keep pushing.”
Moving past that kind of failure isn’t easy. It’s a subject even Pope Leo XIV addressed in a social media post earlier this year.
“In our competitive society, where it seems that only the strong and winners deserve to live, sport also teaches us how to lose,” the post said. “It forces us, in learning the art of losing, to confront our fragility, our limitations and our imperfections.”
Sports psychologists who work with amateur and professional athletes say it requires not only acceptance of the failure but coping tools to return to performing at a high level.
Here are some of the strategies used by athletes, who are in many ways great people for the general public to learn from as it pertains to overcoming adversity.
Prior preparation
While no one can predict future events, getting into the headspace for what could happen can be rehearsed.
Robert Andrews, the founder and director of The Institute of Sports Performance, has 30 years of experience in private practice as a mental training consultant and licensed therapist. During that time he’s worked with Biles and others Olympians in the last five Summer Games, as well as players from the NBA, NFL and MLB.
One of the components in the set of techniques Andrews uses to build confidence and belief is preparation.
“(Kerkering) got highly reactive on that play,” Andrews said. “The key playoff situation he found himself in, made him more vulnerable to rushing things and throwing off balance and all the things that he did that he’ll sadly remember for the rest of his life. But mental preparation is a huge part of that. … I call it being mentally and emotionally centered in a situation like that. So we would have done a lot of mental preparation work to prepare him for a situation like that.”
Alex Auerbach is a performance psychologist who currently works with the NFL’s Jacksonville Jaguars. He’s also worked with Olympians, NBA and MLB players, as well as elite military units and Fortune 500 companies.
He said the “release, reset, refocus” routine is one that athletes can practice “to quickly let go of mistakes in the games or during performance.”
“The biggest thing is learning to redirect your attention to the task at hand,” Auerbach said via email. “When we make a mistake and dwell on it, that rumination interferes with efficient motor execution. … If they can bring attention back to the present and the task at hand, they can minimize disruption to their performance.”
Adversity strikes, now what?
When the inevitable does strike and the game or competition is over, the work to repair mentally is just beginning.
Step one, Andrews said, is to avoid social media, where hateful messages — and in extreme cases even death threats — can often be waiting after failures in these situations.
“I’ve worked with a lot of baseball players and softball players who have missed the throw down to third base that cost them the game, and that catcher couldn’t throw the ball back to the pitcher,” Andrews said. “Their brain freaks out. They get the baseball version of ‘the twisties.’ So he’s going to need some days to do some work around this. … Get loved up, surround yourself with people that are going to support you through this.”
Andrews uses a protocol called EMDR — eye movement, desensitization, and reprocessing — which teaches the part of the brain that gets engaged in an event like that how to calm down and process the experience.
“It helps them work through it to where they don’t have the yips, so they’re not afraid to go out and field a ground ball again,” Andrews said. “They work, but you got to calm that part of the brain down significantly well before next season.”
That also can’t happen too soon, however. The brain, like anything in the human body, needs time to heal after trauma. Andrews advice? Give it a month or so and then start teaching the nervous system “how to process the shock of that event.”
An open mind helps
The good news, Auerbach said, is that people are becoming more receptive to employing mental strategies following setbacks.
“Especially in baseball, athletes are more receptive than ever to mindset work. There’s an increasing appreciation for the role mental health and performance play in facilitating top performance for these athletes,” he said.
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