Wednesday, May 29, 2013

Sports Psychologist Bill Cole on coming to terms with losing

Sports psychologist, Bill Cole, gives some great advice on coming to terms with the idea of losing in order to not let it dominate your thinking and not performing at your best:


What you need to do is come terms with losing, which sounds like a strange thing to talk about because fighters want to talk about winning. But in order to get to winning you've got to first go through the right mindset about losing.
 
Everybody comes with this fear of failure, fear of being embarrassed, fear of looking bad, and all the worries that go with it, and mainly because they blow losing way up in their mind and then losing dominates their thinking and scares them and that's how you get low confidence. So what you got to do is come to terms with losing, which means you have to make it stop scaring you. And you've got to look at it like the following...So I ask them a question and I say:
 
Say the fight is over and you lost. When you go home is your family going to reject you?
No.
Is your dog still going to lick your face?
Yeah.
Are you still going to have your friends?
Yeah.
 
The people that count to you still love you.
 
No one likes losing but it's not the end of the world. You lose, you wake up the next day, you're still training, there's another fight coming up and life marches on.


This idea is something that allowed Randy Couture to perform at his best and be smiling before fights. Couture give Rashad Evans similar advice when Evans sought Couture's counsel.

Before his huge fight with Chuck Liddell at UFC 88, Rashad Evans admitted his fears to Randy Couture, and sought his advice and wisdom. Couture offered the following advice:


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