Avoid defeat by not allowing it to define you
The other day we came across a fine and interesting blog from David Brady, the former Mayo footballer, on the Elvery’s Sports website about the joys and sorrows of being an inter-county player.
After a couple of wins you’re all grand lads. Lose and you’re gobshites. Or at least you feel like one.
“You feel ashamed, so much so you try to hide from any sense of normality,” he wrote. “Going to your local shop is put to one side just in case you have to make eye contact.
“The walk from your car to your front door is done as quickly as possible. You don’t look up from the tarmac in case a passerby sees you or one of the neighbours spot you out their window.
“Why would I feel ashamed, embarrassed by losing a game? For the summer months you are not defined by your job as a local butcher, teacher or builder.
“You’re not defined by your surname or who your mother or father may be. You are defined by one thing only — being a county footballer.”
A lot of sportspeople can relate to that. While their own sport may not quite have that connection with the people like Gaelic Games does, they can be ultimately defined by how they fare in their sport. Or more pertinently, they can allow themselves to be defined by how they go in their sport. Their whole self-identity, self-esteem is shaped by how they perform. If they perform below a certain standard, they feel substandard, inadequate, unworthy.
Dr Steve Peters is a psychiatrist by profession who in recent years has applied that expertise to the realm of sport, doing some terrific work with British cycling as well as high-profile cases like Ronnie O’Sullivan and Craig Bellamy. Those athletes previously had a justified reputation for being tempestuous, temperamental, imbalanced. When the pressure came on and their own ego was under threat, it would be a classic case of fight or flight syndrome; their “inner chimp” as Peters terms it, would emerge and ultimately self-destruct. They would either fight, as Bellamy was prone to do, or flee, as Ronnie did more than once or twice.
Since working with Peters, they’ve become much more balanced and stable performers — and people. They no longer allow their self-identity and self-esteem be defined by their performance. When O’Sullivan enters The Crucible he now has the self-assurance to know that he can handle whatever happens.
Derval O’Rourke finally came to that same realisation. “The main thing I’ve learned from Beijing is that you cannot think that one race defines you,” she told this column last year. “It has to be the biggest point of your career but you can’t walk off the track and think the sun is not going to come up tomorrow. I walked off the track in Beijing [after finishing last in her heat] and genuinely thought the sun was not going to come up the next day.”
But it did. The world did not end and on the way home her relationship with her partner Peter O’Leary, the sailor, began.
Eighteen months ago I was working as a sports performance consultant to the UL Huskies women’s basketball team ahead of their SuperLeague Cup final against DCU.
The team’s form the previous 12 months had been electrifying, but DCU had won the trophy the previous two seasons. The odds on our win were ignorant and ridiculous and there was a danger that we could falter under such expectation; that we’d be playing nearly not to lose rather than to win.
A week out from the game, I asked the players a rather strange question: what would happen if we were to lose? After a couple of minutes reflecting on it, they offered up that they’d be devastated — for about a week. But ultimately they’d still be their mother’s daughter, their partner’s partner, working in jobs that help people, save people, loving and being loved.
It wasn’t that losing would be okay, but that even if it happened they’d be okay.
By staring right up to the prospect of defeat we drastically reduced both its importance and likelihood. In the end the only shock result the following week was that we won by a record margin for a senior cup final.
Studies show that it’s a very useful exercise in the lead-up to any potentially stressful event, be it a match or an exam, it helps your performance significantly to take a few minutes aside and define yourself as something other than as a sportsperson or student.
The day after Dublin lost last year’s All-Ireland semi-final to Mayo, parents at a suburban Dublin school were struck by something. Pat Gilroy walked his kids to school. He saw other parents, smiled and saluted them.
He did not keep the head down. He did not look at the tarmac. He did not feel ashamed. The sun had risen that morning. His world did not end just because he’d lost — and that’s why the previous year he won it all.
