Letting Go of Mistakes & Poor Performances

Bad days. Bad plays. Bad games. They’re a fact of life as an athlete. We can’t escape them no matter how hard we train. But we can learn how to handle them so one bad day doesn’t lead to more.

“Don’t place your mistakes on your head, their weight may crush you. Instead, place them under your feet and use them as a platform to view your horizons.”

Make Mistakes a Platform for Growth

When athletes make mistakes or perform poorly, dwelling on errors creates negative self-talk that diminishes focus and performance. Instead, athletes should transform these experiences into learning opportunities.

Viewing mistakes as teachers rather than failures allows for personal development. As Michael Jordan said: “I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”

Three-Step Recovery Process

1. Set worry time limits

Allocate a specific amount of time to process your mistakes—10 minutes, or until a designated point in your day—then commit to moving forward. Giving yourself permission to feel frustrated, but within a boundary, prevents the negative spiral from taking over.

2. Identify three key lessons

Document what you learned about your form, strategy, or preparation. What would you do differently next time? Writing these down transforms a negative experience into actionable intelligence for future performances.

3. Mental visualization

Mentally rehearse the performance as you intended it to go, not as it actually happened. Replay the scenario in your mind with successful execution. This overwrites the negative mental tape and reinforces the neural pathways for correct performance.

Learn from your setbacks, then release them. One bad performance doesn’t define you as an athlete—how you respond to it does.