How do we react to failure? (Bot9 #338)
I’m 17 years old and it’s my junior year of high school. We’re playing at Liberty High School in an important league matchup and I’m walking to the plate with the bases loaded and two outs and out team down one. The pitcher for Liberty was a short, explosive pitcher named Cory Bragg. He had a good fastball and a biting 12-6 curveball. He was one of those high school guys who played shortstop and would come in to close out games. That was his intention today.
Like anyone in such a situation, I was excited and playing out some of the potential scenarios in my head as I walked to the plate. Hit the ball out and put the game out of reach. Drive in a couple with a ball in play. And, if I’m being honest, I also thought about striking out and walking back to the dugout in shame.
The first pitch comes…a hammer of a curveball misses my bat as I swing and miss. I mean, is this a surprise seeing that I can recount all that was going through my head 30 years later? 0-1.
The second pitch comes…another curveball up in the zone that falls in for a called strike. Well, this isn’t going well. I’m now down 0-2 and the pitching coach in the other dugout has me exactly where he wants me. I’ve seen two curveballs and this moment sets up a bit of advice I’ve shared with all of my hitters for the past 20 years.
I watch an 0-2 fastball down the pipe for strike three as we lose the game.
This is why I’ve told hitters to always sit fastball with two strikes and fight off the rest. Never be surprised for an easy backwards K.
As I begin to go on a deep dive studying failure and our responses to it, it appears that on some level I exhibited a “freeze” response in this critical moment. When faced with a difficult situation where failure is possible, human beings will either exhibit a fight, flight, or freeze response (here’s a short video explaining the Fight, Flight, and Freeze Response - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEHwB1PG_-Q). I froze or experienced “attentive immobility.” I was alert, but unable to swing the bat, physically immobile in the moment. Sure, I was set up by a pitching sequence, but my mind also caused me to stand still instead of being free to react freely.
We will also exhibit a fight, flight, or freeze response after the moment of failure as well. In an article by Olivia Fox Cabane and Judah Pollack, they explain three reactions to failure equating fight, flight, and freeze to Godzilla, a Hummingbird, and a Deer.
Godzilla is the fight equivalent. They breathe fire and cause destruction wherever they go. They react in anger and lose perspective of anything causing positive momentum. These are your helmet throwers on a baseball team. From a Biblical context, think Cain. Cain sees the blessing his brother receives and decides to kill him. Think King David after his affair with Bathsheba. Bathsheba becomes pregnant, David sends her husband to the front of the battle, likely in hopes he would be killed, and marries Bathsheba. The Godzilla or fight response to failure wreaks havoc on those around them.
The Hummingbird is the flight response. They move around with anxiety and without conviction. They waste energy without focus and throw around a ton of ideas. These are your Twitter or social media obsessors looking for something that might help fix their problems in the endless algorithm of content. They refuse to sit in the failure and address the real issues. Biblically, this is like Elijah running away in fear or Peter denying Jesus. They’d both seen the power of the Lord, but flitted away in the face of a threat. The Hummingbird or flight response displays anxiety and runs away from the issues they face.
The Deer? Well, that was me standing there watching strike three.
The important takeaway to this is connecting these responses to the understanding of current brain science. We process things in our brain through the right hemisphere first. It’s our creative center and the faster processor. Our rational mind is a slower processing mechanism (pick up The Other Half of Church for some tremendous perspectives in this area and the applicant to our current church experiences). Failure causes emotional trauma and that is not overstating. We will keep remnants of unprocessed failures in our mind and they can have a considerable effect on our lives. It sure does make you think about how we should help our young people process their youth and high school sport experiences, doesn’t it?
Thankfully, we’re given the person of Jesus to redeem all of our failures. His death and resurrection allow us to tap into opportunities to restore the brokenness of past failure. This should resonate in both the creative, fast-processing center of our brains as well as the rational. In many ways, my coaching career allowed me to redeem some past failures on the field. I developed strategies to help athletes succeed more often.
I also tried to create environments where failure wasn’t the end, but just a new opportunity. The Bible tells us to be grateful for trials and we should treat failure in the same way. Gratitude is a psychological and spiritual restorative to use when we experience failure.
We also attempted to create a loving environment for our players, and apparently hugs provide a physiological restorative during failure as well. Human contact through a hug releases oxytocin, the chemical that quiets the stress response and brings us to a state of connection, support, and calm (apparently, yawning also operates as a physiological restorative as well).
A few years ago, one of my friends was working on staff in a church with a man named Cory Bragg. It was the same guy who had struck me out so many years ago. We reconnected over coffee, reminisced about years gone by, and connected over how we found faith and joy in ministry to others. Pretty amazing what Jesus can do with failure, isn’t it?