Why Failing Is Good
What! Surely, I'm not encouraging you to fail, am I?
Not at all, but there is something that you need to know about failure that can really change the way you look at your table tennis.
I found it made me a much better player, able to keep going and improve a lot quicker than the way I regarded failure before ever let me.
I was always the kind of person who was good at most things, and not necessarily used to failure. So, when I tried something new, there was a good chance that I would have some modicum of success with it.
But if any kind of failure occurred, I would give up, saying it wasn't for me.
To relate this to table tennis, I found that I would start the game in a very good state of mind, and this state of mind would continue until I made a mistake, whether in the first point or the fifteenth (rules changed now) (that didn't happen very often!).
On the first mistake, my confidence would take a little battering, but I would continue.
And what I found when I started to analyze my game more was that each mistake, each shot that went out, or into the net, was eroding my play a little bit because I was regarding them as failures.
It was as though I had a 'full tank' of ability at the start of the game, and each mistake drained that tank in my mind just a little, making me play a little bit worse. It was only when I changed my attitude towards failure that I managed to keep that 100% play up all the way during a game (and that makes a REAL difference!).
That was before I damage my back. My attitude to failure became: "Failure is natural; failure is not evidence that you are no good, rather it is an excellent chance for you to learn from what is going wrong and move on. The more you fail, the more you succeed!"
Again, we go into this in much more detail later on, but I will say this here. Say you hit a smash into the net.
Most of us would view that as bad and move onto the next point in a worse state than before. But if you can view that bad smash as a good thing, a chance for you to realize what is going wrong, you will go into the next point in a positive way and keep that positive attitude throughout the game.
Can you see what a difference to your Table Tennis that would make? I already found out the difference when playing against you.
Until the next session play Wright.
Javad Ameri