“Success is not final; failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”
—Winston Churchill
This past weekend I was reminded that the power of entering the arena of competition has much more to do with the lessons we take from the loss rather than the win.
On Sunday, along with the rest of the tennis-loving world, I watched a match for the ages at Roland Garros between Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner. These are the two best tennis players on planet earth at the moment. And their battle was the second longest final in grand slam history at just over 5 hours!!
It was an incredible display of grit and resilience as these two went toe to toe, grinding out a relentless battle.
At one point, deep in the match, after they had been battling for more than three hours, there was a statistic on-screen that showed they each had essentially won almost the exact same number of points across all of the games and sets that had been played up until that moment. 192 to 193. Exactly one point separated them. So out of 385 points they had played, each player had lost half of those points.
I found this statistic to be such a perfect crucible for life and business. If half the time, things don’t go your way; if half the time you lose, what kind of mindset is required to continue to show up and compete?
Radical acceptance.
When we enter the fray of sports competition or business, we must be willing to take the loss, learn from it, and move on.
So how do we do that? Radical acceptance.
The mindset of radical acceptance has its roots in stoicism and Buddhism and was popularized by the psychologist Tara Brach. It is a way of looking deeply at our lives, our losses or failures and accepting them without judgement or shame. When we embrace failure full on as an opportunity to learn and grow, the failure becomes a path forward. When we get stuck in shame or victim mindset, we are not able to learn from the moment and we get stuck.
This is a mindset that understands that the art of the battle resides in our capacity to process loss and continue to show up again and again and again.
The typical words we reach for to describe this energy—resilience, tenacity, grit—are all good descriptors for that mindset. However, the concept of radical acceptance has at its core that very sense of resilience, but it has an added layer of forward-thinking and surrender to a larger process. When we trust the process and we have the ability to assess the failure in the light of radical acceptance we are immediately vaulted past the wounded ego of the failure and we enter the freedom of “ok, more work to do, let’s go again.”
This resilience is something that I have written about before because I am fascinated by the way humans are forced to confront loss and still find a way to continue the journey; I find it incredibly inspiring.
For my two sons, I don’t think I would ask for a more important interpersonal skill set than resilience and grit. Life requires us to process and feel loss all the time. And if we don’t develop this mindset of radical acceptance, we will never overcome the loss that is inevitable in life. When we don’t process loss, we become stuck in a victim mentality. Life owes us nothing, it is our task to uncover insights and learn our failures and losses.
If it were as easy as putting in the hard work with a guaranteed successful outcome, there would be no challenge. The hope and faith we must have to pursue anything when the stakes are high with no guarantee of success is the heart of the matter here. Everything else is just vanity. We lean in, we engage, we do our level best, we accept the outcome, learn and move on. That’s it.
“Do not judge me by my success, judge me by how many times I fell down and got back up.”
—Nelson Mandela.
Meditation: On a ten count, breathe through the failures in your life and the ways that radical acceptance, grit and resilience served you. With closed eyes and mindful breath work, create a stoke around one moment when this mindset served you. Feel the perseverance you were able to bring to bear in that moment. Following that, think about a one moment or one area in your life when you failed and you were not able to find the capacity to pick yourself up and dust yourself off. And finally, with those two moments in mind, simply commit to the idea that radical acceptance can be a tool you reach for when you need to move through a moment of loss or failure. It’s big medicine for big moments in our lives.
Have a great week brotha!
