Failed Derby Goals

Note: This is an old post from when I failed to make the Belles' roster earlier this season and was on a different site.  It seems timely again though because the Belles' just failed to make Champs for the first time in 7 years.

Out-of-Your-Control Goals

So you didn’t meet your goal, passing a tryout, making a team, making a charter, etc. These sorts of goals aren't entirely within our control which makes it harder to figure out what went wrong and know what to do differently. It can leave you asking "What’s next?"

First and foremost, I want to say that it's shitty. It really is. Not meeting goals is hard, it can feel like abject failure. And different people react differently to this sort of thing. I, for one, have an urge to run far far far away and never engage with the topic again. This, I have discovered, is counter-productive. It doesn’t lead to me meeting goals in the future. The following is what I’ve found has helped.

One, be okay with your feelings.

You’re allowed to have moments where it just sucks. You’re allowed to be okaywith these feelings of suck-i-tude. Watch that funny TV show, take a bath, eat some cookie dough or talk to people you trust and get hugs. Whatever is going to allow you to acknowledge your feelings about it, internal or external validation.

Two, move on.

This is super important. You’re probably not going to get to place where you can work on meeting your goals until you’re in a better place. This can take minutes, days, weeks, whatever. But the following advice probably won’t help until you’re ready to think critically about it.

Three, assess the goal and your other goals.

Is this a goal that you have a lot of control over? I’m going to go out on a limb and say for the most part, no. It’s really easy to be frustrated not meeting goals when you don’t have the ability to meet them on your own (see all my experience of group work in school) and sometimes not meeting these goals can obscure your vision of all the other things you ARE doing and all the other goals you ARE meeting and have met. It’s way easier to focus on the negative than the positive and the one thing than the many. This is going to help you feel like you’ve regained some control of your situation. Make sure you have some goals that are under your control.

Four, assess your situation.

This is about how realistic your goals are. Are some people you trust and believe telling you that you can’t do what you want to or at least not in the time frame you’re thinking about? Are people bewildered that you’re not meeting your goal? This is all good external information about how to proceed. You probably need external information to figure out what's next because you had expected to meet a goal and didn't so now you're doubting your self-assessment. Ask for that information kindly and nicely and within the framework of moving forward from those you trust. You'll also probably get specific feedback about why you didn't meet your goal but more on that later.

Five, accept, accept, accept.

This is by far the hardest part but at this point, you’ve probably started constructing all sorts of stories about why you didn’t meet your out-of-your-control goal that are based on other people. You’ve got to get rid of them. They won’t let you meet your goal. The truth is, either your goal isn’t ascertainable right now because of you or you didn’t meet it because you didn’t meet. We do ourselves a disservice by constructing fairy tales and myths that make it so goals outside of our control are also goals where not meeting them is blameable solely on others. This isn’t to say if you did only one thing differently, you’d somehow make it but also to say that there’s some validity to not making it and there are things you can do to IMPROVE your chances, but not guarantee a result. Accepting that there is no panacea to meeting it, however, is necessary to do better next time.

Six, time to plan.

This is where your other goals come in. So I didn’t make a charter or a roster, what other goals do I have? To be a better teammate, better league mate, better derby player? To master a skill I’ve been working on? Guess what, all these goals will improve my chances of meeting my out-of-my-control goal AND all of these goals I can work on without having a perfect answer as to why I didn’t make it. So now, it’s time to figure out a plan to work on these things. Figure out where I’m falling short, figure out how far I’ve already come and dedicate myself to these causes and forget about that pesky failed goal for a bit. It’s time to build some successes and acknowledge progress. Also, it’s now time to figure out where the feedback you’ve received comes into play in terms of constructing personal goals but I’m going to leave how to assess feedback for another post because it isn’t as straightforward as we all seem to think.