How to Pick Yourself Up After a Setback

0:28Watch it early on the High Performance app. Well, thanks. So listen, this is one of our slightly shorter episodes where we look back in the archives, but it's quite cool to base it upon a little bit of sort of recent news or something that's happened just in the last week or two. And obviously it's only been just a week since we saw Anthony Joshua knocked down to the canvas for not the first time in his career, but already he said that he's ready to get up and go again. Before we talk about picking yourself up off the canvas, not just in a sporting sense, but in a life sense, can I share a quick clip with you from the man himself?

0:59Yeah, go on, that'll be good. So this is what he uploaded onto his social media a couple of days after his defeat. Yesterday, now we came up short, but look, we've got to look at all the positives. That's the mindset and that's the perspective that we have to have a positive one, always. Look at what we've achieved in the space of 11 years. It's phenomenal. And I want to thank every single one of you that's been riding with me. What a rollercoaster journey. But you know what the problem is? is that it's far from over yet you know we've done it once we've done it twice doing it for doing a third time hasn't been easy but i believe it's something i can achieve it's about making the right steps forward working hard improving it's got to come from here so the reason why i think this is an interesting place to start is because what does he say there the mindset has to be a positive one always i understand why he's saying it i understand how it's powerful for him But does it need to be a positive one always?

1:58Or are there actually great lessons in looking at some of the negatives when we're on the canvas? It's a brilliant question, Jake. I think we need to be careful of that idea that everything always has to be positive. Because often it isn't and it's to deny reality. There's work on this that talks about toxic positivity. The idea of facing a disaster and believing that it's amazing. Well, sometimes it isn't. we and we have to acknowledge those those more negative emotions before we move on to the positive ones of planning how we're going to come back from it so i think in anthony's case a it's something that he does need to stop and reflect and go i i got badly beaten you know i was badly outgunned i seemed like i didn't have a have a plan b for what i was going to do when things got tough and that might come across as negative but actually that's where we can do the reflection that allows him to use it as a springboard if he chooses to continue fighting?

2:51See, I think at the absolute base level, we can find the positives in being knocked down to the canvas. You know, when I first started out as a sports broadcaster and just basically got pelters from everywhere because I was a kids presenter in the sports world, I leant really heavily on the poem, It's Not The Critic Who Counts. It's Not The Critic Who Counts. Teddy Roosevelt. Teddy Roosevelt was the person who's in the arena, the person who picks themselves up, and then there's that lovely phrase at the end, for he shall not have a place with the cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.

3:22So I kind of think, you know what, what did Robin Sharma say on our podcast? Where am I winning? And I kind of think if Anthony Joshua asked himself that question, well, the answer is I was in the ring. I was in a world title fight. And I think one of the reasons why I want us to talk about picking yourself up off the canvas is I fear that we're starting to live with so much avoidance of failure that we would never even be in the arena in the first place. Yeah, I think that's a really powerful point that let's acknowledge these brave souls that get in there, that put themselves out there. And I accept that failure is the price of the admission.

3:56You know, Greg Hoffman, the former chief marketer of Nike, told us that, that failure is the price of ambition. And again, to relate it back to Anthony Joshua, you know, he was going to become a three times world heavyweight champion. We're talking about Muhammad Ali, Evander Holyfield, just a couple of the people that have done it. You're in rare air there. so the fact that he's come up short on this occasion isn't something to be embarrassed about it's something to celebrate that he put himself in that position to go and rank amongst some of the all-time greatest fighters okay now you might be listening to this show thinking high performance talking about picking yourself up off the canvas surely these highly successful people don't need to pick themselves up off the canvas they they're already successful what do they know about it well the truth is from our conversations successful people fail more than anybody else it's the ability to keep on going it's the understanding that the failure is a comma not a full stop that's the lesson we need to learn and we thought we would start but i guess sticking with the sporting boxing theme by hearing from barry hearn who delivered one of the greatest conversations we've ever had on this show um and he spoke to us about there being life in the old dog have a listen to barry hearn i got 180 grand that 180 grand saved my life saved my business and save me, more importantly, show me that you're never completely finished.

5:15You know, while you're breathing, there's fighting the old dog. That was a 12th round knockout for me in my world. But it taught me lots of things. It taught me that when you're in situations like that, the situation will define you as a person as well as you will define the situation. And you learn more about yourself in adversity than you'll ever learn in success. And what did you learn about yourself that surprised you? I've got some nuts, mate. I'm unbeatable. I'm totally and completely, unequivocally unbeatable. But you didn't know that before, right? No. I didn't know how unbeatable because I'd never been beaten that badly.

5:57It's like a fighter. Just look at it as a fight. There's plenty of times you go in the ring, you fancy the job. You're unbeatable, I found out. I'm unbeatable. I can't be beat. It's impossible. You condemn me. You can damage me. You're never, ever going to beat me. The brilliant Barry Hearn on high performance. Right, now this is really important, right? Because we said at the start, a lot of people are avoiding failure because they fear that the failure says that they are beatable, right? But actually it almost feels, having listened to that conversation and that quote from Barry, that the opposite is true, that the struggles remind you of your power.

6:32They don't remind you of your weakness. Yeah, you're absolutely right. You find out more about yourself in moments of adversity than we do in moments of success. And I think sometimes we all need that punch in the mouth, as Mike Tyson would have said it, to be able to realise that we do have the power to get back up even when we don't think that we're capable. One of my boxing heroes is the Manassar Mawler, Jack Dempsey, that's had the great line that a champion is someone that gets up even when they think they can't. They just find the way, like Barry Hearn described there, of climbing off the canvas and then convincing yourself that you're unbeatable.

7:08I mean, the point he's saying there reminds me of when we sat down with Andrew Cole, the former Manchester United player, they had that reputation of a game never being lost, of scoring last minute winners. And he spoke about how Alex Ferguson had convinced him that my team never get beat. We might occasionally run out of time, but we never get beat. So I think being beat is a mindset. You can lose on the scoreboard, but you don't allow yourself to give in. you still perform at your very best well that's not being beaten let's talk about how we get ourselves to a place where we're happy to be beaten my take on this and i feel very passionately about this it's why we've created the high performance foundation which is working in schools across the uk is that what we need to do is encourage a mindset of embracing failure like i love it when my kids come home and tell me they haven't been selected for something or they've got a bad grade or they had a hard day because in the moment it might be difficult but i know full well that that's going to hold him in good stead in years to come when life is a losing game.

8:07Even the great Roger Federer only won 54 % of his individual points. So he had to get used to the fact that almost half the time he's losing. So you have to be a loser to be a winner, if that makes sense. And what did Bear Grylls say? He spent his life seeing resilient people outperform talented people. It's a really important lesson to start this episode with, I feel. That leads us into the research by a brilliant psychologist is called Angela Duckworth, who's done a study that, if people want to Google it and explore it, it's called GRIT. And what she did with West Point military graduates was she tested them and you could do all kinds of psychometric tests, but GRIT was your ability to stick at a task to keep going.

8:47And even when things look pretty desolate and bleak, you can still just keep persevering. And how you scored on her GRIT test was an accurate predictor of who eventually ended up graduating. Now, that test has been applied across a whole range of different industries and fields. So you're absolutely right, Jake, encouraging and nurturing this grit, this ability to stick at a task is a defining character of anyone that's going to achieve high performance. Do you remember when we spoke to Jo Malone? And she talked about, shall we see if we can get that clip of Jo talking about resilience? Yeah, because that was incredibly moving, wasn't it?

9:21Because she spoke about her journey of being sort of like leaving school with no qualifications, being written off by education, setting up a business, selling it and then being diagnosed with breast cancer. You know, and yet throughout all those struggles, she's kept that optimistic attitude and kept persevering. The definition of grit. Well, here she is, perfumier and businesswoman Jo Malone. bad things are happening every single day to people but so are good things and i think it's a mindset i think it's how you look at resilience it's how you look at fights that and that that sense of i mean for me resilience means don't quit resilience is you know sometimes we move forward in situations and we walk towards our goal and sometimes you just have to hold your ground Resilience isn't always about moving forward and being successful.

10:14And I think when I look back at my life, I wouldn't change a thing. Isn't that weird? I really wouldn't change a thing because I think I am the person I am today because of all those steps. I might change some of the things I've said to people because I'm quite impulsive, but I wouldn't change my life in it. Not even the cancer chapter. And I know that sounds a very strange thing to say, but I learned so much about myself. I learned about life. I learned about love and I learned about the things I didn't want in my life. That was the wonderful Jo Malone there in a really moving conversation with her.

10:48And I think one of the points that Jo articulated beautifully was what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, but only if you're prepared to go and lean into those setbacks and difficulties and explore them and find a way of flipping them. Right. Well, actually, I'm pleased you said flipping because can I go straight to another clip? Go on. Tom Grennan, the musician, came on High Performance, spoke about a really difficult period in his life, which we can talk about in a moment. But his mindset was informed in that period. Here is what he told us about how he thinks about difficult moments. I was so annoyed at myself for listening to this little other voice who was saying I wasn't good enough, that I thought to myself I'm going to be spontaneous and I'm also going to just throw myself in to something that I never thought I'd ever do and see if I could swim.

11:39And I ended up being able to swim in it and I thought this is wicked and I've also flipped the thought. I do a lot of therapy now still and I have this thing of flipping the thought which really, really helps me in my day-to-day life anyway. go on explain what you mean by that so if i have something that's given me anxiety say if i'm like i can't do this or i feel like i am sinking inside or something like that i'm not i'm actually floating and then that makes it a positive thing straight away and it changes the way you your thought and it also it changes what that little voice inside your head is saying so you're kind of like shouting at that out of a voice saying nah mate that's not what I want to do I want to do that and then you're actually doing it a brilliant reminder that life is again not the thing that happens to you but how you react to the thing that happens to you it's a message we hear time and time again on this show yeah and Tom spoke to us about how that was the catalyst in many ways to decide that maybe being a footballer wasn't the career he wanted to pursue and to dedicate himself to his craft of learning to play instruments, to write music.

12:55And that was only down to the fact that he had the ability to see the world from a slightly different perspective. And again, it's a thing we hear so often about, we do get to control the perspective that we have on the world. Remember when we spoke to Lindsay Burrow, the wife of the late, great Rob Burrow, who spoke to us about even on the darkest days of his diagnosis, we could still find something to be grateful for. that's again just another example of resilience of being able to see the world from an angle rather than the one that's coming at us head on tell you what then why don't we i want to play one more clip at the very end of the episode from lead child the author but i can imagine people listening to this thinking this all sounds very good well how do i get to a place where i'm able to fail and struggle how about we come up with two or three things each that we'd like to share that we've learned on high performance over the years that are valuable what do you think well yeah so the first one i'd do is talk about what the comment we've just made about shift your perspective if you're having a tough time sometimes go and get somebody else's point of view go and ask for advice from somebody else to go back and listen to the archive of high performance and just get somebody that has maybe faced what you faced and has a different take on it what would you do i would say get used to making failure the norm we still see success is the norm and failure is a thing we try to avoid so um what we do every Sunday in our house we sit down with the kids and they actually have learned to love this right where we all failed this week brilliant and at the beginning they wouldn't answer the question it's only when harry and i started by going well i got this you know as parents you feel like you're failing all the time right so it was really easy for us to go well here and here and here and now i say to the kids right where did you fail this week and straight away they'll come up with answers and I love that because it makes them realise that failure is totally normal.

14:43It should be openly discussed. And it is in our house. So that's my first one. What about you? Okay, second one, be kind to yourself. This is one that I personally struggle with. But if you're going to fail, it's your inner voice is key. So if you sort of be lacerate yourself and beat yourself up for like, how can you be an idiot, your brain will find reasons to find all the evidence that you are an idiot and this is exactly why it is whereas if you say you know what I've done the best I can with what I've got you know I tried maybe it wasn't as smart this time I think start being kind to yourself gives you the capacity to embrace failure but also I what I found is it gives you greater empathy when you see other people fail you're not sat on the sidelines laughing you can understand and maybe identify with their struggle I would offer my second point as don't be a helicopter for other people you know hovering around other people all the time i see it a lot especially in parenting this idea of helicopter parenting i think um allowing people to fail is a really important thing especially as a friend especially as a parent especially as a colleague it's too tempting to step in and know the answer it's far more valuable for the person around you even like and it's hard man when you see your kid and you're like i know if they carry on down that path tomorrow or the next day they're going to get a moment of failure it's so easy to step in and solve that problem for them but look at when our kids are really small you know what do we allow them to do we allow them to try and climb up into the high chair when they can we allow them to spend hours trying to pick up a grape or a tiny bit of carrot or something we allow them to stick the spoon onto their nose and their eye and their cheek and their chin before they hit their mouth if you spend your life spoon feeding your kid literally spoon feeding your kid they'll get to waiting and not be able to do it themselves you can't allow it you have to you have to allow the failure right i like that well that leads on to my third one which is anticipate it so one of our favorite phrases here is doing um a pre-mortem work out all the things that are likely to go wrong that could be a setback for you now that isn't to then sort of be pessimistic about it but what we know is that when failure inevitably comes because we've seen it's built into the price of ambition you don't panic at those moments you've got a plan in place a plan b to uh to handle it there's adam grant who we had on the podcast was really good on this piece of research where he'd done it with call center staff and when you talk about how are you going to handle abusive phone calls or an emotive phone call just simply exposing people to one of the things that often causes people to pack in a job increase their resilience by around 32 percent and then not fear it our ability to live through it and get past it it automatically increases what's your third one final one is a reminder that um just because something is hard for you doesn't mean it's bad for you and i feel that sometimes people go well i can't embrace this fella because i know how hard it is and it is hard you know both of us have been through a litany of failures from being young kids teenagers adults and i think it's only now you know we're both in our 40s that we can both look back and go and I wouldn't want to go through that again because it was hard and it was really difficult but actually strangely it was good for me yeah and I want to finish with exactly that one of the best things that ever happened to one of the most successful authors to ever walk the earth Lee Child the creator of the amazing Jack Reacher series failure meant that he became an author and I think it's an important way to finish this conversation if you'll indulge me I'd love to if you remember that he spoke about failure was almost forced on him in some ways but as we've said as we heard Joe Malone say it's not the fact it's how you react let's listen to Jack sorry that's Jack we're keeping this bit in here's Lee Child because I'm intrigued by that job you'd had at Granada for 18 years when you were made redundant and you spoke about how fear and hunger was a motivation for you to begin writing Can you tell us about what your thought process was of dealing with this trauma and what you learned from it that you still use today to write?

18:54Yeah, I mean, it was in one way a super stressful period because I was 39, about to become 40, and that is like a classically bad age to be out of work. You know, tragically, it's too young to retire completely because you're not quite there yet, and so you've got to find something else to do. but nobody wants to hire you when you're 40 and you're sort of too old and too kind of tired by that point to go through that interviewing process that you used to do when you were 20. So it was a really miserable prospect, really, and scary in that, you know, I was like everybody else. I had a mortgage and I had a kid in school and I had credit cards and stuff like that.

19:41So in practical terms, it's a problem. But simultaneously, I also felt that it was also kind of the last chance. It was your last opportunity to change or do something different. It's halfway through your work in life, more or less. And you've gained a lot of discipline. You've learned a lot of things. You're a different person by then. You're not the idiot you were when you were 20. you can look back over the first half of your career and say, what have I got? What have I learned? How do I use this going forward? So in one way, it seemed like a really shining opportunity. And I played a psychological trick on myself, which was to completely ignore the negatives and just concentrate on the positives, which was, yeah, I can start over.

20:34I can do something different. I can be somebody new. And again, I played another trick, which was I allowed no doubts at all. I thought I'm going to write a book. It's going to be successful. It's going to be OK, which is a ludicrous, delusional thing to do, because writing a book is like buying a lottery ticket, probably even worse odds than that, to be honest. And so but if you allow that doubt to creep in you're never going to get anywhere so i i remember thinking yeah people would ask me what are you going to do now and i'm writing a book and in my own mind like night follows day it was going to be a success and people would look at me like with this rather apprehensive worried expression like he's also gone crazy there you go the brilliant lead child it worked for him may well work for you despite the pain in the moment and it's a reminder that failure is very much a comma not a full stop enjoyed that i did yeah it's really good to delve into the archives but also reflect on how we've changed and learned lessons from listening to these brilliant guests as well absolutely and one of the things that we've been inspired to do through creating high performance is to build an app it is honestly the very best place to enjoy the content that we're creating and if you're interested in things like perseverance uh resilience hard work inspiration we've actually created collections on there so you can go and listen to a whole collection about a topic that you think is interesting when it comes to finding your own version of high performance so you can click the link in the description to this show or of course you can just go to the app store and download the high performance app but thank you very much for joining us thank you for watching thank you for listening and we'll see you again soon for another episode of high performance

22:24Thank you.