5 Reasons Why Making Mistakes On The Field is Important

Somewhere along the way, someone told you, or you began to believe that you must be perfect: at home, in school, in your sport, etc. What if I told you there’s no such thing as perfection? If you were born perfect, you would have no purpose on this Earth because there would be nothing for you to learn. Mistakes can make athletes frustrated and angry. Often, athlete’s have a hard time letting go of making mistakes. They often quit when they happen or mentally “check out.”

But, quitting isn’t the solution, and neither is shutting down mentally. This means we need to start teaching and learning the benefits of mistakes beginning at a young age. If no one has taught you why making mistakes is an integral part of learning and growing, here is your chance to learn!

Coaches and parents can learn ways to help their athletes overcome making mistakes. Serving as a role model, slowing down enough to give the athlete a chance to learn, and staying away from meeting mistakes with punishment, will leave room for diving into what mistakes are trying to teach us. We want to use an approach to mistakes that will continue to build confidence on the soccer field. Socceristas can learn to be highly successful on and off the field by learning the importance of mistakes.  

“The more you do, the more you fail. The more you fail, the more you learn. The more you learn, the better you get.” -John C. Maxwell, Failing Foward

5 Reasons Why Making Mistakes On the Field is Important

1. Mistakes give the opportunity for you to learn about yourself. Are you going to quit because you made a mistake or keep going? This is how your brain learns. What things work, what things don’t. Embrace. Process. And move forward. The longer you stay stuck on an error, the longer you stay distracted from playing the game. 
2. Mistakes and change are inevitable. Learning proper coping tools for these instances on the field will pour over into your ability to cope with ever-changing life off the field.
3. Mistakes offer an opportunity to slow down, take a breath, and evaluate. This forms problem-solving skills that will help you the next time the situation occurs. 
4. Mistakes can reveal our blind spots, so we know where to focus to become better players. The game is much more than practice and playing. Becoming a student of the game is important. How can you become a student if you don’t know where you need to focus your learning?
5. Mistakes show our imperfections. The quicker you can learn you’re an imperfect Soccerista and person, the quicker you could get to learning valuable lessons and developing true self-worth based on who you are…not what you can do well.

Now, next time you make a mistake, remember these points. So take a minute, brush off the frustration, and look for what the moment is teaching you!

“Embrace adversity and make failure a regular part of your life. If you’re not failing, you’re probably not really moving forward.” – John C. Maxwell, Failing Forward.

Featured image via Adobe Stock Images

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