Good morning, FIRSTers.
Before anything, I want to send the love and thoughts of every member of 3337 to everyone involved and hurt in the Boston Marathon bombings. To be honest, it wounds all of us in some way.
My main topic today is called dealing with disappointment. This has been one of the best and worst seasons that I’ve had the privileged to coach. It is my third, and the first season that our team has won no awards and has not been in any eliminations. We got to experience a large dose of disappointment as we watched our robot fail time and time again, and experience the sting of watching other teams walk up to the stage to get every award under the sun.
Secondly, after being invited to go to the World Championship because of the Waitlist this past Friday, we experienced the sting of administrative bureaucracy as we managed to find the funding, the bus, and the hotel in a period of two days and then not be given permission, then given permission, then not given permission again by our administrator. So our season is officially done.
With these things in mind, I bring up this topic. How does your team deal with disappointment? Like it or not, there are countless teams that have to deal with this feeling of loss each year. It comes at regionals, it comes from our community or administration or coaches or mentors or at World Championship - it can come from many different directions. When you’ve worked as hard as you could and still find that it seems to not be enough, how do you continue on without shutting down for the entire off-season before you dust yourself off?
This is an open discussion but I did want to give my own insight.
First - I’ve learned the value of redirected enthusiasm. While we were not selected to play in the eliminations, a team that worked down the street from us played amazingly well and ended up ranked #1. One of their mentors had been one of our students. So - once the alliances were chosen and I could feel the disappointment from the team, I brought everyone outside and had a discussion. We decided to turn our efforts to cheering on our fellow Baton Rouge team. It was amazing to watch. We were asked questions by a number of other teams. “Why are you cheering so loudly - you aren’t on their team.” But in some way we were. We found a team to invest in and used our best cheers, our best chants, and our roar of excitement from them. Later we were told that we could be heard across the entire audience.
Second - Never undervalue the benefit of instant refocusing. We all play with gracious professionalism, but in the end, when someone wins and we do not, it is easy to blame ourselves or blame the judges or blame a whole slew of other people. In the end, though, the truth is that someone did something better than we did. We lost the Chairman’s Award because another team did some things that we did not. While we could discuss all day whether or not the goal of Chairman’s is to inspire competition. In the end - it does. Until we’ve made it to the Hall of Fame row at Championship, we continue to compete. This is not a bad thing. Its not about fault or blame. I was proud of my awards coordinator this year. After the tears and the self-recrimination, she was able to refocus: “What do we need to do to prepare for next year.”
With that question, we were able to galvanize our team, and instead of leaving wounded, we left motivated.
Finally, for the mentors and coaches out there - let our disappointment be our own. Don’t bring it to your team. This is not to say that we do not express disappointment, but that our disappointment must always be contained in optimism, in the pursuit for greater things. The hardest thing to do yesterday was to write the Facebook post that told the twenty members of our team - some who have never been to a Championship - that their Senior year would leave them without ever having gone. I know how the system works though. I could have easily had every student’s parent calling every person in our system from here to Timbuktu. Instead, I had to make the decision to refuse the desire for revenge. I had to explain that our administrator was concerned that leaving so close to the end of the year may affect the grades of our seniors especially and in lesser extent that of the rest of our team. I had to make the choice to write the Principal and let him know that I did not plan to go anywhere and that I understood where he was coming from. What words are we using when we talk to our team? Who are we blaming? How are we as mentors and coaches presenting ourselves? We we are is who they will emulate. It is the nature of coaching, the nature of leading.
I know this was long. I think I needed to write this out for myself more than for you. But in the end - the FIRST community - my community is who I can be most honest about these things with because many of you have been disappointed and then found victory.
So now again for my question - how do you deal with it? The feelings of not-good-enough or anger or frustration? How does your team get through?
Thanks for reading.
