What does winning look like for you? In any profession, meeting your goals matters. You have to think like a winner and strive to win. It is impossible to completely avoid making mistakes – after all, you are only human! What matters is how you handle them and what you learn in the process. So how can you own your mistakes, think like a winner and get the results you are aiming for?

On Friday 9th December, we were joined on the Big Friday Finish by motivational speaker and sports coach Frank Dick! Frank was the British Athletics Federation’s Director of Coaching, where he became one of the outstanding sports coaches and coach mentors in the world. He was also the consultant to South Africa’s team at the Rio Olympics and Paralympics. Here is what he had to say about overcoming mistakes and becoming a true winner:

The 3 steps to handling a mistake.

Accountability and responsibility are vital for handling your mistakes like a professional. You need to be accountable for your actions and decisions. If they turn out to be wrong, you are then responsible for dealing with the consequences. Mistakes can sometimes feel overwhelming and embarrassing, however, and as a result, putting them right is easier said than done.

To overcome this, you have to change your thinking. Change is necessary for growth and improvement – and it has to start with you. There are three basic steps to handling a mistake so that you make the changes needed to create growth:

  • Acknowledge it. This means accepting and addressing what went wrong and the consequences it caused.
  • Learn from it. What could you do differently to create a more efficient process?
  • Don’t repeat it. This may seem like the most obvious step. However, to reduce the risk of repeating it, you first need to fully understand the impact it has on your work/life and what you need to do differently.

Mistakes are inevitable, but they don’t have to be a disaster. If you can use them as a catalyst for learning and growth, you will truly be able to make them a part of your path to becoming a winner. As Frank Dick says, a winning culture is founded in a learning culture!

Developing a winner’s mindset

As with handling mistakes, developing a winner’s mindset requires a change in your thinking. In any sector, winning often isn’t as straightforward as it sounds, and sometimes you will fall short of meeting a goal, no matter how hard you try. This is where it pays to look back at previous results. You might not have achieved what you were expecting, but ask yourself: have you done better than the last time? Don’t get too weighed down on what went wrong today; instead, make tomorrow’s performance better.

To do this, aim to achieve more than what you need. That way, if you do not manage that, you will still achieve what you need. How could you be boosting your adrenalin so you can go that extra mile? Don’t just aim for good – become outstanding, no matter how hard it is or how long it takes.

Helping your team get results

For a business to truly thrive, you need a strong team. Once you have mastered self-improvement, think about how you could be getting the best out of your team so you win together. Great teamwork requires a proper understanding of each individual member – how they function and their role in the group. As a leader, it is your job to hold your team together while giving them enough room to learn in their own way. You need to be able to delegate different tasks to different people, and you can only do this effectively if you know what each person is best suited to and how it all fits together.

According to Frank, the trick is to not pass a responsibility to someone else to be rid of it, but so they can handle it better. Imagine what will happen when you give a task to someone better suited to doing it than you! What results will you get? Then think about if you were to successfully achieve this with each and every team member so that your team could become a powerful unit in getting your business to the top of its field. As Frank Dick says, when you add the right components together, you will have something great.

To learn more about how you can become a true winner, please watch the Big Friday Finish on our YouTube channel here.