Making Mistakes - A Players Perspective

As many of you will know, FIFA films each game from a variety of angles and then breaks down the tape in any number of ways. Someone with a lot of time on their hands decided to study decison making and came up with this statistic - players on average made 3 decisions per second.

Take a moment to reflect on that statistic.

If we apply the same numbers to a high school soccer match and the athletes participating this is what we come up with:

11 soccer players

80 minutes of soccer

14,400 decisions per player

158,400 decisions per team

... wow ... I find it dificult to grasp those numbers ... just, wow...



If a player has a 90% rate of making quality decisions, she will still make 1,440 poor decisions per 80 minutes of soccer.

Can you imagine saying "My bad" 1,440 times in 80 minutes?

How about saying "I'm sorry" 1,440 times in 80 minutes?

Not very realistic is it? We would spend so much time accepting blame and apologizing that we could not play the game at all.

I am not advocating that we ignore our responsibility for our poor decisions. Nor am I stating that each player should not be held accountable for the quality of her decision making. I am simply saying that there is not time during the course of the game to verbally do so for each instance that arises. Obviously we must be selective.

Think of it in this manner, one of the building blocks for confidence is positive reinforcement. Is saying, "My bad" or "I'm sorry" 1,440 times in 80 minutes an effective way to build confidence in yourself?

Of course it isn't.

By focusing on 1,440 cases of poor decision making we are ignoring nearly 13,000 cases of good decison making. Should we not accentuate the positives in our play? Think of the impact that hearing "Good job!" or "Well done!" or "Nice Play!" 13,000 times in 80 minutes would have on you? Talk about building confidence!

Of course, there will be times when we might well need to apologize to and seek forgiveness from one another. We need to recognize these moments and strive diligently to work through them together. We need to view such situations not as obstacles but as opportunities. Our approach to adversity must be to view it as an opportunity to strengthen ourselves and our team.

Good decision making skills come with experience but we must never lose sight of the fact that experience is often the by-product of having made poor decisions.