Dump the participation trophies - let's be candid with kids on success and failure

I coached my kids' soccer teams before they turned 10 (and needed better coaching than I could provide!). One season, my older son's team lost every game they played, most by large margins. It was a very difficult season - probably for us coaches and parents most of all.

This story came back to me when I read "Losing Is Good For You" in the New York Times (thanks Rita McGrath for pointing it out). In this opinion piece, author Ashley Merryman criticizes the trend toward recognizing kids for participation rather than accomplishment.

I have heard this argument before, mostly from highly-competitive parents who dismiss the idea of recognition for anything other than ultimate victory. Merryman's argument is more complex and useful. She asserts that participation trophies dilute the excitement of winning, the toughening power of losing, the honor of competition, and the impetus to improve, no matter what your current abilities are:

When children make mistakes, our job should not be to spin those losses into decorated victories. Instead, our job is to help kids overcome setbacks, to help them see that progress over time is more important than a particular win or loss, and to help them graciously congratulate the child who succeeded when they failed.

I'm with Merryman. Competition is a complex mixture. Winning is fun, and losing is information. Improvement from game to game is also important and valuable. These lessons are important for young people, midcareer adults, everyone.

For the last game of our lost soccer season, our team had to travel nearly and hour and a half to the opposing team's field. It was a very hot May day. Some of our parents decided not to brave the trip, so the team was short-handed. In fact, we had to play one man short on the field the entire game.

Our guys fought terribly hard, and never gave up. They lost 7-0. After the game the other team saluted our players for their grit and determination. Our guys were happy and proud, as were we coaches. It was one of the biggest wins in my coaching experience.

Can struggle and failure lead to competitive advantage?

Found this interesting post from Lolly Daskal, "Failure: The Competitive Advantage." Lolly compares two leaders facing upheaval in their professional lives and the loss of their jobs. One was handling it poorly - the other was excitedly looking to the possibilities of the future. Here's how they differed:

The first leader—the one who was struggling—had up to this point lived a charmed life. A perfect childhood in a loving, stable home, the best schools, graduation from a top college followed by a great job obtained with his father’s assistance. He had married his college sweetheart and they had a beautiful family—adorable twins, a boy and girl—with a fantastic home and even a luxury vacation home.

The second leader came from a very different background. His parents had been divorced, and his childhood was often lonely. Money was scarce and he always had an after-school job. After graduation his only option for continuing his education was a city college, where he continued to work nights to put himself through. After graduation he got a good entry-level job and made his way quickly up the ladder through hard work and dedication, eventually becoming global leader of his business unit. He married a woman he had met at a soup kitchen, and they had two wonderful sons.

The thesis being that the trials experienced by the second leader prepared him better for the unstable environment of today than the easy successes of the first leader. As we know, struggle and failure produce grit, a trait which is hard to teach out of a book but which is a major component of long-term happiness and success.

Self-compassion is more important to success than self-esteem

Heidi Grant Halvorson, writing for the HBR Blog Network, asserts that self-esteem, rather than being a useful tool for enabling high performance, may instead be destructive.

Rather, the idea of self-compassion, forgiving yourself for mistakes and failures, is more beneficial, and may drive success. Writes Halvorson:

A growing body of research, including new studies by Berkeley's Juliana Breines and Serena Chen, suggest that self-compassion, rather than self-esteem, may be the key to unlocking your true potential for greatness.

Now, I know that some of you are already skeptical about a term like "self-compassion." But this is a scientific, data-driven argument — not feel-good pop psychology. So hang in there and keep an open mind.

Self-compassion is a willingness to look at your own mistakes and shortcomings with kindness and understanding — it's embracing the fact that to err is indeed human. When you are self-compassionate in the face of difficulty, you neither judge yourself harshly, nor feel the need to defensively focus on all your awesome qualities to protect your ego. It's not surprising that self-compassion leads, as many studies show, to higher levels of personal well-being, optimism and happiness, and to less anxiety and depression.

Self-compassion is a core ingredient of grit, which you've read about here in the past. Self-compassion makes it safer to admit error and share stories of mistakes, which has the powerful benefit of raising the knowledge of an entire team or company.

Sharing stories about mistakes and failure is another way to enable self-compassion. It helps us understand we are not alone in stumbling from time to time. That's one of the purposes of this blog and of the Mistake Bank book, currently in process.

Sigourney Weaver shows her grit: "It's a good thing for me that Yale was so mean"

In a recent interview on NPR's Fresh Air, actress Sigourney Weaver described how she began acting. In the story, she discussed her discouraging experience at Yale Drama School. Weaver was clearly undeterred by the negative feedback; she has fashioned a stellar 30+ year career. More than that, she took that lesson and established a theater to provide a better environment for young actors - demonstrating resilience, grit and a long memory.

DAVIES: So what took you into acting?

WEAVER: Well, when I was at college I was an English major and on the side I did a lot of very irreverent, crazy theater with a wonderful group called The Company. We had a kind of covered wagon. We used to do commedia dell'arte all over the San Francisco Bay area. We did "King Lear." We did "Hamlet." We did, you know, we were fearless and we had nothing to do with any drama department. And when it came time for me to leave college - which was a scary moment - I quickly applied to drama schools, kind of as a lark, and I got in. Now...

DAVIES: To Yale.

WEAVER: ...I actually did these - yeah. To all of them, actually. Then I had a miserable time at Yale where they really were discouraging.

DAVIES: Hmm. In what way?

WEAVER: They told me I had no talent and I'd never get anywhere. You know, I am not alone. So many art schools believe that they need to tear down young people. They consider it a sort of rite of passage to kind of roll - steamroll you and crush you into the dust. And so that's why helped found The Flea Theater here in New York where we have currently, we have 90 young actors, brilliant, wonderful young actors. Very diverse. We just got a grant from the National Endowment of the Arts. But so actually, it's a good thing it happened to me that Yale was so mean, because now I've been part of something that's created an alternative to drama school, which, as was always the case in so many businesses, you come into the theater and you learn by doing and it's an intergenerational thing. And I work at The Flea and we all inspire each other.

Other references to the value of grit to overcome obstacles and setbacks here.

True Grit #2 - English girls' school tries a "failure week"

According to the BBC, the Wimbledon High School near London will hold a "failure week" in February to teach its high-performing students that it's better to try new things and fail at them than to play it safe and try to sidestep situations where failure is possible.

The headmistress, Heather Hanbury, said she wanted to show "it is completely acceptable and completely normal not to succeed at times in life."...

There will be workshops, assemblies, and activities for the girls, with parents and tutors joining in with tales of their own failures.

There will be YouTube clips of famous and successful people who have failed along the way and moved on.

The emphasis will be discussions on the merits of failure and on the negative side of trying too hard not to fail.

This is a perfect time to teach that learning and development are more important than 100% grades. My high school experience was prime time for the pursuit of grades rather than learning, which I find really annoying in hindsight (in other words, that was a mistake :).

The headmistress' thinking is reminiscent of the importance of "grit" - the ability to bounce back from failure promoted by the University of Pennsylvania's Angela Duckworth. I hope headmistress Hanbury lets the girls know that mistakes can open up new vistas and new opportunities, worlds of possibility, rather than the closet of "perfection or nothing."

NB: The Failure Week was held from February 6-10 and here are some of the learnings from it. My favorite quote: "We just lost in debating this week – we’ve been joking: is that what it’s about??"

If by "it" you mean developing a sense of humor around your fallibility, the answer is yes--that's what it's about.

[Hat tip to @brainology]

"True Grit" - the importance of learning how to overcome setbacks

Paul Tough of The New York Times Magazine profiled private-school headmaster Dominic Randolph and his focus on instilling character into his students, in addition to the typical focus on academics and extracurriculars. Central to his efforts is a belief that students need to overcome setbacks - to try and fail at things - to develop character. Tough writes:

When I asked Randolph to explain just what he thought Riverdale students were missing out on, he told me the story of his own scholastic career. He did well in boarding school and was admitted to Harvard, but when he got to college, he felt lost, out of step with the power-tie careerism of the Reagan ’80s. After two years at Harvard, Randolph left for a year to work in a low-paying manual job, as a carpenter’s helper, trying to find himself. After college, he moved for a couple of years to Italy, where he worked odd jobs and studied opera. It was an uncertain and unsettled time in his life, filled with plenty of failed experiments and setbacks and struggles. Looking back on his life, though, Randolph says that the character strengths that enabled him to achieve the success that he has were not built in his years at Harvard or at the boarding schools he attended; they came out of those years of trial and error, of taking chances and living without a safety net. And it is precisely those kinds of experiences that he worries that his students aren’t having.

“The idea of building grit and building self-control is that you get that through failure,” Randolph explained. “And in most highly academic environments in the United States, no one fails anything.”

And one of the scholars who have influenced Randolph's thinking, Penn's Angela Duckworth, emphasizes that struggle is essential to success:

“The problem, I think, is not only the schools but also the students themselves,” she wrote. “Here’s why: learning is hard. True, learning is fun, exhilarating and gratifying — but it is also often daunting, exhausting and sometimes discouraging. . . . To help chronically low-performing but intelligent students, educators and parents must first recognize that character is at least as important as intellect.”

Duckworth’s early research showed that measures of self-control can be a more reliable predictor of students’ grade-point averages than their I.Q.’s. But while self-control seemed to be a critical ingredient in attaining basic success, Duckworth came to feel it wasn’t as relevant when it came to outstanding achievement. People who accomplished great things, she noticed, often combined a passion for a single mission with an unswerving dedication to achieve that mission, whatever the obstacles and however long it might take. She decided she needed to name this quality, and she chose the word “grit."

The idea of "grit" as a character trait vital to success is related to Carol Dweck's research showing the value of a learning versus a fixed mindset. To Dweck, successful learners see a failure as an opportunity to learn and improve, not a referendum on one's innate ability.

Some learn grit later in life. Others learn it early (Randolph is trying to teach it to his students). But in any event, if you don't learn it sooner or later, it's hard to be truly successful.

For more on grit, here's a TED Talk from Angela Duckworth: