Brian Johnson walks through a three-step practice for turning losses into learning: celebrate one win, identify one thing to improve, and pick one concrete action. He learned this from his son Emerson's chess losses and Carol Dweck's growth mindset research.
Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to another heroic plus one. In our last plus one we started talking about one of my recent coaching sessions with my yta. Then I took us on a trip down the Johnson family memory lane as I shared the origin story of why I love falling asleep holding hands with Emerson on our boys only weekend chess tournament adventures. Today we're going to go back to the practical wisdom from that chat with Phil. Let's get straight to work. So after Phil and I chatted about the weekend with Emerson and I celebrated both how much I love our time together and how proud I am of how hard he's worked to achieve success in chess, Phil asked me how does Emerson deal with failure? To which I said this is actually the thing that makes me most proud of and excited for he alchemizes a loss almost instantly. I told Phil that of course he doesn't like losing, but he knows that it's a part of the game and he lets it go almost immediately. It's truly an astonishing thing. Important note I think some of the contributing factors include my relentless obsession with embodying the Growth mindset, wisdom from Carol Dweck's Mindset and Self Theories books. Check out those notes. Seriously parents, check out those notes. And another big thing is my equally consistently relentless practice of Lanny Basham's 1, 2, 3 post performance protocol, during which we always find something to celebrate. Then we find the number one thing that needs work. Then we find the thing that we'll do differently to make sure we turn that loss in the learning, which will soon contribute to a win. We've got a plus one. You can check out on Win or Learn for more on that process. Now, we've gone through this cycle so many times and I have so effectively made the connection between the loss, the learning and the future win that we've been able to take the winner, learn wisdom off the bumper sticker and t shirts a lot of chess kids wear and make it a practical reality in his life. Now check out another plus one called Operationalizing Learning Wins for more. It's one of my all time favorite pieces of content. In our next plus one, I'll tell you what Phil told me after I told him that it involves a movie director who knew which person would become a star based on one thing. For now, if you feel so inspired, let's go through the heroic Win or Learn protocol together. Think back to your last disappointing performance. You got it. Great note number one. It should have been really easy for you to recall that performance. You wish you could have improved upon. Whether that's at work or at home, the more heroically you're striving to live, the more opportunities you're going to have to win or learn. So note number three. If you couldn't quickly come up with a thing or three, take that as a sign you need to step up your game. Now if you could easily find a gold mine of failures, great work. You're right where we want you to be. So bring that performance you wish you had crushed to mind. We're gonna 1, 2, 3. First. Number one, what's one thing that we can celebrate about that performance? Note, we always start here. Always. There's always something you can celebrate. Always feast on that. That's like you to crush it. For Emerson, it's often that he put himself into a position to win against a really good opponent. We talk about that before we talk about what needs work. Then number two, what moment do you wish you could go back and redo and or what is something that oops moment reveals needs work? For Emerson, it's often a move in a game or a specific skill that needs to be addressed. For example, he played a guy who had a killer opening recently. We knew he needed to work on defending against that. We played another guy. He played another guy who had a great end game and we knew we needed to study those. So how about you? What's one thing you know you need to improve based on that sub optimal performance? You got it. Great. Now it's time to turn that loss into a learn so we can take this wisdom off the bumper sticker and make this loss a win in the future. Which leads us to number three. What's the one thing, the one thing you know you can do to address the weakness that was exposed on that suboptimal performance? And most importantly, what specifically will you do differently to improve? You got it? Great. Now go crush that with a smile knowing that that it's supposed to be challenging. Remember, heroes battle dragons. We don't sidestep lizards. And remember, dragons have sharp claws and fiery breath. And remember, we're gonna get scratched up and burned in this one precious heroic life of ours. Let's wear those scars like medals. It's time to win or learn. And remember, when we do it right, learning becomes winning. So we win or we win. It's day one. We're all in. Let's go hero.
