Pep Guardiola arrived at the press conference after Manchester City’s game against Feyenoord on Tuesday with scratches on his face: he had been injured.
He didn’t lose the game. After winning 3-0, they drew 3-3 in the Champions League, but had already suffered five consecutive defeats before that draw.
Guardiola won everything. As a coach, he made every team he played for shine with his magic. The players changed, but he went back to doing his tricks.
He trained the best players in the world. He was the one who commanded Messi’s Barcelona team, who played football as if it were a Playstation. They did what they wanted. It wasn’t football, it was art.
However, this formidable man is going through the worst professional phase in his history. I had never lost so many games in a row. Success can help you think, but defeat teaches you much more.
Being professional also means dealing with failure. The way we process the internal helplessness of defeat is very dense. It costs us all because we all want to win. Failure can be an invaluable experience for leaders, helping them grow professionally and become more resilient. Some say that failure is an opportunity to start over, reassessing the situation in a more intelligent and accurate way. Failure allows us to prioritize, identify new opportunities and, above all, it becomes an invaluable life teacher.
The founder of IBM used to say that “the quickest way to succeed is to double your failure rate.” Failures are essential to be able to continue innovating. No company, no leader can innovate if they don’t take risks and are willing to learn from mistakes. Failure opens a door to rethink, reimagine what we are doing, change strategy and reformulate action plans.
It is often necessary to accommodate the frustration of executives and leaders for having fallen and not having won everything. It’s the most bitter learning. Anger explodes, many start looking for someone to blame and everything goes dark. Sometimes it feels like everything was a failure. The tree devours the forest. We have to start over.
Now, personality is key when it comes to failure. For those who have always been successful, who have had everything in their professional lives, failure acts as a forced and painful landing that requires them to scramble again, to bathe in a pool of humility that will leave them in a better situation for when they have to face a situation again. Be careful, self-sufficiency can be poisonous.
For this we need a lot of patience with ourselves. And patience is in short supply these days.
Practicing how we would react in the event of a defeat has absolutely nothing to do with the internal greed that real defeat produces. We can all be thoughtful and strategic on paper. But the tsunami of reality washes us away.
Pain must be accommodated and processed for something to happen. And often in organizations, failures are not reflected. And Pep comes from a very pedagogical and humble football school like Johan Cruyff’s. But no matter how well we drive, we are human and we can all go to pasture.
We all have a voracious volcano of fire inside us. All it takes is for this specific movement of the plate to occur for our lava to make everything burn.
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