How do you react when you make an error?

by Robert Poole

When players make errors, one of their biggest issues is the way that they react. Players are passionate when they play and they often vocally express themselves with elation or with statements of frustration. Now a strong player will easily brush off any negative or passionate comments as an expression of a desire to win and improve the team’s performance but a player suffering from self-doubt will sometimes take these comments personally. Every comment that they hear is construed as a personal attack and appears to be an indication that the team doesn’t believe in them and that maybe they aren’t good enough.

Sometimes a player could be concentrating so hard in practise that they forget to express any emotion whatsoever – a habit I am sometimes guilty of. This is not so detrimental when it follows a ‘positive’ outcome but when they have just made an error and they continue to dwell on it, it can appear to others that they are not concentrating or that they just don’t want to be there. If they then lose belief in themselves and stop trusting that their decision making is good, they can feel that they have let the team down and so retreat into their shell. Unfortunately, this can look from the outside as if they don’t care anymore.

This can be very detrimental to the team but just by talking honestly to teammates after practise, a player will soon learn that even though his/her teammate might get frustrated in the moment, they will continue to trust the player as long as he/she continues to work hard and show that they are fighting for the team. Often the player has good intentions but they can come across to the team as negative so they need to try to be more like the athlete who moves forward rather than dwells on the past – the athlete who believes inhis/her ability. They need to reinforce their belief that an error is no more than a momentary lapse. They need to show their teammates that they match their desire to win in the next point by finding a way to score the point for the team– nail the reception pass, kill the next ball, make sure to get the next block or get that crucial touch on defence – then celebrate with their teammates and get loud! Getting frustrated and retreating into your shell will not help your cause, you have to be mentally strong and believe that you are that player.

Changing because of an error

When a player starts to doubt themselves in a training session, one of their first instincts may be that they have to immediately make a change. Whether that is in their shot selection or changing their temperament by getting angry, they can often lose focus on what the meaning of “practise” is. It’s as if they doubt their decision-making ability rather than trust their execution and so they then predetermine what their next shot is going to be before the ball has even been set. So what exactly is the problem with this? They have absolutely no idea what that set will be like! What if the serve receive pass is bad? What if the setter is forced to set ‘out of system’? What if the resulting set is poor and off target? The best attackers have the ability to adjust to whatever balls they are set. As discussed in a recent blog post, good attackers will wait to see where the ball is set, judge the tempo of the set and then accelerate towards the ball. Only when they are actually in the air will they finally decide which shot to play, having taken into account several factors such as blocker and defender positions. They may well have several ideas beforehand of what shots they might play dependant upon what they are eventually faced with but the final shot choice is made at the latter end of the attack process.

Put simply, there are so many factors that can change during a transition play that an attacker needs to keep all options open and not restrict his/her choice of shot. When a player loses confidence and starts to predetermine their shots they are no longer reacting to what is in front of them and choosing the best shot for the situation. This ultimately leads them to having less faith in their abilities and getting more and more frustrated.

If a player truly believes in their shot choices, then they need to commit to them. They need to accept that an error in the past is not a reflection on the choice that they made and move on. If anything, it is an opportunity to work on becoming more consistent, to challenge themselves to find a solution as that’s the ultimate role of an attacker – to put the ball on the floor!

Moving forward

Realising that you do not have the option of changing the past but that you can make changes in the future is key to the performance of an athlete but sometimes it can be the hardest thing to do. In the moment that one point can mean everything to you and if you make an error, you feel like you have let the team down. However, sometimes you have to look at the situation from a different perspective; it was only a single point, it was in training and you now have the opportunity to make the next ball better. In the future you will receive hundreds if not thousands of those same balls and you can have an effect on the outcome of each and every one of them but you will not be able to change the outcome of the previous ball.

Overview

At the end of the day how many of your teammates will remember the 3 balls you hit out in a row at practise? Maybe 1. How many will remember it a month from now? Probably none. However, they will see that you continue to doubt yourself if you dwell on those 3 balls at every practise thereafter. You owe it to yourself to allow yourself to make errors and move on from them, to not feel like you are letting the team down when you make an error and recognise that it is all part of the learning process. Getting your head around this basic concept is one of the hardest aspects of mental toughness but when you start to have this realisation, training and your enjoyment of the sport becomes greatly enhanced.