Staying Positive Step 4

Staying Positive: The ability to use tactics and strategies to overcome setbacks and achieve goals.

Step 4: I keep trying when something goes wrong, and think about what happened

Outcomes

To achieve Step 4, learners will show that they can persist at a task but also respond to setbacks by thinking about what they can learn from when things go wrong.

In earlier steps, the focus was on how to keep trying and stay calm when something goes wrong. The development here is to introduce some analysis of what caused the problem, and how to learn from it.

Learners need to be able to:

Know how to take a positive approach to learning from setbacks
Analyse when something goes wrong and learn lessons

Introduction

When something goes wrong there is often learning that we can take from that experience: it could be to not repeat it or learning something new about the situation or ourselves.
The most important part of learning lessons when something goes wrong is about having the attitude of wanting to learn them.

Skill Starter

Positive Change

In pairs, learners reflect on past scenario where they may have not done their best, may have lost or something didn’t go to plan.

How did they keep trying? Did they manage to change something or try and have a different outcome?

10 mins

Paired activity

Discussion

Teach & Apply

Learning is about asking ourselves a series of important questions:
- What happened and why does it feel that something has gone wrong?
- What role did I play in the events, and what was out of my control?
- What could I have done to have prevented that happening?
- What do I know now that I did not know before and how will I use that learning?

This sort of analysis, means that even when something goes wrong we can take something positive out of it and is something all sports people go through.

Optional Activity

Challenge Accepted

Set teams a challenge before a game, e.g. starting a player down or not being able to go into a certain area for 5 minutes.

Pause part way for the team to reflect on what has happened.

· How do learners reflect on their own input?

· How can they change their approach to learn from this setback and keep trying?

Resume the game and reflect on successful strategies at the end.

20 mins

Group activity

Active

Reflection & Assessment

Embed these strategies across your teaching and coaching to help learners apply what they’ve learnt.

This is a step that lends itself well to sports, as it can be a powerful tool for turning setbacks into more positive learning experiences. Remind learners of the steps for staying calm to allow them to keep trying and the questions to prompt a reflection about what happened.

Use these ideas for ways of assessing this skill step to help you check learners’ understanding and confidence.

This step can be assessed through a discussion of events from learners’ own lives but this will need to be supplemented with a sustained view of how learners really react to things going wrong.
Ask these reflective questions:
- How can things going wrong also be chances to learn something new?
- How can we learn lessons when something goes wrong?
- What are some of the important questions we should be asking ourselves?