Losing is never easy.  Especially when you want to win so badly.  When you train so hard, and you put the work rate in.  When you show up but its not enough.  My heart broke as I watched my 12-year-old son and his team lose their hockey final last week 7-4.  The emotions were raw, and the disappointment was real.  The team went through the “if onlys”.  “If only we had got those two goals earlier”, “if only we had one more quarter”, “If only”. 

The reality is that the team they versed were a top team.  They had good players and the coaches had done their research on us.  Were they beatable?  Of course.  But I think the outcome could have been even worse.  

The teams versed one another earlier in the season and we lost that game 11-0.  Emotions built earlier in that game and my son fell apart.  The pressure of losing was too much and by the middle of the game he was angry, frustrated, and teary and everyone on the team felt it.  

As parents, I can’t say that we were not concerned leading up to the final after witnessing the outcome of the first game.  But we didn’t need to be worried.  This time, our son was ready.  I watched proudly as he settled his team over the first two thirds of the game.  “It’s ok guys” he said calmly.  “We can do this” he encouraged, all the while still playing his game.  By the third they were down 6-2 when suddenly the game shifted.  His team started to dominate, and, on the sideline, we had a sense that they could win this game and the boys realised this too.  Sadly, there just was not enough time and the boys went down fighting to the very end.  

We were so proud of that team and even more so proud of our son.  He led his team well through loss.  He still had the same emotions he had in that first game – anger, frustration, and devastation but he had learned over the season to maintain his calm to keep his team going.  Failure had taught him to lead well.  

Too often we fear failure.  We do everything we can to prevent it from happening.  We avoid risk and we take over when we start to see someone fail.  Failure though is a much greater teacher than winning will ever be.  So many top businesses have founders who have had multiple failed businesses before they finally got it right.  As leaders we must learn to let our people fail and we must learn to lead calmly through the tough games.  Failing is not the teacher though – the magic that comes from failing is in the after.  It’s in the vulnerability with one another, in the connection with our team, in the accountability of our actions.  It’s in the humility that happens with loss.  True magic happens when we can sit down at the end and instead of saying “if only”, we say “what have we learned?”, “what have I learned?”.  It’s creating the action plan for the next big game from these learnings.  Over time, after leaning into a few failures, you might just come out with a big win.