Episode 059 – Seekardo Short – Learnings from Englands Euros Final Penalty miss, how to perform under high pressure, bouncing back after failures and more

Harms: Hello it’s Harms here and welcome to another episode of the Seekardo show. 

Today is a Seekardo short and we want to pick up on the topic of a recent mega event, which was the Euros football tournament. 

Specifically hone in on the events of the final involving the England team and even more specifically, the three young superstar footballers who missed the penalties at the finals of the Euros against Italy. 

Those footballers the reason we wanted to bring that example in is not specifically talk about the penalties or football in detail we want to look at this example, which has taken place at the highest level and extract learnings and insights. 

I noticed the fact that there were three young footballers who are at the peak of their profession and the peak of the sport they asked to perform at the highest level and they missed a penalty, so the reality is that’s an error, a dip in performance how you want to describe it. 

But that also can translate into the lives of young people in everyday workplaces, businesses, families and relationships. 

you’ve got a young child, teens, 20s, even in their 30s and they’re high performers in the workplace. What happens when you’re in your workplace and there’s a moment where the pressures are turned on and you don’t perform? 

You make a mistake? 

You have a catastrophic error, how do you then recover from that like these three footballers have to do now in their profession? 

All being said they had incredible support from the public and they also had some negative feedback from the public and this would have given them mixed emotions, but they still have to turn things around to maintain that level of performance. 

Ro how do we solve this for young people in their everyday life?

Dr Ro: The first thing to reflect on is if you saw the camera on them, how they reacted and their instant reaction was they just shrunk. There were tears so by default, the internal language shock and yes, you’ve got thousands of people watching and millions around the world watching. 

There’s all that immense pressure. 

The decision when they went up and who took the penalties was actually taken by somebody older than them who is more experienced. I want to make a statement although we’re talking about young people it can actually translate to older people who have a younger set of beliefs and values and are maybe not so emotionally developed. 

The point is they didn’t at that moment in time, having not got the ball behind the net they didn’t suddenly turn around and say I need to work on myself. 

That goal I scored last month was amazing. But they didn’t do that, they really went to that dark place of shit I let everybody down. I think that’s the first thing we need to talk about is the internal language that occurs when a setback hits us. 

Let’s hypothesise what would have been some of things going in their head. 

When you watched that, what could you imagine them saying to themselves?

Harms: I felt sick in my tummy, I felt their pain. 

They were stunned, shocked, there was a level of disbelief. There must have been complete silence from the world around them in that moment and like you said they caved into themselves.

Dr Ro: For example, it’s the exam season results going on. Those results will be out in a months’ time. It will be exactly the same feeling for young people.

Harms: If you’re saying these sportsmen that don’t relate to me, actually it does because scientifically or biologically in terms of a human mind and emotions we all feel the max level of pressure. 

The scenario is different, the environment is different but the extremes of happiness that we feel, extremes of sadness we feel, the extremes of pressure that we feel will be the same but it will just be in a different situation. Marcus Rashford the penalty taker he can’t feel more pressure than I can feel in my workplace about to pitch. 

He can’t feel more pressure than the child about to get their exam results.

Dr Ro: It’s how it’s magnified internally. 

We have our own internal magnification system that can add colour, sound, and emotional connection to it, which will make your stomach feel sick. 

That translates to you and millions of people watching every human being is connected and that pain can be magnified by the meaning that we give to the experience that we’re having at that moment. 

The great quote, nothing has meaning apart from the meaning you give it. I’ve just recently been coaching a young speaker 30 years of age and we had a conversation about two weeks ago and it’s quite emotional and some blocks going on there, and the more we dug around the former professional footballer had an injury and the stuff coming out from that even and that was like over a decade ago. 

We harbour onto that. 

If you’re in front of a massive audience about to take a goal kick and all the things in the past that went wrong can potentially become magnified and it’s a shift in focus, everything comes back to that internal language. 

Do we default to gladiator, warrior, building off the back of their strengths, their muscular performance and their mental performance? 

Do we go into that or when we’re under pressure do we default to shit what if I screw up it like I did last year or like that time my parents told me I was not adequate. 

That’s what we default to.

Harms: That is happening unconsciously, that’s the difference. 

Some of us default to gladiator the warrior, unconsciously automatically, some do the opposite.

Dr Ro: Some by the way, and this is where the age comes in.

I believe that some come further down the line when you have more life experiences, they’ve been there, it’s in the muscle memory and they can talk from observation because they were there. 

Here’s me at 55, 56. 

I know what I was like in my 20s and I would have definitely been the hot-blooded reactionary, very emotional, which I am today, but I’ve learned to temper it because I’ve got a roadmap of the experience. 

But when you’re that young you’ve got no roadmap of your own.

So a mistake like a job error or exam result or football goal being missed it’s a bloody great highway on a map. Defined in that moment is the biggest thing but in 50 years’ time it might be a tiny side road.

Harms: Because hopefully by then you’ve made more errors and mistakes and remapped.

One thing which ties nicely here is it was so easy to judge the players in that circumstance. 

Hopefully one of the messages you’ve taken away is have you been in the situation yourself? 

Have you ever made an error in a high-pressure situation? 

It may not have been scoring a goal for England, but was it in your workplace? 

Did you think you were going to get an A in the exam and you didn’t? Did you make a poor investment?

Dr Ro: I have done all of the above. 

I got my PhD at 25 years of age. I’m super pumped. I go for an interview and the guy interviewing me is a former Cambridge graduate. He’s at the top of his profession in his area of my field.

I specialise in one area of the field he specialises in another. We sat down and immediately I didn’t understand this. 

At the time I had quite a feisty character and I’d done a lot of personal development. I’m starting as a young engineer going in with a PhD and a PhD academically is the highest qualification you can actually get without going to professorship for example, and to get professorship you then have to just publish enough papers, be long enough in the field and then have the opportunity. 

I’ve done O-levels, A-levels at the time and then my degree so he opens up my CV and this is the classic case of feeling judged or how you and he says, I noticed on your exam results in maths you got a C. 

If you asked me that probably five years before I would have gone shit, as I was so conscious. 

This guy gets a magnifying glass out and no, not the PhD, not the award I won from the institution or the award I won for presenting my PhD to peers, none of that he goes, you got a C. 

I had a quick response to that initially which was like fuck that. 

I got angry and that’s a good response. 

You either get angry or you kind of shrink down and you back off and I get angry, but I didn’t say it to him I just said to him, that was a long time ago. I’ve got a PhD and that’s what we’re discussing. 

I think the point being that the reaction in me was one of the roadmap before I built it up. 

I knew how hard I worked to get to that point. I knew that I had an extended year in my PhD to get my grant money. 

My mum had no money, so she had to go out and work extra hours to help me at the start of my PhD. We then got a small grant from the council because I was a single parent child doing a PhD. 

So when somebody then pressed that button in me I was like fuck you because I had built up that roadmap, but I was older. If I’d been 19 in a totally different situation.

The message here is you have to start to go back and remind yourself of all the great things you’ve done and what got you to that point. 

I was prepared to walk out that room and say I don’t want this job but there were some people in that company I really wanted to work with, and it continued all the way through. He interviewed me when I left the company. 

29 years of age, I left the company and I had to have an exit interview four years after working at the company and he said, why are you leaving? 

I said I’ve seen the hours you work and I don’t want to work like that. Another one was standing in front of a group of about 5000 people and I went up and my slides were messed up. Something had gone wrong with the technical and somebody said didn’t you sort this out before you went on stage? 

Pointing it to me. 

I’d prepared it all but the issue wasn’t mine, they were pointing it back to me. 

Ask yourself the question: how are you going to feel about this when you are 20 years down the line? 

That is one of my resets in any situation.

No matter how young you are, think about the older version of you having a conversation with that person. 

What wisdom would that person bring? 

What roadmap would they bring to the table?

Harms: Once the error and mistake has occurred what I don’t want to happen is that it becomes the anchor point for the rest of your life. You don’t then go for that promotion because you’re scared, you don’t go speak in front of the audience because you’re defaulting back to that situation.

For these young lads imagine they don’t ever take another penalty again.

Dr Ro: If they’re not careful the next time they stand in front of that box all they remember is 70,000, millions watching. 

It’s rewiring the experience to make yourself have a greater strength and attitude towards it.

As parents we can literally screw up our children’s belief system by even a breath, a look on our face, a sense of disappointment, energy. 

Our kids will hold onto that.

Harms: Mine was less to do with studies and grades, it was behaviour. 

I sometimes did reckless things in school, that expression that stood with me and it was actually beneficial because it was anchored to the right thing. It was anchored to behaviour.

Dr Ro: That can be positive because if a parent gives you that look, then when you get faced with that situation you picture then. 

I was in Singapore six years ago and 150 people there I was talking about the challenge the children face with pressure. 

I was talking about the fact there’s a quite high suicide rates nationally as a lot of parents were saying we want to help our kids I through this one sentence out and this lady said to me, my son attempted suicide drinking Vim, which is like a cleaning agent. 

The teacher told him he was underperforming because he got 75% in his exams and he came from home, drank the stuff, and found him on the floor. I’ve let you down mum. The teacher said this and the kid is like 14 years of age so that’s what we don’t realise as parents that our children harbour and they magnify and it goes back to are you going to be a gladiator magnify the positive or reflect on the negative in that moment? 

It doesn’t help you in 10 minutes, it’s how you deal with it in that moment in time and who you have to have around you to support you with that as well.

Harms: When big events like what’s happened take place we’ve got to just extract as much learning as possible from it. 

Those are the historical events that we will remember and rather than anchor back to something which may have taken place in your life but we know the three young lads who missed the penalty but we can watch them over the next 10 years and they’re going to do incredible things. 

They will bounce back and we want to extract new learnings.

Dr Ro: What was sad and I think this is the other thing that throws into the mix is the racism, the bigotry and all those comments that came across one spectrum of social media. 

You’ve got to segment this, you have to compartmentalise. Somebody is using someone’s colour to attack somebody for missing a penalty. 

So if you ever find yourself subject to some kind of discrimination separate that as that’s not about you, that’s about that person’s fucked up attitude. 

Whereas the stuff that you’ve got to deal with is actually your internal conversation about who you are, what you believe in, what you’re capable of not to do with your colour, age, all that stuff. So try and filter the two.

Harms: If that happens and you make the error, the mistake, regardless of what the field is and bad by your own definition.

It is based on your situation, your scenario and the result that you’re trying to get and when that happens, the judgement will come, and the judgement will come in different areas. 

One part will come from somebody’s judgement but is based on their view and their view of the world and their issues. 

On the other side it could be valid. 

In which case you’ve got these footballers who will talk to their managerial team, coaching team, fellow players and get better, but they should not be and there’s no doubt they will be focusing on the judgements of others based on the other people’s personal experience.

Dr Ro: Have an audience with private guidance with people that are there to support you without judgement, unconditional love and who have maybe been there and had that experience. 

Lean on that. 

And yes, it’s not going to be easy to absorb it but there’s a time where you process it and you grow through it. Whatever has happened it could feel bad that’s the thing we all give it our language but once we’ve got that language you can say what really is this. 

I think one of the best things is to reflect back on the great things about you, go back and rebuild the belief legs underneath your table and then lean on people that are actually supportive and you know will not judge you for who you are.

They won’t judge you for what you’ve done but actually complement and guide you for who you are and that’s what I really liked about what went on in that incident but we need more of those around us on a daily basis. 

That’s the challenge, if you’ve only got a small support group around you and that group is say people who have got their own issues, they are going to put their issues on you.

Choose your mentor and coaches carefully.

Harms: That’s myself and Ro signing off will see you on the next episode.

Harms: Mine was less to do with studies and grades, it was behaviour. 

I sometimes did reckless things in school, that expression that stood with me and it was actually beneficial because it was anchored to the right thing. It was anchored to behaviour.

Dr Ro: That can be positive because if a parent gives you that look, then when you get faced with that situation you picture then. 

I was in Singapore six years ago and 150 people there I was talking about the challenge the children face with pressure. 

I was talking about the fact there’s a quite high suicide rates nationally as a lot of parents were saying we want to help our kids I through this one sentence out and this lady said to me, my son attempted suicide drinking Vim, which is like a cleaning agent. 

The teacher told him he was underperforming because he got 75% in his exams and he came from home, drank the stuff, and found him on the floor. I’ve let you down mum. The teacher said this and the kid is like 14 years of age so that’s what we don’t realise as parents that our children harbour and they magnify and it goes back to are you going to be a gladiator magnify the positive or reflect on the negative in that moment? 

It doesn’t help you in 10 minutes, it’s how you deal with it in that moment in time and who you have to have around you to support you with that as well.

Harms: When big events like what’s happened take place we’ve got to just extract as much learning as possible from it. 

Those are the historical events that we will remember and rather than anchor back to something which may have taken place in your life but we know the three young lads who missed the penalty but we can watch them over the next 10 years and they’re going to do incredible things. 

They will bounce back and we want to extract new learnings.