The 24-Hour Rule

Whenever you accomplish anything great you should allow yourself time to celebrate, and whenever you fail at something important you should let yourself experience that pain. But how long should you allow yourself to celebrate or to mourn?

A common rule of thumb among coaches is 24 hours. After a big win or loss coaches will often tell their teams to celebrate and have fun, or feel the loss and the pain from it for 24 hours. But as soon as that 24 hours is up its time to get back to work.

Victory

The reason we can’t dwell on our victories and stay in a constant state of celebration is because we will lose our hunger and drive.

If we are always celebrating and having fun then we aren’t putting in the hard work that it took to get us the win in the first place, and when you aren’t getting better your getting caught. Then, next time around when you face that challenge again, or maybe a bigger challenge, you won’t be prepared.

This can sometimes be a difficult balance, because on one hand we should enjoy our victories and accomplishments. If we don’t take time to celebrate, we will eventually burn out on whatever it is that we are doing, because all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. By taking time to celebrate victories we will re-energize ourselves, allowing us to be ready to get back to work and continue to improve so that we are able to maintain that success.

It’s also important to remember that no matter how good you are, or how successful your team is, you always have room to grow and improve. So, by limiting yourself to celebrating for 24 hours and then getting back to work, you will be able to maintain that pressure to continue to strive to get better, while simultaneously allowing yourself to live in the moment and enjoy your accomplishments.

Defeat

On the flip side we can’t continually dwell on our losses and failures. Take some time to allow yourself to feel those negative emotions. But after those 24 hours are up its time to get back to work. Find out what you did wrong, and use that pain from the loss to fuel you to do better next time.

Failure hurts, especially if it is something big and important to us. However, if we try to suppress all of our negative emotions from failure they will build up over time under the surface. These negative emotions won’t go away on their own, we have to deal with them. 

By taking 24 hours to feel those emotions, to embrace them, and then come up with a plan so that next time you succeed and don’t have to feel those emotions again, you will have effectively dealt with those negative emotions and you will know how to move forward.

Allowing yourself to feel the emotions, and determine exactly what it is about the loss that hurt the most, will allow you to figure out what you need to do better next time. Do you feel bad because you didn’t try your hardest, did you not put in as many hours as you could have, were you not as focused as you should have been, were you not being a team player?

Once you know the source of the negative emotions you can begin moving towards making a game plan. But we also can’t stay in this sad state for too long, because eventually it will become counterproductive. If you stay stuck in that negative state you won’t want to take action to get better, and you won’t have the motivation to get better. You may end up quitting all together instead of addressing the problem and trying to move forward. That’s why it’s so important to have that time limit.

So, take 24 hours to grieve your losses and celebrate your wins. Then figure out what you could do better next time, and begin working to make it happen. Good luck.