After losing to New England last night, Peyton Manning faced the usual bevy of reporters and fielded their usual bank of uninspired questions about what went wrong.
When asked what he attributed the loss to, Peyton quipped:
“Sometimes, it’s just bad football.”
In typical post game fashion, the reporters pressed him to elaborate on what was already as obvious a reason for Denver’s loss as any.
Ever the champion, Manning added, “I don’t usually stink, but I stunk today.”
When a leader of Peyton Manning’s status takes responsibility for why things didn’t work out the way the team anticipated, we need to pay attention. In the professional world, whether it be the world of sports or education or finance or technology, emerging and existing leaders everywhere do our teams a tremendous service when we face the press of our respective industries and are quick to own the losses as often as the wins.
Everyone knows winning is sexy and losing sucks no matter what uniform we put on in the morning, no matter the stadium we show up to work in. Everyone also knows that in order to move forward in the wake of a loss OR a win, we have to take a good hard look in the mirror and ask the person staring back at us what went right — and what we could have done differently.
It would have been so easy for Manning to shift blame for losing to the cold New England conditions, or a referee who made a bad call, or a teammate who didn’t make the play as mapped out in the Xs and Os in the pre game locker room meeting.
Harder to admit in front of millions of viewers that the reason things didn’t work out was because we stunk today.
Yet what a difference in how we feel waking up the next morning, not to mention how the world responds to us, knowing we owned our mistakes and can now get to work on what’s next with a clear and focused conscious.
Bad football is going to happen to all of us at one point or another. It’s how we choose to respond to it that makes us champions — or not.
