It’s our first post of the year so here’s wishing you all a smashing 2025! The first lesson we are embracing this year is overcoming the fear of failure. One of our well-meaning coaching and parenting mistakes is to try and prevent our children from facing any hardships or unpleasantness. But is this really helping the kids in the long run? Let’s find out.

Whether it is not being selected for the school team, or not improving & developing skills “fast enough”, or academic pressures, or even food choices, often we are loathe to ruffle the kids’ fragile feathers. But research published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology (Hattie & Timperley, 2007) suggests that failure provides immediate, actionable feedback, allowing children to identify their weaknesses and work towards overcoming them. In other words, failure is a pretty effective teacher.

Kobe Bryant’s tryst with failure

When Kobe Bryant, one the greatest ever basketball players, was 12, he played a 25-game summer basketball season without scoring a single point. “I was terrible,” he said. “Awful.” Not a single point. Not a free throw, not a lucky bounce, not a breakaway layup—Not.A.Single.Point. ZERO. When asked about that season, Kobe said it taught him to take the long view. “I wasn’t the most athletic,” he said. “I had to look long term. Because I wasn’t going to give up on the game, right? So I had to say, ‘Okay, this year I’m going to get better at this. Next year, that.’ And so forth and so on. And patiently, I got better.” Patiently, he repeats. “It was piece by piece. It was the consistency of the work. The consistency of the work: Monday, get better. Tuesday, get better. Wednesday, get better. You do that over a period of time—three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten years—you get to where you want to go.” “It’s simple,” he said. “It’s simple math.”

Patience & Consistency are key

Imagine if Kobe at age 12 was one of our children. Some of us may have even told him to try a new sport because he was “too far behind” his peers. And we might have lost a brilliant athlete. Instead, Kobe doubled down and battled his demons. He went back to train harder and gradually got better with each passing year by putting in the hard yards – daily practice. While other kids were training 2-3 hours a week, Kobe was grinding every single day for at least 1.5 hours clocking 10-15 hours every week.

Over the next couple of years, not only did Kobe catch up. He actually went on the become the state’s top basketball player by the time he turned 14. And after that, there was no looking back. All he did was put the power of compounding to work – invest in developing his skills every single day.

Failure as a stepping stone to success

Studies conducted by the American Psychological Association (APA) highlight that children who face and overcome failures are more likely to develop self-efficacy—the belief in their ability to achieve goals despite setbacks. When children learn to embrace failure as a stepping stone rather than a dead end, they build confidence in their ability to tackle future challenges.

At Bravo, we have seen that resilience in the face of failure is a key predictor of success. By normalising failure as part of the learning process, we help children develop the courage to take risks, innovate, and persist in the face of adversity, setting them up to thrive in a rapidly changing world.

If you would like to know more about our training programs, call us on 9819337766 or 9819227766.

P.S. This fantastic interview provides great insights into Kobe Bryant’s renowned “Mamba Mentality”. It helps us understand the work ethic and mindset that made him such a great champion. 44 minutes of your life that you absolutely won’t regret investing.