"Next play. Next pitch." One of my favorite phrases coaching kids in softball. Simple, but it teaches a valuable lesson about staying focused after a mistake rather than letting one bad moment turn into several.
While watching college softball recently, Arkansas shortstop Atalyia Rijo made an uncharacteristic error. You could see the frustration hit her immediately - the kind of split-second reaction any competitor would have. But how she reacted caught my attention. She bent down, picked up a little dirt, took a breath, and reset. Two pitches later she turned a double play to end the inning. Three outs, just like that.
That's the lesson, and it has nothing to do with the error. Everybody makes mistakes. The lesson is that she didn't let one become three. She processed it, reset mentally, and went right back to helping her team. In coaching we call it flushing it. The play is over. Move on.
As a coach, and father, I’ve said some version of that more times than I can count. "So you struck out. What are you going to do right now?" The kid who strikes out and then turns around and cheers on the next batter is helping the team. The one standing in the dugout replaying the at-bat and dragging everybody down with them is not. Adults struggle with this just as much as kids do, maybe more, because the stakes feel higher and the mistakes feel more permanent.
One of my favorite reminders, and the kids usually stare at me blankly on this one until somebody's dad laughs, is that I don't know anyone who owns a DeLorean with a Flux Capacitor. You are not going back in time to change anything. So the only question that actually matters is “how do you respond?”.
The Financial Version of Compounding Mistakes
The same dynamic plays out in investing, and more often than people realize.
Markets go down. Headlines get scary. Investments don't always perform the way we hoped. We sell too early, hold too long, or freeze when we should act. These things happen to everyone at some point. The question is never whether you'll face a difficult moment, it's what you do when you're standing in the middle of one.
What I've seen over the years is that the investors who struggle most aren't necessarily the least informed. Rather, they're the ones who can't emotionally reset after something goes wrong. One difficult quarter turns into panic. One missed opportunity turns into reckless overcompensation. One market decline turns into abandoning a plan that was working perfectly fine before things got bumpy.
I call it quicksand. The harder you try to dig yourself out with reactive decisions, the deeper you go. A bad inning doesn't have to become a bad game, but it will if you let emotion drive every decision that follows.
The better question, in sports and in your portfolio, isn't what went wrong. It’s what did we learn from it.
Learning From It Without Living In It
There's real value in reflecting on a mistake. Understanding what went wrong, what you'd do differently, and what you can carry forward, that's useful. What isn't is dwelling on what already happened.
Part of what we do as advisors is help people make good decisions when the environment makes that hard. Building a plan, managing risk, evaluating investments - that's the technical side of the work. But during difficult stretches, a significant part of the job is simply helping people avoid letting a temporary problem become a permanent mistake. Sometimes the most valuable thing we can do is remind a client that the play is over, we can learn from it, and it's time to focus on the next pitch.
The people I've watched handle adversity well, in sports and in business tend to share one trait. They recover quickly. Not because they don't care about what went wrong, but because they understand that dwelling on it doesn't change it. They adjust, reset, and move forward.
That's a big part of what we try to bring to every client relationship, not just a plan for when things go well, but a steady hand when they don't. Because at some point, they won't.
Nobody's showing up in a DeLorean to change what already happened. So you learn from it, fix what you can, and get ready for the next play.
That's good coaching. And it's good financial advice.