Winning does not happen in straight lines with Clive.

When you are at the top of your game one of the most difficult things is knowing how to handle setbacks & failures. It’s easy to surf the wave of success for a certain period of time, staying at the top is harder, and then even harder still is keeping going when things don’t go well.

Handling failure with success is a key part of being a champion team. According to Clive Woodward, “one key to handling failure is to discuss it in advance. It means that if you do lose, you handle it better as you are prepared for it. Yet more importantly, it becomes clear that you don’t want to lose as you don’t want to go through all these processes to handle defeat.”

Clive points out that being honest with yourself is also key: “…in fact as long as you’re confident you did everything possible to win, life can carry on very peacefully and quickly. However, if you know deep down though that you took short cuts or didn’t work as hard as you could have and then loose, that’s not good.”

Winston Churchill famously defined success as “the ability to move from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm”. Clive totally subscribes to this and would even go as far as to say “I never lose, I either win or I learn.” This positive attitude can be applied to both professional and personal lives to make sure we take the best from every situation.

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