Transforming Doubt into Growth Opportunities
The Super Bowl was played yesterday, and while I wasn't rooting for either team, I still enjoyed watching the level of expertise and skill displayed by both teams. As well as the creativity and quick thinking. Everyone involved was there to do their best. Months of training, learning from each other and from individual mistakes, revelations and collaborating came together on the field and in the coaches booth. As happens in any sport or competition, there will most always be a winner and a loser. And on both sides, afterwards, there will be a time to reflect, to look at what could have been done differently. Even for the winning team. There will have been near misses, mistakes by the other team, feats that were fueled by pure adrenaline and just plain good luck. There will be a lot of what-ifs on both sides. Or if-onlys. Even on the team with the highest score. They will think that there had been chances to have scored even more points!
Defining a Term
This is what the term Monday Morning Quarterback means. To look back on an event that has already occurred. A Monday Morning Quarterback, according to the Oxford Languages Dictionary, has been described as 'a person who passes judgement on and criticizes something after the event''. According to Merriam Webster, the term was first known to be commonly used as far back as 1931. It means to 'second guess' and it's really easy to do once you have the hindsight of the full picture. Harder to do in-the-moment.
Quarterbacking in the Booth
I think that second guessing may be human nature and something that most of us do now and then. I know I sure do. But where I notice it the most in my life, is when I am auditioning for voiceovers. I can record and re-record (and quite often I mean re-re-re-re... you get the picture) an audition and upon listening back before hitting 'send', thinking that it sounds pretty good. Like, I could maybe do better, but actually I really like this audition. To then listening to it later in the day or the next day and thinking "What was I thinking? That sounds terrible! I could have sent in a much better audition if only I had done this... or this... or this..." (Again, you get the picture.)
Fortunately I have been voice acting long enough to know that stressing over an audition that I have already submitted does me absolutely no good. Sure, I allow myself to feel that way for a moment or two but then I quickly transition to thinking about if I really don't like that audition, what can I learn from it to do my best to improve my next audition.
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