The first few friendly games of the season are now under our belt at Largs Thistle.

Wednesday night’s 5-0 defeat of Saltcoats Victoria was, even taking into account the lower league opposition, a pleasing start given the nature of the performance.

It gave me a degree of confidence that we could push on to Kilbirnie Ladeside’s mini tournament last weekend and progress further.

Unfortunately, I came away from the weekends two matches feeling rather underwhelmed at our performances and certainly our results.

Don’t get me wrong, two draws are far from the worst outcome especially given that the other two matches finished in draws however, having lost on penalties twice, we ultimately finished fourth out of four teams and that doesn’t sit well with me at all.

I did emphasise to the players before both games that the games were important in terms of developing our fitness and working on our shape, but I did harbour the thought that their own standards would be enough to push them a lot further than what I was asking.

The upside to failure though is that it is still a step forward.

Now I can hear a lot of you saying “That’s him finally lost the plot”, however if you bear with me then I’ll explain.

When we have ever taken an action to achieve something worthwhile, invariably we don’t get it spot on first time. Or at least I don’t!

In anything you’ve ever achieved in your life, I have no doubt that you failed a few times before you got there. In each small failure, you realised that the action that you previously believed to be the way forward was in fact the wrong way. So you re-adjusted, tried a different way or a number of different ways until you progressed.

On a basic level, failure is an acknowledgement that at least you have taken some action towards your goal instead sitting thinking about it and procrastinating. The step forward that failure brings though is the lesson it gives you in what doesn’t work.

A lot of us will try something and if it doesn’t work then we’ll give up and say “I tried to do it but I wasn’t able to”.

What we’re missing out on here though is that what we’ve learned is how not do it and the mindset then needs to be “What other way can I now try it that might succeed?”.

If you’ve every had to do something that was important enough to you then you will have automatically changed your mindset and adapted to a new approach when you hit a roadblock.

This is partly because you’ve learned what doesn’t work.

Everyone knows of Colonel Sanders become who founded KFC right? He’s the old man with the glasses, white hair, white beard and white suit you may see on KFC advertising. Colonel Sanders was 65 years old and had a great fried chicken recipe that he had for many years.

He was struggling for money and struck on the idea of selling his chicken recipe to restaurants. So he went out and started knocking on doors, giving each restaurant owner his pitch.

Many people rejected him but instead of feeling bad about how each restaurant had rejected his idea, he immediately start focusing on how to tell his story more effectively and get better results from the next one.

He spent two years driving across America in his old car, sleeping in the back seat in his rumpled white suit, getting up each day eager to share his idea with someone new. He was refused 1,009 times before he heard his first yes.

It’s true that there aren’t many of us that could emulate Colonel Sanders drive however it’s evident in this case that failure was very much a stepping stone to success as opposed to a death of it.

Due to his failure, he learned what wasn’t working in his approach and continually amended it until he succeeded.

If he can continue to push forward after 1,009 failures then we can surely keeping trying after one or two.

I’m a great believer that we should raise our own standards beyond what everyone else ever expects of us, however I do have the awareness to realise that having that outlook will sometimes lead to disappointment when we don’t quite achieve what we’re aiming for.

The important thing appears to be that we don’t allow the failure to be the end of the action but rather the just re-direction whilst bearing in mind the lesson we learned.

On reflection, my disappointment at the weekends results has faded somewhat when I realise that we are only a few weeks into pre-season training and are still some way short of fitness and re-familiarising ourselves with the game again.

Throwing in tiredness from two games in two days also didn’t help much.

I’ve also looked at my own tactical approach to the match and realise that I need to simplify it slightly to take into account where we are at this point in the season both physically and mentally.

Like Colonel Sanders, we’ll learn our lessons and re-adjust appropriately.

My only hope is that it doesn’t take 1,009 times before it pays off or i’ll be the owner of a freshly issued P45!

“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” - Thomas Edison