Own it.

This is a guest blog from Nikki Laubenstein.

Unlike many sports where a basket or a goal adds to a larger total of points, mine, gymnastics, is a precision sport – where (if your combinations and difficulty were strong enough) you started at a 10.0 and worked backwards. An un-pointed toe, a bent knee, or a leg separation would mean a tenth to a half a point deduction for each error. I was judged on every move, and the goal was, simply — perfection.

I competed as a gymnast from a young age through college and loved it for the competitiveness, discipline, teammates, and the feeling of putting in hard work at the end of each day; incidentally, the same things I love about working! But looking back, I also appreciate it for the lessons in humility.

Athletics are great for building confidence, a belief in a cause greater than oneself, and work ethic — but they can also be important for learning how to deal with defeat and not-so-perfect days. During my Junior season in college, for whatever reason, the team photographer at my university decided to do a series of competition photos of me throughout the season for the university newspaper. To be fair, many were decent, but one in particular caught me in mid jump over the balance beam with bent legs and an unflattering grimace on my face.

This was a long time ago when school newspapers were still printed, so I got to see this horrible photo of me all over campus (it was on the front page, by the way), in every classroom I entered and in the dining halls all day long. My first reaction was mortification. My teammates and coaches laughed at practice that day and made comments about the school photographer’s “poor timing on this one!” It angered me to have my imperfection splashed all over campus, a large D1 school with nearly 20,000 students.

The humiliation somehow set me to action, and something in me decided to cut out the photo, go to Kinko’s, and have it shrunk down and laminated into bookmarks for my entire team. I decided that laughing about it would be the best way to get over it.

Many years later, well into my professional career when I oversaw a law school admissions office, our dean added a formal opening convocation ceremony to kick off our 1L orientation. We invited the same alumni speaker, the hiring partner of a major law firm, to welcome our incoming class several years in a row. She changed up her speech a bit from year to year, but always kept in one line that I often think back to; the part of her speech that stressed that at her law firm, they take their work seriously, but don’t take themselves seriously, and anyone without humility had no place at their firm.

Some of my teammates still laugh about those bookmarks, and I am happy that I can remind myself that so much in life is not about how a situation happens, but how you react to it and charge forward. You will find yourself in humiliating situations, where your best wasn’t on display, or you are wishing for a do-over. Own it, and instead, change your mind about how you will react if your first instinct is to crawl under a desk and hide.