I thought the badminton teams being disqualified for intentionally losing their matches was interesting. The players involved were China’s world champions Wang Xiaoli and Yu Yang, Indonesia’s Greysia Polii and Meiliana Jauhari and two South Korean pairs – Jung Kyung-eun and Kim Ha-na, and Ha Jung-eun and Kim Min-jung.
If you watch the matches on video you will see it is as though they have never played badminton before. They keep serving into the net and their rallies (if any) are short.
The crowd are booing and telling them to go off. Anyone who has gone to the Olympics in London knows tickets are expensive, it takes a lot of effort to obtain a ticket, then to travel and make your way there. I know I would have been very irritated and upset to watch a match I could have myself played far better at.
But why lose a match on purpose? Here there was a benefit in losing to the other team. All had qualified but the winner would then play China which was the stronger team. This was part of a strategy in the round-robins which had been newly set up and the teams were trying not to play China and were working to be relegated to a match with a less superior opponent in the semi-final.
It is often assumed we all go for success but I have seen clients where there is a benefit to keeping up with a pattern of failure. Some of the most successful people can have this ‘failure belief’. It seems strange but somehow failure can be programmed in the same way success can be programmed. Originally the failure belief helps to drive the person mercilessly to achieve things but at the same time prevents enjoyment of the journey; it then later on gets in the way of further advancement.This belief which originally helped motivate a person in the end frustrates and blocks all further advancement. This failure belief is like the constant replaying of the badminton teams that were disqualified. It is about being in the Olympics but not really being there at all, it is about constant disqualification in life. To get out of such a belief it is necessary to look into how the belief originated and then how to work around and finally through it. With the badminton matches which were purposely set to fail the best way to set an example was disqualification. The question with an individual who keeps repeating such a pattern is as to how to disqualify failure itself………rather then to keep disqualifying yourself from life.
©2012 Yasmin
Dr Yaz Headley 
Quite insightful!