I hate losing. I hate it with a passion. As someone who is pretty competitive, whenever I lose at anything, be it in sport or even in a video game, I get annoyed and angry. I wouldn’t say I’m a sore loser. I will always shake my opponent’s hand, but never the less, I still hate that I lost. Losing used to really get to me. It would sometimes take me a full week (the time until my next game) to put the loss behind me and focus on the next game. Let me frame it this way.. I once stayed up until 2am playing FIFA on Xbox because I refused to go to bed after a losing game. That night I had started playing at I think 10pm. That’s 4 hours of stubborn headed losing. I did end up winning and allowing myself to go to sleep. Yet, as I hope you can see, it was a problem.
This drive to win is not a bad thing, but not being able to let go when you lose, or even worse, fearing losing/failure can be a big problem. The latter is where I fell in. I “suffered” from a mix of hating to lose, but also having a fear of losing or failing. I felt a huge pressure that if I lost, I would have failed the ones around me. It couldn’t have been further from the truth. Yet, no matter how many times my family and friends told me, I still feared losing. It’s a fear that I don’t know if it will ever go away. But it is something that I can continually work on and it is something I think I’ve gotten better at.
When it comes to losing, mindset is everything. I’ve come across athletes who play team sports who cope with losing by pointing fingers at other teammates. One can argue that these athletes never truly cope with a loss. Everyone on the team has a part to play when you lose, so sometimes coping with that loss is asking, “What was my part in it?” Actually, I think this is the biggest thing you can do to help cope with a loss whether you play a team sport or a solo endeavor. Yet, it is not the only thing when it comes to a loss, so let’s dive in. Here are my thoughts on losing and how I’ve come to tackle that awful feeling.
The first thing to remember is that everybody loses at some point. Let me illustrate that again for you: EVERYBODY LOSES AT SOME POINT. Michael Jordan lost, Wayne Gretzky lost, Anderson Silva lost. All three of these athletes are considered some of the best who played their given sport, yet they too were not immune to losing. One must think, if they have lost, then I will definitely lose at some point. It’s the beauty of being human, that nobody is perfect. This is why it is such a big deal when a team goes undefeated in a season! Making it just one season undefeated is a huge feat! Now imagine trying to do that over a career, including amateur….Impossible. Everybody loses, so take that pressure off right away.
Now lets swing back to something I mentioned before. What was your part to play in the loss. If you are competing in a sport such as MMA, well that question is easily answered. If you’re in a team sport, you are going to have to put that ego aside here for a minute and do some self-reflecting. The important thing here is to not take credit for every mistake made by the team, just your own. Figuring out what you did wrong is the first big step to correcting it. Taking ownership for that mistake, I find, is an excellent way to move past it.
My last piece of advice when it comes to losing/failing is something that someone reminded me of recently and it comes in closely with the second step to moving past the loss (ownership). How you react to losing and the ownership of your mistakes is everything! As a soccer goalkeeper, I get a front row seat to this. When I let in a goal, I have to decided right away how I am going to handle it. I have to put whatever I did wrong past me as quick as possible because I could be facing another shot any second. I have found that you can react one of four ways to a failure/loss. The first is that you can just chalk it up to luck and move on. Maybe it was just an off day. Those days do happen, but only you truly know when they do. The second is that you can crumble under the mistake. This is obviously the worst of the four choices. That mistake or event can play over and over in your head. It can start to take over your conscious thought and take you to very frustrating places, setting you up for further failure. The third is that you can play ignorant. You can blame everyone but yourself, never think about it as your mistake, and most likely continue making the same mistakes over and over and over again. The last is the best option. Recognizing a mistake was made, and searching out a solution. Let’s dive deeper into this last option.
So, now we have recognized our mistake and we are not going to dwell on it, It is, as a matter of fact, now in the past and we can’t go back to change the result. What good does it do for us to sit and pout about it? No, rather we are going to do the only thing we can to improve: analyze where we went wrong and correct it. We tell ourselves, “Okay, I got beat here today because of my mistake but I will never get beat like that again.” Let’s take a none sport example that happened to myself.
When I design a workout for clients, whether it’s personal training or a group setting, I always try it myself. This allows me to see if it does what I want it to. I will also partake in classes I design because they usually run for a six week period. After three weeks, I may forget what it feels like to go through the full body circuit, so I will go through it on my own time. Well, this particular instance, I did the full body circuit I designed. The first time I did it, I finished a full five rounds in just over 28 minutes, which is a pretty good time. I was actually really happy that I was able to complete it in that time span. But it was to be short lived. Just over a week later, I tried it again. It went absolutely dreadful. I barely finished three rounds and my time was at 22 minutes. If I did another rep, I was pretty sure I was going to either be sick or pass out. What was going on? How could I fail to do five rounds of my own circuit when just a week ago I was able to put up a personal best?! I started by going down that downward spiral. Maybe it was just a fluke the first time, maybe I’m not as in good shape as I thought.. It was starting to really get to me. But I had been here before and recognized what was going on, so I decided to take a systematic approach. What went on that day that could’ve messed me up? Where was my mistake?
After taking emotion and ego out of it, I was able to pinpoint my mistakes. I didn’t eat enough that day, or drink enough water. Furthermore, I didn’t sleep well the night before. All factors that I am in control of that I took for granted which effected my performance. With this realization, I am able to make sure I now eat enough before I train and have enough water. I won’t fail the same way again. If I fail at the training again, it will be muscular failure (so I can get stronger) as opposed to some mistake I made.
This failure could’ve gotten into my head, much like a loss in sport. In fact, as I write this, my team had just tied in the game today. It wasn’t even a loss, but a 4-4 tie that was getting to me (we were winning 4-1 at half). I thought about how much it sucked just to tie, not even lose, and I realized how much the idea of losing or a tie can get to people. But it doesn’t have to. It’s an easy thing to write it off and say, “Mike you are just too competitive” but I guarantee others are out there right now just as competitive as me. Sometimes you just can’t turn it off, so you have to learn to deal with it.
So take that loss in stride, don’t get discouraged. Fix those mistakes and get back out there. For it’s only failure if you stay down.