I’ve been thinking about winning and losing and the journey to both destinations. I guess not only in sports performances but in life.
How do you go about winning in life and in sport?
What are the true lessons from those we see winning and of course the lessons from losing?
When it comes to winning in life:
Winners let the challenges, the seemingly bad or uncomfortable experiences make them better.
They do this through truly experiencing it.. by being in the now, all the while trying to understand it and not ignoring it. This is highly uncomfortable. It isn’t so much what we commonly think of practice as but practice being about overcoming the frustrations of making mistakes.
See winners make mistakes. Winners are not scared of failing.
Winners embrace the mistakes. They use the experience/s, and reflect to understand so it can make them better. They don’t ignore them, they don’t hide from them.
Losers or quitters don’t do this.
Fundamentally I believe when we stop and choose that we are going to be a winner that we point our internal compass in that direction.
We all have the power to choose to be a winner yet most of the time we let ourselves be pulled by the gravitational pull of mediocrity as my buddy Scott Jones so eloquently puts it. That means we’re essentially choosing to be a loser.
The choice to be a winner, for the most part, won’t be comfortable. Especially if you are really wanting to change the current life circumstances you find yourself in. That’s HARD but you do have a choice. We always have a choice but at first, you won’t find comfort in that choice.
Winners embrace discomfort, losers do not.
Hard work is uncomfortable … yet winners allow themselves to find comfort there. They revel in the discomfort.
And HARD work is all around us in all facets of life and the choices we make.
It’s HARD to go EASY to develop structure when you want the short term gratification of smashing yourself and getting the feeling of a job well done. It’s HARD to go truly HARD when it’s required like learning to hold form under duress and pushing hard when you’re tired and want to coast. It’s HARD to leave a job and security that is making your life miserable. I’s hard to walk away from negative relationships. It’s HARD to get up a little early and RESET the body. It’s HARD to stand you ground. It’s HARD to say sorry when we screw up.
HARD, HARD, HARD.
It’s HARD to embrace the ‘failures’ with a let them make me better attitude.
It’s hard to delay gratification now for a better more fulfilling result later.
Here’s the thing… “The best things in life are the things we EARN … those were the things that were the HARDEST to accomplish”.
When I’m talking about winning. I’m not necessarily talking about standing on the winners dais. I’m talking about winning in life. To do this you have to make the choice.
The choice to be a winner.
And as soon as your choose to commit to winning. And choose to embrace the uncomfortableness that will come with the journey you are 90% of the way there.
As the saying goes … in blood, sweat and tears.
Embrace it.
If you aren’t winning at the moment, one of your bottlenecks may just be you haven’t made the choice to become a winner. Food for thought.
Time to choose.