I’m sure you’ve heard the Vince Lombardi quote:  “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.”

It’s not my favorite quote.  First off, because it’s simply not true, and secondly, because it encourages a mentality that’s very damaging – especially in a relational environment.

Sure, in (most) sports, there’s a ‘winner’ and a ‘loser’.  Sports are about competition, and they keep score, so that’s how it’s going to play out – and that’s fine.  However, just because you lose doesn’t mean you can’t gain something from the experience.  Learning from a ‘loss’ is an important life skill.  One of the key differences between people who succeed and those who don’t is that those who succeed learn from their mistakes and ‘failures’ (which might be considered other forms of losing).  We’ve discovered from research that we actually learn more from our mistakes than from doing things right.

We live in a society that makes it easier than ever to ‘connect’.  As I sit here typing this, I could communicate with many of my friends, family and colleagues in a plethora of ways.  In fact, there are at least 9 different ways you could contact me that would all come to me via my iPhone. Yet, so many people in our world talk about being disconnected.  Why is that?  I think the competitive and comparative mentality of our culture plays a large part in it – when we’re focused on being ‘good enough’ or ‘better than’, we will inherently tend to be protective of our true selves, which may foster safety – but at the cost of connection.

As a culture, we attach far too much importance to ‘winning’.  We approach many of our life interactions from a ‘win-lose’ perspective.  Think about what happens when you take a win-lose approach to your daily commute, your job, or your marriage.  It’s not pretty.  I’ve seen it a lot in my work with couples;  one partner finds some way to prevail in an argument through demeaning, manipulating, or intimidating their partner.  In the moment, they ‘win’ and get the satisfaction of being ‘right’.  Unfortunately, their partner, and their relationship, are both losers.  Eventually, couples that approach their interactions from a win-lose perspective become very disconnected and resentful, and they tend to just stop playing, because their relationship is an ongoing battle, not a partnership.

I’m going to wrap up by offering  a couple of suggestions for ways to change your relationship with winning and losing:

1)  When you find yourself in what seems to be an adversarial situation, ask yourself  if it really needs to be that way.  Do you have to win at the expense of the other person?  I’m not suggesting that you give up your boundaries or allow yourself to be taken advantage of, but I think it’s always worth the effort to seek a ‘win-win’ answer, a way for everyone involved to benefit.

2)  Next time you end up on the ‘losing’ end of a situation, once you’re past your initial disappointment, see if you can find some value in the loss.  What can you learn from the experience that will help you get a better result the next time you are in a similar situation? It took Thomas Edison 1000 attempts to invent the light bulb.  When asked how he managed to continue trying after all those failures, his response was something like this:  ’I didn’t fail 999 times, I found 999 ways that don’t work.’ If you read any stories of success, you’ll see that persistence and learning from failures were key factors in the success.

How have you been able to use a mistake, failure, or loss as a stepping stone for growth or improvement?  Let me know in the comments below!