You either win or you lose each game. Which is preferable? It seems like a stupid question, but if the goal is to improve as quickly as possible, the answer usually switches. (One point of this article is that it does not have to.) Losing now often helps us to win more later. Our opponents have kindly shown us what was not working and motivated us to work on the adjustments. 

The real question about winning and losing (and life) is…What are you going to do about it? John Wooden said, “People say you can learn a lot from losing and that’s true, but you can also learn a lot from winning.” How good are you and your players at making consistent progress, regardless of the scoreboard?

Typically, losing magnifies problems and winning hides them. Both tendencies create some problems. Magnifying problems leads athletes to not only lose enthusiasm, but they can also question just about anything. They second-guess their coaches, which does damage in many ways, and they second-guess themselves, which is often even worse. They look at their own strengths and begin to wonder if they were ever particularly good at that. They look at their weaknesses and see huge problems that may be difficult to ever overcome. They look to make wholesale changes to their mechanics and their approach. Their loss of faith and confidence often leads them to open themselves up to too many sources of coaching. Suddenly, everyone they know is an expert, and there are a million “quick fixes” to test out. Over-adjusting abounds when a single small tweak or better present-moment focus may be all that is needed.

If losing’s magnification of problems sounds bad, the negative effects of winning are often worse. Complacency is the main offender. After winning, many athletes question nothing. They may have given three At-Bats away with avoidable mistakes, but the pain from that is soothed by the win. They fail to think about the fact that performing exactly the same against a better opponent would lead to a loss. Their search for adjustments is short-lived. They focus on the things that went well, smile inwardly, and then wonder what’s on the social agenda.

A major reason for these tendencies is the emotional roller coaster that winning and losing sends people on, and athletes are not the only culprits. Coaches, too, make the same types of mistakes. After wins, coaches often hesitate to make lineup changes, thinking, “Why tinker with something that is working?” After a loss, coaches on the emotional downswing commonly yell more and are quicker to criticize. They may even take away player privileges and add more conditioning. These might be useful decisions, but they absolutely should not be made emotionally.

Enough about these trends; we are already familiar with them. The more important question is what to do about it. Can we use rational thought to maintain motivation and the search to understand more about ourselves and the game? Certainly. First, we can train ourselves to change our focus from winning to success. John Wooden taught us to define success as the peace of mind that comes from knowing you did your best. This definition makes success a completely controllable variable, and one that is extremely difficult to attain. The pursuit of success is constant. It does not pause for victory or defeat. 

Understanding the difference between mindfulness and judgement helps here tremendously. In both, we identify what works so we can repeat it and figure out what does not work so we can change it. This is good, but with mindfulness, it is done completely without emotion. The roller coaster ride is gone, replaced by a steady, enthusiastic pursuit of the question, “How good can we be?”

Great leaders (coaches or players) do not allow their teammates to have negative effects from winning or losing. Complacency after winning is not allowed because they are never satisfied. They know that everyone can get better and there is urgency in their actions, even after a dominant win. Everyone can see their motivation; their pursuit of continuous improvement is contagious. It is also worth noting that they simply hate to lose. Most champions hate losing more than they love to win. The fire that is lit in all of us after a tough, avoidable loss does not diminish over time in these leaders the way it does in most people.

Great leaders also do not let losing diminish confidence. What are you trying to be confident in: the process or the outcome? If you try to be confident that you will win, then obviously your confidence will falter after a loss. But if you are trying to be confident that you are doing everything you can to maximize your chances of winning (or be successful, or find out how good you can be – these objectives are all variations of the same theme), then the loss has no direct effect on your confidence. The desire to completely change course is gone, replaced by the continuous climb.

Continuous improvement is, logically, a constant pursuit. Mindfully, we reflect on the process, searching for patterns of cause and effect, and then develop a plan for making adjustments.  These questions of an Effective Rational Response are repeated ad infinitum in this process:

1. What was I trying to do?
2. What happened? (Remember, no emotion either way is included in this answer.)
3. Why? ("I don't know" is the most common response. My coaching response to that: "That makes sense, but you can guess!")
4. What do I want to do next time I’m in a similar circumstance?
5. How do I get my body to do that? (Again, guessing leads to progress, even if it is just more knowledge of what does not work. Failing to guess does not. Intelligent players have simply become good at guessing by guessing often and paying attention to their results.)

Humility is another key ingredient. Humble athletes and coaches are not surprised by a loss. They know the game is tough and that losing is always a possibility. They also never take winning for granted, even after doing it often. These perspectives do not change.

Humans are imperfect. Therefore, if we decide to travel down the path of mastery in a quest to find out how good we can be, we must remember another of Coach Wooden’s lines, “Strive for perfection, but never expect it.” Why not? Because we are human. The effort to achieve mastery is, itself, what mastery is all about. It requires a constant struggle to answer these three huge questions:

1. Where am I?
2. Where do I want to be?
3. How do I get there? (a.k.a. What am I going to do about it?)

I hope you will get off the roller coaster and enjoy the journey with your teammates through the wins and the losses.