Sore Loser

I don't lose well. I don't like to lose, and I don't often lose gracefully. When I was growing up, the game Monopoly was actually banned in my household because of the level of stress it created in my entire family when the game wasn't going my way. I am a rare breed of person who would actually cry hysterically like the world was coming to an end if on any given day anyone in my family was more successful than me at Monopoly. This characteristic led to high levels of tension between me and my also ultra-competitive father. It also, however, led to an understanding between us. My competitve nature is what drove me to push myself so hard in school. I wanted to be the best at everything. My father knew this about me, and instead of pushing me harder, he'd encourage me to back off when I was setting the bar unrealistically high.

But in spite of my father's best efforts, some things never change. I am no longer a 10-year old girl crying over Monopoly; now, I am a 27-year old woman who can barely contain her tears when the team of 14- and 15-year old girls that she coaches loses. Especially in games like tonight when we lost to a team we should have beaten. We lost tonight because my team played awfully. Even my best players who haven't had a bad game all season looked terrible tonight. I tried my best to boost them up during the desperate time-out that I called and during halftime. But my best efforts were to no avail. I could not play the game for them, and I ran out of things to say to make them play better. So after we lost the game in an overtime that we shouldn't have even gone to if my team had been playing at their potential, I found myself struggling to muster some composure so that my frustration with my team and ultimately with myself as a coach would not come wailing out of me the way it so often wailed out of me when I was sitting around a board game with my family. See, while I recognize that my team did not play their best, what followed me off the field was a frustration that stemmed from that same self-competition that my father tried to soften when I was a student. How could we lose to a team who is clearly less skilled than us? What did I as a coach do wrong for it to come this with only one game left in the season? I wasn't upset with my girls, I was upset because I felt that I must not have done enough. The team's failure was not theirs, it was mine.

When I stop for a moment I realize that almost unfathomable level of arrogance that I must have in order to take such responsibility on myself. Arrogance was a trait I often sneered at in my father, but maybe it is the same in me. I set the bar so high that I must on some level be deluded into thinking I am actually capable of reaching it. Could it be that my desire to win actually has root in some belief that I am capable of winning at all? Or, instead of arrogance, is it the opposite--do I simply see no value in myself beyond outward success? It's as if I push myself so hard in order to prove to myself--even more than to everyone else--that I am worthy of life. Since self-confidence has never been my strong suit, I'm more inclined to view my competitiveness in the latter, almost more pathetic way. Without an inner belief that I am worthy, I need the outward acknowledgement to motivate myself to keep going.

So then the counselor in me asks how do I address the competitiveness in myself? Do I treat the behavior and ignore the roots hoping that by changing the behavior, I will sever the roots? Or, do I seek to destroy the roots in the hope that the behavior change will follow? Regardless of the methodology and/or ideology that I subscribe to, I realize that I must change. As a 27-year old, I need to learn how to handle failure with Audrey Hepburn-like grace. Crocodile tears over a loss are no longer cute, they're immature. Success, after all, is not about never falling; it's about how well you pick yourself up after a fall. That is cliche for the sheer reason that it is true. Beyond the immaturity aspect, my competitiveness is bad for my health. I am alredy half-convinced that my stomach problems the past two days are due to an ulcer I've developed over the course of this field hockey season because I get so tense when we're not winning by several goals. I need to change if I'm going to live to see 65 or even just next field hockey season. Maybe losing is good for me if I treat it as a life lesson. I need to learn humility, and I need to learn that I am valubale within more than without. If these are lessons that only losing can bring, perhaps I should be a grateful loser instead of a sore one.

Posted by Kim at October 11, 2005 08:21 PM