The Benefits of Losing

We need to lose.

This season in one of our tournaments, the team of 13 year olds I help coach finished last in a twelve team tournament. After the tournament, I felt queasy thinking that maybe we hadn’t prepared the players well enough. I ran through the practice plans for the first half of the season wondering what we could have done differently. Finishing last in that tournament made us all feel unsettled and disappointed, even though several of our matches had been very close.

I am a very competitive person. I prefer winning. I want to win so much that I will throw my body down onto the sand in a beach volleyball game to increase my chances of earning a point. My drive to win results in me giving everything I have in every single play.  And so, in my comfort bubble, I would gladly accept winning everything for the rest of my life (wouldn’t we all?).

But my experiences in sport have taught me that there are tremendous benefits to losing. In the struggle and the disappointment of defeat, there are so many lessons we can learn. In those moments of loss, we’re faced with our own failures and shortcomings.  They are glaring and painful.

Often in sport, there are two teams that are evenly matched and one pulls out a victory – partly by chance, partly by design. The difference can be in a play or two that ends in favour of one team. In these types of close matches, the difference in how the winning team feels about their play versus how the losing team feels is enormous.

Winning feels fantastic and losing stinks.

Reflecting on the huge difference between how great it feels to win and how disappointing it feels to lose, I have learned that we all need to lose sometimes. In our losses we learn humility. We learn to reflect on what we could have done differently and can then strive to become better. We learn how we can improve and how we can get stronger. We learn to be gracious in victory as well as in defeat. And most importantly, we learn that sometimes despite our very best efforts, we will still lose.

These losses in sport can prepare us a little bit for the very real and often heartbreaking losses that we may face in our lives. We may lose in a bidding war for that amazing house that we have already started imagining ourselves moving into or we may not be offered that job we really wanted or the promotion we were hoping for. Losing at sport is a practice run at how to bounce back and deal as gracefully as possible with these types of losses when they occur.

Losing can teach us many important lessons.  I, for one, have learned the importance of being a gracious winner as well as a gracious loser. I have learned that in sport as in life we can feel like randomness can take over.  I have also learned that some of the most important lessons may not be immediately apparent. I have learned that mental and emotional preparation for every member of the team matters. 

So we all need to lose. 

But next time when you do end up losing, whether in sport or in other areas of life, ask yourself: “How can this loss make me stronger? How can I be more loving and compassionate after having gone through this?” If we’re able to learn something, then we can take consolation  in using our losses to make us better.  

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