
Winning: A Dangerous Passion
Participation medals, are you f*#king serious?
Well yes, much to the absolute shock and horror of every ‘True Blue’ Aussie bloke who grew up playing sport at any level, in most kids sport, you can still get a yellow ribbon for placing 4th.
I’ll lead off by admitting that I was a stout believer that kids should sink or swim, live or die, start them young, winning and losing breeds the stronger, if you lose? tough, learn to be better next time. We don’t want a nation of ‘pussies’ growing up not understanding what it means to lose and have to work hard to get better and win next time. We all know this narrative.
I blithely lived with my years of competitive sport as one of the most powerful parts of my education, ‘I learned lessons during sport that you just can’t get elsewhere’. I even told a story about how the best day of my life was when my Scotland University team beat England for the first time in 40 years. Winning was everything.
Some time ago I saw a segment on ‘The Footy Show’. Now I don’t usually watch it, but it was a whole piece on ‘Participation Medals’ for young kids. Some old Aussie sporting legend had a short 5–7 minute speech on how absurd he though it was. What kind of kids are we growing!? We’re entering an age of entitlement! Our kids are going to be soft! When I was a kid… Blah blah blah blah. He finished his rant by saying perhaps we should have swimming races and not touch the end, we should have footy games without goal posts and tennis matches without the ball. Two things happened.
Face-palm.
Television off.
I sat, now staring at the profoundly black screen. What he was saying really annoyed me, but wait, that was the opinion I apparently held myself? So why did it get to me? On one side we have a group of educators saying that kids should all get medals, just participating should be rewarded. On the other side we have the University of hard knocks saying, ‘suck it up princess!’
The proceeding few months, until now, I have put the proverbial ‘pen to paper’ I started to form an slightly more rational and informed opinion of this apparent conundrum our families and more importantly young participants are faced with. I reflected on my past experiences in multiple sports I’ve taken part in from professional basketball, multisport endurance races and competitive weightlifting. I came across many concepts that have made me take a long hard look at myself, how I’ve treated teammates, coaches, family members and also relationships in the past.
A passion for winning is a wonderful thing. But I am not simply talking about scoring more points than the other person / team does and certainly not ‘at all costs’. I am talking about real winning. I’ll present to you my idea of what real winning is with some premise-driven narrative and try to give you a stroke of insight from some of my person experiences as a competitive, wait, ex-competitive athlete. I believe real winning goes beyond a player, even in individual sport or a group, even in team sport.
Real winning is a macro level experience revolving around how an individual or group is going make history- not solely to beat their competitor, but doing it because it makes a local, community, state, national or global impact. The mood associated with this type of winning brings an almost innocent admiration. A player or group is more in competition with what is possible & not another player or team. Winning done this way creates remarkable relationships, miraculous innovations and eye opening moments. This is pure unselfish dialogue between players and coaches, leads to explosions of leadership during games by outstanding individual or team performances.
That is winning.
A remarkably long way from the ‘win at all costs’ attitude we think is serving our youngsters so well, or the ‘lets give everyone a medal’ misdomener.
One question I am sure spring to mind that sounds great but is it applicable to our youngsters?
My answer is: Not only is winning in this fashion great for our youngsters, its perfect for winning on every level!
The real question should be, Where do we start?
What are the structural characteristics of a winner? True to the definition that I gave?
- Recognize team members for their personal values:
‘Core Values’ is a term that is literally dragged through he mud, more often than not it is a attempt by an authority (coach) or otherwise to get all players on the team to play by their rules. Our core values are X and you did Y… Each team member or even individual has a set of things they ‘value’ each person involved should be allowed to express that and each other participant should know what is most important to them to see how that fits into the team and ultimately how that can help with team flourish. On reflection in my personal experience, I’ve had some vastly, how could I say, different teammates throughout the years. I’ve often said to those close to me, ‘You know if it wasn’t for basketball, I’d have never met this person’. Caring about and understanding what drives one person vs. another is a rich learning experience, deep and beautiful thing when you truly make time to understand it.
2. Play for a Noble Cause
A noble cause is ‘direction’ in which an individual or a team is going. It is what a team or individual is ‘shooting for’. Lets explore some great examples of Noble Cause.
Lebron James winning a championship for ‘the city of Cleveland’ beating a 52 year drought for a lower class city of ‘hardworking’ citizens.
Greece winning euro 2004 soccer. The historic day when Greece upset the top soccer nations was described by their team captain as:
‘The time we forgot our problems, rid ourselves from our differences and dedicated our entire devotion towards the exact same thing. We were living an inconceivable dream.’
Matthias Steiner won an incredible gold medal by lifting 20 kilograms above his personal best in the weightlifting event. Steiner’s past year had been an emotional hell on earth, after his young wife of two years was killed in a car accident.
Steiner screamed. He cried. He embraced his coach, and together, they danced like children in Beijing. When Steiner went to the medal stand, he didn’t go alone. He had tears in his eyes, and clutched in one hand a snapshot of his wife, Susanne
He had promised the gold medal to his wife.
“There was so much emotion that I cannot describe,” Steiner told reporters. “It was, after a few weeks last year, a big motivation to fight for the gold medal. For her. For friends, for family.”
A noble cause has to capture the team or individuals ultimate inspiration. It can be found by a group pronouncement of the future state (real winning) its technical accuracy isn’t important. It will however require everyone’s best efforts and passions and should arise so much excitement in the group that even if you fail, it was worth the effort.
3. In ‘high-stakes’ conversations the team must have a deep understanding and agreement that you will always ‘return to dialogue’.
Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron Mcmillan and Al Switzler’s book Crucial Conversations. Explains, when it comes to risky, controversial, and emotional conversations, skilled people find a way to get all the relevant information (from themselves and others) out in the open, that’s it.
At the core of every successful conversation lies the free-flow of relevant information. A preparedness and capacity to share a viewpoint even if their particular statement is controversial or disliked.
Dialogue: ‘The free flow of meaning between two or more people’
Upon reflection in my time, beyond ‘what happens in the locker room stays….’ I’ve seen and heard some pretty intense stuff. Verbal attacks on a team-mates, coaches, items being physically thrown across changing rooms, fingers being pointed and the peak tragedy to synergy I’ve ever experienced, a team-mate being held around his neck against the locker room wall (off his feet)
Of course there’s the old stories of coaches having a monopoly of fear and I believe much of our current strife with the way kids being taught to compete these days comes from the thought that there cannot be success without experiencing struggle or pain like their stoicism worshipping parents and coaches.
So how does it happen? How does a high stakes conversation between a coach / player turn into a blood bath? When you are verbally attacked, it releases the same neurochemicals in the brain as if you were physically threatened and activates your ‘flight or fight’ response. Two things are going to happen to the person copping the tongue-lashing.
Silence or Violence
Silence:
As Patteron et al explain, consists of any act to purposefully withhold opinion or avoiding people in general. Withdrawing, avoiding or masking. I am definitely guilty of all 3 at some point. After a whip crack to the back of my head for making a mistake, I’ve gone silent, sat my ass on that fresh cold hard pine and spoken some shit about my coach under my breath.
‘Oh yeah? Put him on instead of me, that’s definitely going to solve the problem, where did you learn to coach?’
Violence:
This can consist of any verbal (but hopefully not physical) strategy that attempts to convince, control, or compel others to your point of view. What this does is violates the safety that should be established in the team from having an understanding of each other’s core values. Examples of this are, ‘Controlling, labelling and verbally attacking’
Ever been cut-off, had someone over state the facts to you, speak in absolutes, change the subject matter, or have you been labelled so you can be dismissed under a general stereotype or category?
Here are some colourful examples from my experiences,
‘Shut up rookie’
‘What have you ever done in your career?’
‘When I was a player I never did stupid shit like that’
‘When the going gets tough, you choke!’
But isn’t that a right of passage? Well, I propose a better solution to conclude this point:
If the stakes are high, and the conversation resorts to silence or violence — we know that we have gotten away from ‘dialogue’ we’ve gotten away from the shared meaning, we’ve gotten away from the Noble Purpose, We’ve gotten away from recognizing and encouraging our ‘meaning’ as a team or as individuals to flow freely.
As individuals in high stakes situations we need to look at our coaches, teammates and players and first get over a dogmatic conviction that an individually punishing statement is going to ‘be the one that changes the game’. Start with yourself then think of the team second.
Silence or Violence takes us away from dialogue that stops the free flow of communication between teammates towards the common-goal of REAL WINNING.
4. Aim to fill up the ‘pool of shared meaning.’
Sport and competition, especially a whole season is a beautiful kaleidoscope or stories on every level, every match-up, every game, every city you visit, every person that attends the game, every coach you play for, every coach you play against, relatives alive and dead, partners that are proud (and resentful.) All of these moments can add wonderful value to a teams ‘pool of shared meaning’
A team-mate returning to play against their old team
Playing against a best friend that you grew up with
Playing your 100,200,300th game for the same team
Playing for your state or national team
Playing with a team-mate that is retiring at the end of the season
Older experienced player matching up against the young buck trying to prove themselves.
There are some truly wonderful moments throughout a game, season, career that should be cherished by teammates. Players and coaches can add to the pool of meaning by identifying those moments in teams, or individual players and let them know that they will share that meaning with them, they will elevate their motivation and be fuelled by the desire that is present for whatever the particular short story is in that moment.
‘Lets go out there and do this for…’
Sharing it and living it with that teammate will enhance the meaning for both. It will lead to a greater buy in for all involved, if done on a team level.
I used to think winning was everything. But I was greatly mistaken. We don’t need our kids to feel the pain of losing because it’s the only way they will understand how to pick themselves up and win. We equally don’t need to cut down the goal posts and play imaginary flower tennis where no one loses and everyone becomes a millionaire. Neither of these approaches are realistic or stable. The national depression figures are higher amongst athletes in sport than the general population and what is more frightening is suicide rates in athletes follow the same trend.
I truly do believe it is necessary improve the quality of conversations we start having around the importance of winning and really defining what Real Winning needs to look like. Sport is an unbelievable teaching tool; it can create and draw attention to completely life defining moments that literally shape our lives, our relationships and our world and it has done that to me.
Lets allow it to take it rightful place as a mechanism that we have at our disposal for preparing young men and women for high-stake situations, how to transform anger and hurt feelings into powerful dialogue between team-mates that and help them create a culture nurturing an attitude of living for each other.
But lets also make if safe for them to talk about almost anything and feel comfortable doing so.
Then and only then can we start understanding for real winning feels like.
