How to Use Your Mindset to Lose Like a Winner
Losing like a winner is all about your mindset. After a loss do you have an impulsive or strategic mindset?
An impulsive mindset is one that can’t resist the temptation to select the first behavior that comes to mind. Moreover, an impulsive mindset will cause you to choose past behaviors even when better new behaviors are available.
The strategic mindset is the exact opposite. Research from mindset psychologist Patricia Chen, Ph.D., describes the strategic mindset as the ability to ask…
…oneself strategy-eliciting questions, such as “What can I do to help myself?” or “Is there a way to do this even better?” in the face of challenges or insufficient progress.
Chen’s research finds that those who employ a strategic mindset make more progress towards their goals than those who don’t. The reason for this is that the strategic mindset allows you to fail forward. Correspondingly, failing forward is the key to losing like a winner.
Failing Forward
To understand the process of failing forward, I recommend the research from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. This research suggests that failing forward requires two steps.
First and foremost, if you want to fail forward, you must “tune-in” as the researchers describe it. Going through the motions just doesn’t cut it. Learning from failure requires paying close attention to the details and separating the ego from the causes of failure. This means focusing intensely on the causes of failure that are under one’s control and not using what one doesn’t control to excuse the failure. To put it differently, those who have big egos, make excuses, and ignore details are using an impulsive mindset not strategic.
Secondly, to fail forward, you must also experience success. In fact, the University of Chicago research strongly supports that you learn more from success than failure. This suggests the need for a trial-and-error process that supports incremental corrections pushing one in the right direction. Failure followed by more failure will not support learning. Instead, failure followed by success then more failure and then more success is a more realistic process. While one can’t always engineer a trial-and-error process in the real world, a progression of difficulty or a breakdown of goals into logical bites is possible.
So, if you can orient your mindset to strategically apply these methods after a loss, you will be losing like a winner.