I have recently learned to redefine my understanding of winning. In short, to understand this transformation, you must understand my past, because in my past everything came easy to me, especially winning. Winning came so naturally to me at almost everything I did as a child that it tainted my understanding of what a true winner is; in turn, I spent my adolescent years overwhelmed with feelings of inadequacy once winning at everything I did wasn’t my norm anymore.
As a child athlete, I was convinced that I would change the world because I was a winner, but to be a winner according to my youthful definition, I had to be better than everyone else. Once I matured and realized that no one human being one is better or more worthy than another, I start struggling mentally in competition and in my own understanding of self. Seemingly overnight, I went from winning to failing very quickly, and the constant “failures” got the best of me, sending me towards the start of my eating disorder and desperate attempts to prove my worth again. Sadly, it took me well over a decade to understand that my definition of winning was whack; the winner in me had never disappeared after all. I simply had never recognized what a real winner was and I surely didn’t understand the winner that I still had within.
There are winners and losers in life. The losers are the ones who have stopped believing, stopped trying, and acquiesced to being just “average” in their own self-perception. Be a winner in your life. Own your passion and your purpose and know that as you do, you will have obstacles and you will want to quit, however it is the winner in you that will prevail through every setback by your unwillingness to ever give up.
Let the inner winner within you out and applaud yourself through every “failure” that refines your inner determination to never quit. My failures, and they were many, are ultimately some of the best things that have ever happened to me.