You get a trophy. You get a trophy. Everybody gets a trophy! Our society is in trouble. Our society is so afraid of hurting someone, that anyone should ever have to experience pain. Parents so afraid to let their kids fall down and skin their knee. Athletics afraid to determine who wins and loses. Such a thing is so far from reality it is agonizing, not to mention unhealthy. Pain is necessary to foster growth. Muscles cannot grow without first being broken down. Being exposed to different germs or sickness strengthens the bodies immune system. The pain of a setback in someone's life enhances their resiliency to future adverse situations. We are greatly harming our youth's abilities to respond to life's difficult situations.
Fear can be a good thing. It can warn us of danger and steer us away from harmful situations. However, fear can paralyze us from ever attempting a challenging task, to go after something that seems too difficult to accomplish in fear of what may happen. There is a growing belief that everyone has to be on the same playing field. In what area of life does that actually exist? Life is not fair. Life is hard. From the moment we are born we inherit certain traits and attributes that are different than anyone else. We differ in our intelligence, athletic ability, creativity, and our health. We are born into different financial situations, different families with different challenges. These challenges all must be overcome by an effort to make up for areas in our life that we are less fortunate. They do not single-handedly determine the outcome, but if we are raised to believe that all is equal we will find out the hard way that they most certainly are not.
In almost every area of life their is a winner and a loser, but just because we lose doesn't make us a loser. It is how we respond, learn, and grow from each experience. Competition is present every day of our lives. You are always competing whether you know it or not. If you are trying to provide for your family, you are competing with those in your profession to hold a job. If you cannot do your job effectively, your employer will hire someone who can perform that job successfully, thus affecting your ability to provide for your family. Competition is a good thing. After all, it is at the core of all motivation. Survival of the fittest is the greatest competition of all. It is present every single day.
Not all competition is between you and someone else. Sometimes that competition comes from within. The competition to better your situation, grow professionally, or give your children a better childhood than yourself. In any attempt to grow as an individual, we must step outside our comfort zone. We must put ourselves in situations that are painful and challenging. If you never step outside your comfort zone, you will never grow. As a coach, winning is not the ultimate goal, but competing to the best of our ability and showing improvement is. How can we ever determine growth if we don't have a way to assess it? Sometimes that assessment hurts. Sometimes growth takes an accurate measure of self-reflection. You are the only one who can determine your effort. That can be a painful realization if our effort did not bring about the outcome we desire.
So how can not calling a winner and a loser be detrimental to our youth? If the final score always ended in a tie, what motivation would a young person ever have to improve themselves? What does that teach them? That engrains in that person's mind that everything in life is always going to be fair and equal. Everyone will make the same salary even when one student challenges themselves academically, gets up early for class, and stays in from the party. They become trained to believe everyone deserves the same job promotion even when one person got up before the crack of dawn to work on their dream. We are teaching our kids that if something isn't fair and equal that they are somehow the victim. No. No. No. You are a victim of your own demise, of your own actions, and those actions always have a consequence. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Lastly, we are shackling our young people to the idea that they shouldn't pursue great things because of the fear of failure. Failure is growth! If I never lose, why would I ever change what I am doing or challenge myself? Each time we attempt that challenge again, we have learned something from our past failure that just might help us break through the next time. To put it bluntly, we are lying to our youth. We are perpetuating a great untruth. We might be able to get away with it for a time, but eventually the truth always comes out...
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