The Habit of Winning & Losing | ProductiveandFree

What are winning and losing habits?

An athlete’s dream is to reach the Olympics, but how does one make it. It takes years, if not decades to do so. So much dedication, sacrifice, persistence, and grit is involved in achieving that Gold medal.

Exactly what does it take to get that coveted gold medal?

Hidilyn Francisco Diaz-Naranjo, a Filipina wrestler, beyond all odds won the gold medal at the 2020 summer Olympics. I saw a video of her practicing at home during lockdown using a 2-five-gallon water bottles filled with water tied to both ends of a stick. There is another video of her training again with another stick, but this time with two duffel bags, filled with something so heavy that when she finished lifting them, she needed help putting them down.

She may not have had the actual equipment to train but she found the resources to continue training and the perseverance to endure. She continued to train and focused on her goal: That. Gold. Medal.

Since 2002, at her first competition, she honed her skills and kept going. She didn’t let anything get in her way. Her habits, her routine, her education, even joining the air force were all stepping stones to her dream. She considered everything else on her path as distractions to her ultimate objective and decided that nothing was getting in her way.

Now, if winning is a habit, and losing is a habit is as well.

What could that look like?

I asked my 8-year-old son what “winning is not a some-time thing, it’s an all-time thing. Winning is a habit. Unfortunately, so is losing.” Means to him.

He tells me, “I will keep going and practicing until I will never lose.” Granted I think he was talking about Mario Kart. But perhaps he has a good point.

If we put Mario Kart and it apply to what we’re talking about – we add practicing Mario Kart into our daily routine, even watching YouTube videos on tips and tricks on how to get better at playing the game. We eat, sleep, sweat Mario Kart, until we reach our goal of getting Gold Stars on every level – or so my son says.

As for losing, well, that would be just playing Mario Kart every now and then. Not practicing or learning tricks to go faster, to glide, and to drift. Not honing your Mario Kart skills to get a gold star. Then expecting to win and whining about losing. That, perhaps, is the habit of losing.

If we have bad habits, how do we break them? Well, they aren’t easy. I have my share of bad habits, and I have to say, try as I must to break them, I need all the help I can get. It really does take a lot of motivation, discipline, and consistency.

Here’s a bad habit I have. The moment I wake up, I grab my phone, and go on Pinterest, or Amazon, or check emails. Upon realizing and accepting that this habit needs to stop. I tried to figure out how to do it with the least amount of resistance. A good habit will begin with something you can do that integrates with something you are already doing. So, I decided to listen to my audiobooks or podcasts I follow instead of mindlessly scrolling through my phone. I turned my morning bad habit into something educational and somewhat productive, even while I’m slowly getting myself ready for my day.

In Building Good Habits, I mentioned that working on a major habit would be easier to do one at a time than doing multiple new habits at a time. This way you can focus your efforts into changing or breaking one habit and making that habit stick. In the book Choose to Win by Tom Ziglar it is said that it takes approximately 66 days for a new habit to stick. If you are working on multiple, major new or life changing habits, it might be harder to stick to it, than if you were doing one or a few at a time.

Starting new habits takes time to form. Tom Zigler said it takes persistent consistency. Remember that. Persistent Consistency.

What is persistent consistency. Basically, you have to keep doing something all the time, every day, that is consistency. The behavior has to be automatic for it to be a habit. You can’t just do it when you feel like it. You can not do it sporadically. You can’t do it sometimes or once in a blue moon. Make it part of your routine, part of your schedule.

As for persistency or being persistent. It means that no matter the obstacle in front of you, or how hard the situation that comes your way, you stick to what you are trying to accomplish. You keep going despite the difficulties and challenges you are faced with. New habits or breaking old ones are not easy at all, but sticking to your schedule, to your routine, persistently, will aid in making this behavior turn into a habit.

To sum it up, “stick to the course of action over and over until it becomes a habit.”