You Lost. Now What?

You are going to lose. It is part of life. In fact, in most competitions, nearly everyone loses. Have you considered that in a marathon of 128 people, 127 of the contestants do not win? We have a tendency to focus on the winner, but many more lives are affected by losing.

Even those who win have most likely lost many times before. Have you ever considered this? Unless the competition is entirely comprised of novices who never competed before, the person who wins is often one who has more experience in the activity. To gain that experience, he or she likely had to lose against more experienced people.

Even the greatest athletes lose, and world-class musicians make mistakes. Basketball superstar Michael Jordan put it this way: “I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”

Twenty-six-year-old skier Mikaela Shiffrin fell mere seconds into her giant slalom run during the 2022 Beijing Olympics. Automatic disqualification. She had won the gold medal in the event four years earlier and was a favorite to win again.

Her response? “I’m not going to cry about this because that’s just wasting energy.”

She was out training for her next event later that day.

Such athletes appear unphased by losing. What is their secret? They make it seem so easy, but anyone who has suffered a bitter loss knows it is not so simple! It brings on emotions of anxiety and disappointment. It can cause you to second-guess yourself and do even worse next time.

So what exactly does it take? Here is what you can do to get past the emotional letdown of coming up short.

Difficulty Improves You

We need to reframe how we view losing, but we also need to rethink winning. Both should spur on personal growth. For a winning basketball team, the coach will still point out where to improve. The point guard can do the same when looking back on how he did. A violinist may have a moving performance, but still have areas where he wants to better his technique. A photographer may set up photoshoot for her friend’s graduation portraits—everything goes well, but she still finds a lot of areas to develop.

The same could be applied if the B-ball team lost, the violinist lost his place in the music or all the graduate photos were out of focus. Lessons abound.

Whether we succeed or fail in any endeavor, we must strive to have an introspective attitude. Celebrate and identify what went well and why—but also scrutinize shortfalls and how to improve.

Throughout all of this, be sure to push yourself. Winning something unchallenging is not much of an achievement. For example, if you are 16 years old and give your 5-year-old brother a shellacking in Scrabble, did you really achieve anything? Sure, you will always win in such circumstances, but what does it prove? How do you improve?

Challenges will point out your weaknesses and show you where you can get better. Tackle difficult tasks, reach forward to things just outside your skill level, and set goals that force you to grow. This cannot be done if you are always playing games in which you easily beat your opponent.

If you want to improve at something, you should spend time around an individual who is already skilled at it. If you compete with him, you will probably lose. However, these failures will teach you much more than when you simply win against an individual who is less skilled.

By competing against better players, you can observe the correct way to do things. Also, a better player will likely take advantage of your mistakes, thereby making it obvious when you make an error. You might lose, but you will become better in time.

Refocus Your Thinking

Still, losing stings. When it happens, your mind is going to tell you that you are a failure. You may want to blame others for your loss—or point to allegedly faulty equipment. “Taking an L” may just put you in a bad mood for the day.

Even more, suffering failure can cause you to “get in your head.” You may be hesitant to try your hardest next time—and then perform even worse. A bad loss can cause you to want to quit.

How do you navigate all of that?

It is all about refocusing your thinking and reframing the loss. If you make a mistake in a performance or game, find ways to think about things other than your negative emotions. For example, you can use humor with your teammates or parents to cut through the sting of defeat.

Even so, your mind will likely stay on the event. Do not just think about what went wrong. Focus on where you succeeded. Did you block a shot? Did you nail that difficult run of notes on your saxophone? Where were you a good team player?

Often, it will be difficult to do this right after the loss. You are going to feel disappointment, and that is OK. But you should employ strategies so you do not spiral into wrong emotions.

Remind yourself that failure happens to everyone. This alone is a great step in the right direction.

If you cannot immediately think of things that went well during your latest loss, recall other times you really enjoyed the activity. Think of a time you were performing at your best. When you were having the most fun. Really visualize these moments: How did you feel? What were you thinking at the time? This exercise will really help remind you what you love about the activity—and the places where you are skilled at it.

Remember that just because you failed does not make you a failure. Refocusing your mind away from negative emotions will help you separate who you are from how you did in the game or competition.

Never tie your self-esteem to how you did during an activity!

Analyze Why

Once you get over the initial sting of defeat, it is time to analyze why. One sports-medicine coach put it this way: “Athletes who study their bad days generally see much faster skill acquisition and mastery compared to athletes who deny they have specific talent areas to improve upon. Arguably the best way to specify weaknesses to improve is to closely examine the bad plays, tough moments, and yes—losses from the past.”

To find imperfections, you will want to review the entire event. Whether a short game of ping-pong or a full day of football, examine the entire process and remember all that occurred. As you recall everything, create a list of areas in which you need to improve. Suppose you lost a ping-pong match: Was your serve too slow? Was your reaction time too slow? Did you lack control? Were you too predictable? Was it a combination of these?

Here are some more general questions to ask:

• Were you fully prepared? If no, why not?
• Where could you have specifically done better?
• What are the skills you need to improve upon or learn after this loss?
• What are specific ways you can improve those weak areas?

Here is where the greatest opportunity from losing comes into play. All of a sudden, you have a lot of information about areas to improve. Winning does not highlight your weaknesses as much—but losing certainly does!

Once you have compiled a list of areas upon which you can improve, the next step is to prioritize those areas. What gave you the most difficulty? For example, if you lost 10 points in ping-pong due to a bad serve and only three because of a lack of control, you would want to concentrate more on your serve. Taking the time to properly analyze different deficits can be helpful in fixing them.

Create a Plan

After examining your strengths and weaknesses, it is time to devise a plan. Continuing to use ping-pong as the example, maybe you want to develop a really fast serve before your next game, or maybe you want to master ball control. By analyzing your mistakes and creating a plan to correct them, you can figure out exactly how to win.

To overcome your areas of weakness, you will need to engage in an activity that can be difficult: practice. Be sure to devote adequate time to diligently practicing your areas of weakness. You have probably heard the saying “practice makes perfect.” Those who master a particular activity or sport have done so only after a great deal of practice. No one is born a winner from the womb.

You will find that you will improve overall in a particular activity if you focus on improving in areas in which you are the weakest. This can be difficult to do, as it is certainly much more fun to practice areas in which you are already proficient. (Of course, spending some time working on areas you enjoy is also beneficial, as it will prevent a practice session from seeming like drudgery.)

In addition to practicing, you will want to employ another basic learning tactic: research. Depending on how serious you are about an activity, you may want to find books and how-to articles on the internet. Finding the best methods to pursue can save you many hours of practicing incorrectly.

Perhaps the best way to research a particular skill is to ask someone who is better than you. This means, quite often, the best person to converse with when you lose is the person (or people) who won. Since they have just seen you in action, they can probably inform you on what areas you can improve.

Lose at Losing?

In all of this, realize that learning to cope with losing is a process. You are going to lose at losing! There are going to be times where you do not approach defeat the right way: You may say something hurtful to your parents, you may “get in your head” and do worse during the next game, and so on.

When you fall short, apologize to others if you need to and move on. Analyze your reaction to losing the same way you analyze any activity that did not go the way you had hoped. Most important, remind yourself that losing is hard.

Remember Mikaela Shiffrin from the beginning of the article? She went on to fall again at the start of her next event—something that has never happened to her before in her skiing career.

When interviewers caught her afterward, she was still grappling with what happened: “I think I just slipped. I had every intention to go full gas…In my experience that mentality has brought my best skiing. And today I went out on the fifth gate.”

“Pretty much everything [about this] makes me second guess the last 15 years. Everything I thought I knew about my own skiing and slalom and racing mentality. Just processing a lot for sure. And I feel really bad. There’s a lot more going on today besides my little situation, but I feel really bad for doing that.”

This was Mikaela processing her loss in real time. It shows that even the best athletes sometimes struggle when things do not go their way. The same will go for you—defeat is hard and requires work to get over.

Learning from losing is one of the most important skills you can build. It will help build mental toughness, emotional maturity and make you a more effective person. Most important, it will provide a foundation that will help when you grow older in God’s Way.

Notice that failure is a crucial part of Christianity: “For a just man falls seven times, and rises up again…” (Prov. 24:16).

Even righteous people fail. They sin. What is important is that they get back up from it, ask for forgiveness and repentance, analyze what happened, and learn from their mistakes.

Back to physical loss: It is going to happen to you. A lot. Make sure—win or lose—you are focusing on personal growth. During defeat, banish negative thinking, really scrutinize what happened, and hatch a plan to improve.

The next time you fall on your face, you know what to do!