Dealing with defeat in competition

Dealing with defeat in competition

You put your everything into it. You give it your all. You train harder than anyone you know and focus your everything on winning. You know you deserve it, you know it deep within you.

Suddenly, one mistake. One tiny coincidence. Gone is your dream. You are facing defeat.



We all know the feeling of defeat. Whether that is losing a match of kickboxing that you dominated half-way through and put your heart and soul into or it is just another starcraft laddergame.

 It does not matter what it is, losing rarely makes us feel good.

Sometimes, we put so much into winning that we forget about everything else. When we are so committed on living up to one thing, not achieving that very thing can make us feel completely worthless. We suddenly feel purposeless. Everything that used to have meaning was taken away.

We start questioning what we are actually doing. We start questioning if it is even possible for us to achieve what we are reaching out for. Maybe we are just not good enough. Maybe what we are is just not good enough to work with.

Me personally, I know exactly how that can hurt. How losing can destroy all your confidence in a blink of an eye. Heres more on my experience with competition if you are interested in that: http://www.teamliquid.net/blogs/481511-my-hyper-competitiveness

"However, losing is a part of life. Unless we learn how to deal with it in the most effective manner, we will never be able to reach our full potential."

When we are losing, we are usually doing so whilst developing some form of skill. Even in the face of a bad grade at an exam. Instead of getting fed up about bad grades, we can use the given information at hand to spot our weaknesses. Once we identify those, we can start working on them.

"Being good at something is very rarely raw talent."

 Usually, at the very least, it is a combination of hard work and talent. More often than not, it is just massive amounts of hard work. Repetition over repetition.

A lot of people however have the wrong interpretation of what hard work actually is. Hard work is not just grinding out your activity as much as possible.

 Hard work is everything that comes with developing your skills. Hard work is dealing with the obstacle, spending every second - minute and hour giving it your all, as much as it is spending massive amounts of time to develop.

"We will only become greater if we face our pain. The better we do that, the more we can use our pain as our advantage."

I used to see it in myself. I see it in so the people around me. I see it watching professional StarCraft players and I see it watching ordinary people failing at ordinary things.

People get so incredibly frustrated about losing. They are unable to objectively use the information provided to their advantage. They are unable to channel their emotions to their advantage.

I see so many of those, and I see so many of those that are incredibly talented. So close to greatness, but they are missing something. They are missing emotional control. Missing self-control.

But why are they missing self-control? Why do they not have control over their emotions? Why cant they deal with loss better? Did they not try? Do they not work on themselves?

Of course they do. I am sure that most people that are competitive thought about dealing with emotions. Dealing with such downsings.

The reason they are failing is that they dont do it properly. They dont dig deep enough. They did not find the right motivation and they did not pull through with it. Most of those, that fail, have made it work for a day or two. Maybe a week. Maybe a month. But then, they fall back into old patterns.

"Emotional control is hard. It is hard to get, harder to maintain and incredibly hard to master."

But only if we understand our emotions and are able to channel them, we can use them to strengthen us further. To becoming even better as a sideeffect.


We have to understand that our strongest emotions are incredible sources of energy, and that energy can be channeled towards our goals and dreams.

But how do we get control over our emotions? How do I channel them and what does that even do?

Channeling your emotions means that first get control over them, you catch them, redirect them and make them into something else.

Emotions such as disappointment, sorrow or anger can be incredibly powerful. Our emotions can become our greatest source of motivation. A source of motivation to work harder, a source of energy to focus more intensely.

Once we understood that the 'negative' emotions we feel are not neccessarily what they seem to be but they are something to work with to become even better, we can start looking differently at loss.

How to use your emotions to push yourself to new frontiers

Especially in those last few days, I realized that for me, anger is an incredible source of power. I am able to reach a physical potential that I could not have before without motivating myself the right way.

I tried to experiment a bit with emotions in combination with physical excercise.

When I started a workout, I thought about something that was deeply disappointing. I turned that disappointment into anger. I used that anger to push myself harder. When I was about to give up, I reminded myself about this very thing. I tried to channel so much anger into my workout that I pushed myself further than ever before. There was no giving up mentally. I was pushing myself until I broke down and no last pushup was even possible.

And that is exactly, what you need to do with your emotions. Understand that whenever you let your emotions out, you are losing this potential. Whenever you are shouting and complaining, you are losing that energy that you could have converted into something very useful.

Here's another example. Losing in StarCraft:

Oh dear, how I used to get angry over this. StarCraft is probably the number one unforgiving game out there. One mistake can easily cost you a game. And that can be incredibly, incredibly frustarting at times.

I always hated losing. But with StarCraft, I had the worst experiences. Losing was not just losing. It's not easy to describe how much anger and depresssion I felt at times. The most frustrating moments is when you lose a game that you absolutely dominated. When you know you deserve a win but a tiny, stupid mistake makes you lose this hard fought game.

And that is where it starts. You enter what I call "the vicious cycle of anger". You complain, you get angry. Your ego feels threatened. You queue the next game. The fact that you express your anger reinforces your anger. You become sidetracked by emotions. On top of everything you had to deal with before, you now have to deal with frustration as well.

Your focus lessens. You start doing small mistakes, further reinforcing your anger. Your emotional rollercoaster takes upper-hand. Step by step, your performance deteriorates, whilst your anger is growing.

For some people, they quit right there. Others take it so far until they are overwhelmed, crying and depressed. I remember these days. I ended up on my floor, punching my fists so hard at times they would start bleeding. Being so overwhelmed that I would lie on the floor for hours, crying in self-hatred. That's how bad some people take losing. 

But as competitors, we have to understand that losing is as much part of competition and our progress as everything else. Emotional control, making the best use of our emotions is a skill that is very rare, but as much part of becoming great as it is to be mechanically or strategically good at something.

The fact that very few people are good at dealing with their emotions should be a motivation for you to become good at it. It should be your motivation to take an edge in life.

If you are one of the few people that can channel bad experiences into energy for something purposeful, that can channel anger into focus, disappointment into motivation, then you will have a huge edge over almost everyone not just in competition, but in life.

For very competitive people, we might have to see losing as part of another game. As you are confronted with the deepest of your emotions, the toughtest of feelings, how good are you at that game? How good are you, where most fail? Are you one of a million that is able to make use of this situation to strengthen yourself? Or are you just another one of these people that fall apart and unable to reach your full potential?

No matter how good and skilled you are at something, even if you are a professional on the higest of levels. If you will not master your emotions, you will not reach your full potential. Think about what you could be able to do if you took all the strength that is in losing.

To win, we need to simply become better than those that compete with us. How do we do that? By making use of everything that we can work with. If we are already on par with their mechanics, mental mastery might be what we need to edge out on them.

3 Steps to controlling your emotions:

• 1) Make it a purpose. 

Understand that mastering your mind and emotions is as much part of the competition as it is being strategically or mechanically better. If you lack in mechanics, you practice your mechanics. If you lack in understanding or strategical thinking, you go ahead and research. If you lack in emotional control? ...Work on it!

• 2) Channel your emotions 

To get not just back to your neutral state but into an even better more deep state of performance, you need to start using your emotions to strengthen your performance. Physical strength can massively profit from emotions like anger, pushing us to not giving up.

However, we can also channel emotions like anger into mental strength by channeling our focus. 

The next time you become incredibly angry, understand that it is a waste of energy to let these emotions out in the form that they got to you. Collect them, decide where to channel them and use them to your advantage to reach your full potential for the given moment. 

You will realize that once you learn to stop expressing your emotions but rather channeling them, you are often able to reach much better levels of performance than without emotional activity at all.3) 

• 3) Understand that losing provides you with useful information

Losing and failure is probably your number one source of pointing out what to work on next. Sometimes we might be able to realize our weaknesses whilst we are having fun winning. But life is hard and more often than not, we have to face defeat to actually understand our position. 

If you are able to take out the useful information that losing provides you with, if you are able to embrace your failures and weaknesses and replace them with strengths, you can only grow. If we do not lose, we might never grow.



closing words

I truely hope that some of you competitors out there read this and take this to good use. There is already enough talent wasted by some great competitors that are unable to master this last piece to the puzzle. Dont be part of those that waste their talent, understand that mindset is as much part of your road to success as is every other skill you could think of for your very competition.

Thanks for reading, 
as always, share this blog if you would like to see more of those articles!

have a nice day and good luck!
Niklas.

also check out:

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How not to care what people think about you
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Ego - Understanding the most important concept about our self
Changing your life - how to start