How Winners Lose: Accept, Assess, Advance

Everybody loses. Entrepreneurs, athletes, investors, every human being. Nobody is immune. I've lost businesses, I've lost money, I've lost my health more than once.

The biggest winners are the ones who refuse to make the loss part of their identity.

The core of how I handle a setback fits in one distinction: failure is something that happened, not something you are. "It didn't work. I have not succeeded, but I am not a failure. I'm still a winner; this just didn't work."

I call the sequence that follows How Winners Lose. It doesn't run every day. It runs after a loss.

What do you do right after a loss?

Accept. It's done. Accept that it didn't work: the business, the relationship, the financial bet, the race, the goal. Acceptance isn't giving up. It's refusing to carry the loss as part of who you are. Don't take it personally.

When the loss is big, acceptance isn't instant. There's terrain to cross first. Denial, anger, bargaining, guilt, and depression usually come before acceptance, and growth comes after it. That's my adaptation of the grief stages, applied to any kind of loss. Acceptance is the door to abundance.

How do you learn from a failure without dwelling on it?

Assess. Ask one question: what can I learn so I'm better for it? Own your part, mine the lesson, and find a better way so you don't repeat it. That's the only reason to look back at the loss at all.

There are four things you can do with a failure: stuff it, dismiss it, suffer with it, or reframe it. Only the reframe works. The other three are different ways of making the loss part of you.

The reframe has a few practical moves. Focus on why it happened, and own your part without judging yourself. Stop the voice in your head that keeps replaying it; that's the work I describe in the Power of Silence. Give yourself credit for what you did right. And be patient. Allow a refresh period before you expect to feel normal again.

How do you move forward?

Advance. Get back on your toes, not your heels. On your toes you move forward with energy. On your heels you get knocked back. It's a fresh day. I can't do anything about my past, so I move forward.

The best athletes show you how. They don't carry yesterday's defeat into today's game. They learn from it, they let it go, and they play. The order matters: learn first, then forget. Forget before you've learned and you'll repeat it. Hold on after you've learned and it'll weigh you down.

I've used this sequence after business losses and after health scares. Keep or Kill tells you when to end something. How Winners Lose tells you what to do once it's over.

What loss are you still carrying that you've already learned everything you can from?

~b