How to lose with style, as a leader....
It’s hard to lose, let’s be honest, you never heard Hannibal from ‘The A-Team’ say, ‘I love it when a plan doesn’t come together.’ There’s a joke in my family that when my kids (now adults) were little, I could tell a board game was over when I heard the swish of the board flying through the air and the multiple little thuds as the pieces hit the floor. My son, ‘he who shall not be named’ used to end almost every board game, like this. Hat’s off to his siblings forever playing with him.
He knew that this behaviour wasn’t okay and he struggled to manage his outbursts but you know, he was 7, and at 7 you learn and you apologise. At age 10, these outbursts were less frequent, but still present and as a parent should do, I sat down and talked about boundaries and socially acceptable behaviour – you know the type of conversation a ‘proper’ big talk. I told him that while his siblings might forgive him, as an adult his loss of temper could end in prison and no friends (alongside giving him support to resolve it, I might add!). Now in his 20s he has grown out of it and can even manage a gentle teasing about it occasionally and we can all relax knowing he can manage his feelings and that it’s no longer necessary to pull Bart Simpson from the Simpson’s chess set out of a hole in the ceiling.
Let’s just pause for a moment and focus on what is the key message here – he grew out of it.
So, let’s come to today, it’s just days after the 2020 election and it’s running right to the wire, even so, there does seem to be a fairly clear winner. The problem is that one of the candidates just can’t accept this. Now, I’m not here to argue about your politics, I’m woefully politically uneducated, but I am here to argue about how to lose gracefully because if you want to push your leadership ahead, you are going to lose sometimes and if you don’t, then frankly you just aren’t creating enough change. A leader should be moving things forward, trying new things, pushing the boundaries, and disrupting, that’s why they are called a leader, remember that childhood rhyme, ‘we’re following the leader…. wherever they may roam’. They are meant to roam knowing that occasionally it will go wrong.
In my book, ‘It Begins with You, Transform Your Mind to Excel as an Alternative Leader’, I write about, as I name them, the alternative leaders, as those that lead from a strong core, make great decisions and have good self-worth. These leaders are growing in numbers every day, but right now, in positions of power, like politicians have, they are the exception, not the rule. When we have good self-worth, losing is okay, it’s not seen as something that is personal and means something about you as a person, it’s not about your worth it’s about the outcome of the game or the situation….or the election…
A true leader loses with style. They lose in such a way that the people who beat them sort of feel sorry they had to beat such a nice person to win. They may even question if that person should have lost. A true leader loses with such grace that even if they lost this round, this election, or this game, others still want to play with them/work with them afterwards, even if they are on the opposing team.
This is not what we are seeing right now in the election. Currently, as I write, the outcome is not definite, but it is looking like we have a winner and one side is full of recrimination, hatred, anger, and even lashing out and attacking his own fellow Americans – the very people he is meant to look after. It’s just not uncomfortable to watch, it sort of breaks my heart a little, whichever side you sit on. I see a very upset child in an adult’s body who is acting out the triggers of his child baggage…. Like the behaviour of a 7-year-old child who is struggling with his anger and feelings, the pieces of the board game have just been flung, there’s that familiar swish in the air of the board as it whizzes past our heads, narrowly missing taking an eye out.
Most of us, since childhood, have been taught to play fair, share our toys, be a good sportsperson shake hands when it’s all done and be respectful to our opponent, even when you lose. So, if you’re like me, there’s a certain squeamishness to watching these antics from a ‘world leader’. When I work with business leaders I clear their emotional baggage and childhood clutter so they have great self-worth and self-confidence and make strong decisions, this means that when things go wrong they don’t take it personally and that they can, as Buzz Lightyear says be ‘falling, with style’. I do hope that emotions re-balance and some dignity can be retained in the last few days of power, I see someone who needs a lot of therapy and business coaching, and I do genuinely hope he gets it.
If you want to be able to lose with grace, fall with style, have a plan come together, and you’d like to have great self-worth so that you can also win much more often anyway, do get in touch, until then stand well back the board game pieces are flying….