I’m not on board with the whole, “everyone is a winner” mentality. But, I will say that even though only one person walks away as a champion of a particular event… there are multiple winners.

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Say what?

When I was in the midst of my career– I also thought, if I don’t win, I have lost. I’m competitive. And so I didn’t have the perspective then to realize that there’s not just one winner. Actually everyone, if you are paying attention to the process, can draw something from the experience that will make them better, something to build off of. And that’s a win. But not everyone does.

If you take time to reflect and acknowledge what went well, and what could have been better…. Guess what? You will be better next time because of it. That’s the “win.”

It’s through each experience that you pick up the nuggets of wisdom that you need to level up. It’s essential to take a couple steps back to get even further ahead. It’s so hard to do when you’re in that moment, because you’re so close to it that you don’t see it. It’s not until later that you see how it was helping you. But only if you pay attention.

I always tell my students, after a game, look at what went great and what could have been better and write it down in a bowling journal. Keep track of that. And ask yourself, what could I have done differently? Because being able to grow from every single experience, every win AND LOSS that you have on the lanes and beyond the lanes is instrumental to your future success.

It’s one of those things that’s not black and white though. You don’t see it happening. It’s one of those things you have to believe in first, without proof, and see the proof later. It’s like this trust that you have to have in the process and that the process does pay off and you’ll be better because of it. You have to have a little faith — alright, I didn’t win this, but I’m going to sit down and go internal and figure out what could have been better. I’m going to take that away as the win for this event, trusting that in the future, I won’t make those same mistakes again and I’ll have grown from it.

It’s avoiding the thinking that if you’re not the winner, it was a waste.

That is hard to do. I know. Because I’ve done it. I remember times when I wanted to win so bad that when I didn’t win, I thought it was a waste of time, because a “win” was the only goal. And now I realize that there’s so many things that I learned in those losses that could be considered winning. Because then they did, indeed… lead me to more wins.

When I was in college and they were taking apart my game, in those moments it felt terrible. I wrote about this in detail last year (you can read the full blog post here), but let’s just say, I experienced ALL the emotions that year. My coaches dismantled and reassembled my game, and I lost far more often than I won. My average became way lower. As much as I hated that experience and as hard as it was to experience going backward so many steps, I stuck with it. I maintained my faith in the process. Having the faith in them and vulnerability to allow them to break down my game to build it back up was a huge win. There were moments when I asked myself, am I ever going to be great again? Why do I have to take so many steps back to go forward? But I stayed faithful to the process and came out the other side stronger.

I didn’t realize it as fully then, when it was happening, as I do now. Now I just see it as a winning experience, to have gone through that. Now, overall, whatever or wherever I am bowling, I focus on the process instead of the outcome. If you can get to the point where you’re more focused on the process, you have a winning mindset.

Even if you don’t walk away as the “champion,” if you can get to the point where you are super introspective about what just happened, that’s a win. It really is about how you support your pursuit of wins that makes you a champion. Live your life in the way that supports being a champion. When I see players who lose without grace and not using it as a learning opportunity, I feel like they are totally missing the point. They will have a really hard time getting to that champion level because they’re not living their lives in the way that supports being a true champion.

When I put on my EYT tournaments, I can see who’s going to emerge and stand out as future champions. It’s how they live, who they’re around, how they talk to themselves, how they win and the integrity that they have when they lose. I can look at all of that and see, there is a real champion.

How do you frame a “win” in your game?