A few days ago, I wrote a post about loser’s games:
Situations in life where the outcome is all about what the loser does… rather than what the winner does.
I wrapped up that post with advice given to amateur tennis players. “Lose less. Avoid trying too hard. And keep the ball in play.”
To which a freelance copywritress wrote in to ask:
“How do you lose less in freelancing? Not trying too hard and keeping the ball in the game is straightforward. But I wasn’t able to figure out how I could lose less. Any insights or tips would be much appreciated by this seasoned loser.”
My answer was that losing less is about all the stuff that’s really 100% within our control, but we muck up for reasons of our own. Like…
There’s a great job that you want to apply to, but you convince yourself not to do it, or you don’t do it in time.
Or…
Client comes to you and says, “Here’s what I need” and you say, “Yes boss” instead of saying, “What’s the ultimate goal you’re looking to achieve by doing this?”
Or…
You hear 50k times that you’re charging too little and yet you still don’t raise your rates.
Basically, losing is self-sabotage and mistakes that we really can’t blame on anybody else. And losing less is not doing that.
Of course, maybe that’s just deflecting the question. How exactly do you not make mistakes and avoid self-sabotage, whatever form it takes?
I’ve got three unsexy but true ideas for you:
1. Habit. Start small and low risk. Build from there.
2. Willpower. Sleep. Eat. Drink your orange juice. Grit your teeth.
3. Self-awareness.
Because those three losing behaviors above, those are all things I did and sometimes still do. But maybe they aren’t exactly your own.
Whatever yours are, identify them. In the spur of the moment those losing behaviors just happen. You shrug them off, either blaming circumstance or yourself.
But if you take time and identify them… that can sometimes be all you need to change when loserliness threatens next.
I’ve got my own homebrewed journaling system for this. In fact I’ve got close to 30 separate journals, for different aspects of my life.
In each journal, I ask myself, what happened? What did I do right? What could I have done better?
This doesn’t always mean I never act like a seasoned loser. But when I do act like a loser, that goes into a journal, and maybe reduces the chance of it happening again. And if you sometimes play loser’s games… this might be worth a try for you too.
By the way, one of the journals I keep is all about interesting and novel ideas for emails. Because I write a daily email newsletter. If you’d like to read some of the ideas I write about, you can sign up for it here.