#selfimprovement #personalimprovement #personaldevelopment #personalgrowth
I did my signature motivational speech up in Orangeville last night. This is a small town of about 30,000 about an hour northwest of Toronto. Usually, I present this particular presentation to adult audiences only as a self improvement topic. However, in this case, one family (husband and wife) brought their son who was probably in his early teens by my estimation. I told the event organizers that based on the arrival of one youth, I wasn’t going to change my talk (I have totally separate talks for the youth audience).
At the end of my motivational talk, the father and son came up to me to ask some questions. The boy raised an issue about himself. He told me that he was afraid of losing (in sports competition for example).
I told him that I’ve lost many times in martial arts competition. Although I have won world championships, I’ve also taken last places in my division as well as everything in between. And I also told him that it’s when I don’t get first place is when I learn the most. When I lose a competition, I always go back to the drawing board and think about what I can do as self improvement in that activity.
I then modify my training to work on those aspects I want to improve on. Over time, I always become a better competitor as a result. So I had to lose in order to really get better. If I won all the time, I probably wouldn’t have put that same type of effort to learn and improve.
The fact is, sometimes you have to lose in order to grow for self improvement. Therefore, although losing is never a great feeling, it should be viewed differently. Instead of totally negative experiences, losing should be viewed as great opportunities to learn and get better. When you lose, you are really uncovering huge potential growth opportunities.
I feel so strong about this, I’m even going to shoot an entire future episode of Clint Cora Motivational WebTV based on this. If you haven’t seen all my previous shows, check them out as part of your own self improvement at the Motivational TV archive.
