There is nothing that can reshape our goals and plans like disappointment. We have it all one minute and the next second, nothing. It’s a vicious cycle in life we all face and if we’re not mindful we can land ourselves in that cycle mentally, even while getting stuff done.
We all lose sometimes. I’m not talking about competition or sports. I’m talking about life. It is never feels good we lose. Losing is just not an enjoyable part of anything. Sometimes though, the loss is not about our feelings, but our ability to pay attention to details.
The flexibility to adapt and roll with the punches is skill we all need when we don’t get the results we aimed for. But it takes a level and attitude none of us have in times of apparent loss.
Ask anyone who ever started a business from scratch how much they lost in the effort to get where they are.
Older generations used to power through life and struggle like we do. I don’t know if they had shame like we do though. But we can read about the older folk in books and see old movies of years gone by. The Bible though is a book that provides the greatest insight into people that knew how to handle losses.
When we open the Bible, we see the unfiltered struggles of those generations. Some of what they went through could be considered colossal losses. But they believed God and so moved forward in that faith, and carried the lessons from the losses. Some, the Lord gave great victories and we see them carrying the lessons they learned as they lived.
The lessons we can gain from our efforts aren’t always pleasant. They do provide lessons that embolden us to live our lives without fainting when we’re challenged. We develop mental and emotional stamina we use to power through life. Challenges provide ample lessons.
One of the most important lessons to learn is to stop giving our emotions too much control of us. We ought to learn instead to apply logic to situations and other times, apply actions necessary for others.
The lessons we incur when we attempt and fail gives us more information than succeeding. Success isn’t a bad thing, it is just losing actually produces more information because we think about what happened without pride clouding our thoughts.
We spend a lot more time going over the events we lose than we do the events we come out on top. That is a known fact. By the time we’ve moped out of the loss we have tons of intel we can use for future events or useful tools that will make our everyday life a bit more stable. Losses are only useless when we don’t learn anything. If we pay attention to the details of our thoughts then we will learn and grow from the bumps and bruises. Bible tells is that a righteous person considers their ways. If we then consider our ways we are in line with folks from generations long gone.
Now, there are some folk who crash out when they lose. I can understand the reasoning behind it too. Losing sucks, but only for people who have no imagination. I mean, we can spend all day wasting energy raging about losing, whatever we lost. But wouldn’t it be better to get prepared for the next time we face another event.
If we are patient when we lose, we can learn how to persevere when we’re facing a rough patches. We can gain bold habits and new levels of fresh attitude. It’s all about the attitude. We can be winners who lost a bout or we can be sore losers.
Those who pay attention to the details learn to be champions in life. Those who crash out and sulk only know what the loss feels like. They may never have the drive to find out why or learn how to use what happened to their advantage.
End of rant. Thank you for visiting Spiritseid for this week’s post. I hope this little bit of inspiration gives you a new perspective on losing and winning. I suppose we should create a blog post about using losses to empower our actions.
