Vision

Winning and Losing: What You Can Control and What Really Matters

Once I watched the Boston Celtics lose a 7th and deciding game to the Miami Heat in the Eastern Conference finals of the NBA on their home court in Boston. Fans were disappointed and the players seemed somewhat shocked. The Celtics have played in 36 game 7 playoff games and have won 27 championships—not bad! Not only did they lose a game 7 but so did the hockey Bruins, both in the same season. Newspapers called the performance of both teams embarrassing and pitiful. 

The Celtics began the night stone-cold behind the arc and it snowballed from there. When their shooting is on they are practically unbeatable. They just were not on against a very good team. 

People become very sensitive about winning and losing. Of course, everyone wants to be a winner, and losing is something you want to avoid and not talk about. The truth is everyone experiences the devastation of loss far more frequently than winning. 

It’s important to talk about results you can and cannot control, and how to make meaningfulness from it all since it is a common thread to everyday living. 

You cannot control the results: You can create a pool of great talent, shape the environment, influence those around you, control work ethic, control attitude, and approach, and chisel your own mindset toward winning. You just cannot control the outcome. At the end of the season for every team sport there is one winner and everyone else loses. Even the winner is not a winner for very long. When we win we celebrate and pontificate as if we might be a champion forever. But it fades quickly!

I don’t think the Miami Heat wanted to win more than the Boston Celtics wanted to win. When you try to control all the factors that go into a team result, plus overcome the factors that might be going really well for your opponent, it brings you to the precipice of results you cannot always control.

The Celtics won game 6 with a tip-in by a player that was in the right place at the right time with one-tenth of a second left on the clock. Had that not happened there would not have even been a game 7! You cannot choreograph that result. It was happenstance that 2 teams very much wanted to win but one guy makes a tip-in at the buzzer! It’s luck! Vegas thought the luck would continue by favoring the Celtics by 7.5 points at home. They lost by 19. It wasn’t meant to be. Many times it is not meant to be that you will be the champion. 

Michael Jordan who is considered by himself and many others to be the greatest basketball player in the history of the NBA won 6 titles out of 15 seasons. As an owner for 13 seasons, he has only won 3 playoff games, period! Is it because he doesn’t want to win bad enough? I don’t want to be around when you tell him that. It would not be safe. It simply suggests you cannot control the results all the time.

However, there are things you can control. One thing is a deep belief in yourself. You can be a heart champion. Heart champions are a different breed and are spawned from a different ilk. There is so much more than the score at the end of the game. Self-definition comes from a deeper source. It’s about the preparation, the sacrifice, the sweat, and engagement of uncertainty. A heart champion’s life is determined within before the game is ever played and independent of the score at the end of the game. It has to do with connecting congruency with values of the heart. 

A heart champion is more concerned about being true to one’s heart and not just winning or losing. Becoming true to your heart takes a willingness to go deeper and find meaningfulness in all of life’s endeavors, including failure. It’s not like heart champions condition themselves to lose. Rather, they are carved from a deeper place down deep inside. A heart champion knows that losing is a part of the ebb and flow of life. She determines to never let an outcome define who she is. Instead, definition is determined by the vision of destiny from within which supersedes any result. Her priority is knowing that she is connected to herself, embracing all of herself—the good, the bad, and the ugly. She understands that life is a tapestry weaving together the bitter and the sweet, success and failure, triumph and tragedy. Positive results are fine and desired, but fundamentally, a heart champion already has determined that they are “an unrepeatable miracle of the universe.” 

Heart champions understand that no victory will add to this reality and no defeat will take away from it. It is already etched into the stone of destiny that exists in their heart. It is this deep self-belief that enables a heart champion to go deep with disappointment, bitter loss, and uncertainty. Still with great confidence, know that they will rise again!

Collective Resilience

“The human capacity for burden is like bamboo—far more flexible than you’d ever believe at first glance” – Jodi Picoult, My Sister’s Keeper

Resilience is the capacity that a person has to adapt and readily recover from adversity. It is evidenced in the picture that contrasts the mighty oak that fought the wind and was broken and the willow which bent with the wind and survived. Recovery from addiction requires resilience. There are many up-and-down experiences. Addicts must develop the capacity to adapt in order to do recovery on life’s terms. As life unfolds, plans are foiled and people disappoint. Flexibility is necessary in order to maintain long-term sobriety. Chaos gives way to calm in recovery when an addict practices resilience. 

Resilience is a recovery quality that increases when exercised and practiced. The following suggestions will help you strengthen the practice of resilience in your recovery.

  1. Stay positively connected to at least one other person in recovery. Resilience tends to wilt in isolation. Recovery requires connection to others. When a sense of community wanes, addicts withdraw and close their heart where they need to be open. Twelve-step meetings are designed to accelerate connection and openness. However, large meetings make it difficult to be open. They trigger isolation for some in recovery. Building resilience in a large meeting requires the same commitment to connecting with others that is necessary in a small meeting. Go out of your way to have coffee and conversation with at least one person. It will greatly increase your capacity for resilience.
  2. Make meaning from mangled moments. These are moments in life where nothing goes right. Thank God this doesn’t happen all the time! Yet, when they do occur, it seems like they always occur. During these times you can get caught up in moaning and groaning. Long-term complaining will snap serenity and threaten sobriety. Take a deep breath and then let go. It’s just one of those days! Step back and learn from these mangled moments. There are priceless lessons you can gain when things go wrong. Practicing gratitude will help you open your heart and make meaning out of mangled moments.
  3. Help someone else when you are in the midst of your own trials and trauma. I learned this from my mom. There were always trials for her in raising 12 kids. There would be one crisis after another. What kept my mother sane was that she always had her eye on others whose struggles were greater than hers. In our community, there was the Fryman family who had 22 children. My mom was forever gathering clothing and food for this family whose trials were greater than hers. There was a poor woman in our community known as Sister Harris. My mom would have her iron our clothes for 50 cents a basket because she needed the money. When the clothing came back with a musty smell my mom made us put up with it because Sister Harris needed the money. My mom seemed to gain inspiration for her own trials by helping someone else. Try this in your recovery. It will inspire you while you increase your resilience.
  4. Imagine a positive future. My mom used to imagine what it would be like to take a vacation to St. Louis, only 2 hours away from where we lived in East Central Illinois. I sat with her at the picnic table in our backyard listening to her daydream about a trip to this favorite city. I developed deep satisfaction saving money from my paper route and mowing yards to make this trip possible for my mom. It was a future vision that propelled me through my childhood trials and tribulations. Creating a vision for the future will help you stay the course in your recovery life of sobriety. When times get tough, maintaining an unspeakable imagination for the future will sustain you and create a way through the agony of craving. Keep your eye on the prize of a positive future. It will strengthen resilience in your recovery.
  5. Simply forgive! In the aftermath of addiction carnage, resilience increases when you simply forgive. Forgiveness means to let go and not hold against. You must first forgive yourself before you will effectively forgive others. You forgive yourself for doing the same thing in principle as that which was done to you. Though you didn’t commit the same behavior in like kind, you did so in principle when you consider times when you did what you wanted, when you wanted it, regardless of its impact on others. This is a universal principle of offending that all humanity has engaged in at some time in their existence. When you forgive yourself, you create the necessary resilience to forgive someone else. This is the secret to getting out of your own emotional prison from a hurt perpetrated by another. Forgiveness requires that you believe in your capacity to forgive. The word “believe” is an Anglo-Saxon word that means to live in accordance with. Therefore, you must live out forgiveness of self and others daily. Seldom is forgiveness a one-and-done experience. Most often, it requires a daily practice of letting go and not holding a grudge against yourself or others. This practice increases resilience.

A 12-step community is a place to practice collective resilience. Every person within the community struggles with the same issues of craving and need for sobriety. The power of resilience can deepen in a collective way. Collective resilience encourages collective courage. In a 12-step community, everyone is invited to deepen the practice of resilience while facing the adversities that are inevitable in the recovery journey.