There’s a great quote from Jack Nicklaus which is: The most important part of winning is losing.
I’ve come to understand the importance of this more and more, and also understand it as the hinge point between true, intrinsically generated confidence and confidence based on false bravado or pretense.
We see a lot of competitive examples of people psyching themselves up to the point where they won’t even entertain the possibility of not winning or not ending up on top, in whatever manifestation that takes as if that somehow presupposes weakness and an unwanted vulnerability.
In fact, there is nothing that puts you in a MORE vulnerable place that holding a fixed point of success in your mind without being able to simultaneously sit comfortably with its opposite.
Freedom is being ok with every outcome that presents. It’s the integration of all possibilities and having full acceptance of each of them- even those that our mind judges as the bad and the ugly.
Does that mean you don’t care? No. Caring is a product of showing heart.
It just means that you don’t get wrapped up in worry, which is the anxious art of getting ahead of yourself.
Commitment does not mean you must rigidly accept a single option. When we are out there working with our horses, we can be committed to an overall vision or intention, whilst being accepting of what presents in the moment and seeking to find ways to soften the edges of the resistance.
We are fluid to what presents but informed in terms of where we want to take things.
Attentive to a vision, unattached to the outcome.
To be a good winner, you need to be as skilled at being a good loser. If, in fact, there is such a thing as a loser at all…
Onwards.
Jane