“If you lose control, you lose. Period.”
I read this in a weekly advice email I subscribe to called The Daily Coach. As I thought about this short quote, I was struck by the depth of those 7 words.
Maybe you have won the game, but lost leadership capital with you team in the process. I have memories of coaching and saying/doing whatever I could, sacrificing trust with my players because I knew how to win, and used them to get it done, for my purposes. Maybe I’m alone on that one? Probably not.
Maybe you lost the competition because you lost your composure. Zenadine Zadane‘s headbutt during the World Cup final, got him ejected and his team lost the match in the process. There are tons of examples of this sort of loss of composure.
Maybe you “won” the argument with someone, but lost a relationship, a friendship, or changed a relationship forever. If you can be right and effective, that is a homerun. But when you have to choose, 99% of the time it is better to effective than it is to be right. Losing composure to “win” an argument or to make sure people know how right you are and how smart you are, is almost never a win.
7 words, that couldn’t be more true. If you lose control, you lose. Period. Try to find a time, even an outlier time, where losing control was the right thing to do, where it helped you “win,” where it didn’t cost you on the other side. Even if you find that time, I’ll bet you could have kept your composure and still accomplished your goal.
We could try to re-write this by saying, “if you stay in control, you’ll have a better chance to win. Period.”
Ill take the chance to win every time over those 7 words any day. Lead well!
