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Wellness Wednesday for December 20, 2023

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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I understand your hatred of defeat - I hate losing as much as you and I've lost an awful lot! This has lead me to a few mental frameworks which can make losing less painful:

  1. Losing is a huge motivator for me not to lose - it forces me to critique what I'm doing, seek help, and actively make adjustments to 'lose less'. Losing is a motivator!

  2. Losing means I'm learning - assuming you can repeat losing, if each time you 'lose less' it means you're winning more - 'winning' and 'losing' are not binary but rather ranges and distributions.

  3. Losing is risk on behavior - seek to increase risk outside of your comfort zone. I've been on this forum enough know that you work in finance to some degree which is an institution where risk-seeking is dangerous. Too much risk causes all sorts of problems so so much of what you do is mitigating risk while maximizing growth. Your hatred of losing can also be a dislike of risk - as other people mentioned in responses this is largely female encoded. In many ways losing is a sort of risk tolerance - are you willing to lose more as an accumulation of risk?

  4. Identify where you hate losing. Some activity you might lose in won't hurt you emotionally as much as others. For example, losing professionally could carry a huge risk. What about learning something new? Trying something new? Cooking something you never tried that's outside your wheelhouse? There might be many things you're less worried about

  5. Change the framework - focus on trying to win instead of trying not to lose - rather than worry about, risk focus on trying to beat out other people. This is largely antisocial behavior but it can come at success - by being better at someone in a thing that's moderately important than you, you're worrying less about 'I hate losing' and more about improving yourself to be able to get ahead.

  6. Ask forgiveness not permission - Once again it requires in engaging in more antisocial behavior, but just going ahead and doing things without first asking for permission or coordinating with others can be a useful competitive mindset - of course it isn't always useful in certain areas, but this sort of choice can allow you to more opportunities and to be more competitive without the 'I want to get ahead' mentality. Sometimes it's 'I want to get things done quickly'