Are You Playing To Win, Or Not To Lose?

Welcome to A New Life podcast with Pamela Jean, where it's all about empowering women to empower more women. Get ready, friends, to create a new life. And here is your host, Pamela Jean.

Hello, my friends, and welcome to this week's episode of A New Life podcast where today we're taking a deep dive into the strategies and mindsets that drive success in business and in life. I'm your host, Pamela Jean. Thank you so much for being here. If you will please go and like and subscribe to this podcast so you never, never miss an episode. I don't know if you know this about me, but I'm a big sports fan. I love basketball, baseball, volleyball, football, you name it. I really enjoy watching competition. But I have a story. Just a question I want to ask you about a football game. I want you to imagine that you are the coach of a team. Your team just scored a touchdown and you're down by one point. There are five seconds left in the game and there's only time for one more play. You have a choice to make. Do you kick the field goal and tie the game, sending the game into overtime, or do you go for two points and win the game? What would you do? Would you play it safe or not? Playing to win means you're willing to take some calculated risks, knowing that potentially the outcome isn't going to be exactly what you want. Or are you just going to stay safe and play not to lose? I think if we're honest with ourselves, there are times where we're just playing not to lose. We're not willing to challenge ourselves or challenge our circumstances or challenge our situation to play to really, really win. Well, my friends, I want you to win. You deserve to win all the best things in your life. I think deep down in our hearts, we all want to say that, yeah, I do want to play to win. But how do you do? How do you play to win? What has to happen for me to start playing to win? Well, I want to share some ideas with you to help you get going on that path. We are going to talk about the mindset shift that's required. Getting out of the comfort zone, taking calculated risks, overcoming the fear of failure, the question of innovate or stagnate, and building a play to win culture. Those are the things we're going to talk about today. Well, mindset comes first. You have to shift your mindset from playing it safe to winning. You have to. Playing it not to lose often leads to a very, very conservative approach. Maintaining the status quo, holding back, growth in your life and in your business, on the other hand, playing to win involves embracing uncertainty, being curious, being open to the idea of innovation, and taking certain risks. Now taking risks doesn't mean that you're reckless. It just means that you're willing to go out on the fringe just a little bit, to push towards the big win instead of staying safe and playing not to lose. The comfort zone, my friends, is the biggest trap of growth. It's the biggest thing that will stifle your growth is staying stuck in your comfort zone. Growth does not come from your comfort zone. Sometimes life shatters around you simply to get you out of your comfort zone. Because you've been there far too long. It's easy, easy to fall into that trap of the comfort zone where routines feel safe. But the cause and effect of feeling safe means your growth stagnates. Feeling safe will stagnate growth and sometimes feeling safe is exactly what you need. But the long term goals of life and in business does not mean staying in the comfort zone. You have to break out of that comfort zone, be willing to play to win. You have to look at the comfort zone, look at where you've been for far too long and figure out where you need to go next to grow your business, to grow your family, to grow your relationships, to play to win. Now, taking risks does not mean you become reckless. Being reckless has nothing to do with risk taking. The importance of the calculated risks in understanding the potential rewards versus the possible downside. The downside obviously is you don't grow, you stay exactly where you are. Successful entrepreneurs and leaders and business owners always, always mitigate their risks. They take time to look at all of the options. They don't make knee jerk reactions and knee jerk decisions, but they're very calculated and they make sure that the aligned, the risk you're going to take is completely aligned with your long term goal. So if you don't know where your long term goal is, what your long term goal is, you're not going to know how to do to take calculated risks to get there. So figure out your long term goal and then reverse engineer that goal and start today with what can you do? What little risky thing can you do today to help you move towards that goal? Overcoming the fear of failure is the next one we're going to talk about. The fear of failure is such a common roadblock to playing to win. We don't want to be a failure because when we fail, it's rarely that we fail in private. Failure typically comes very public and very loud and no one wants to fail. You know, it's like when you're a little kid in grade school and the teacher passed all of your tests back and you had a bad grade on your test. Maybe you got a D or maybe you failed. You don't want to fail in private. Think about how much you tried to hide that letter. You try to fault, turn your paper over so no one can see it because you don't want to fail in public. The fear of failure is such a personal thing. And many people take failure personally, not as part of the process. Failure is part of the process, period. Failure is what is going to allow you to grow. If you embrace failure, and actually, this is going to sound crazy, but you actually look forward to failure because that is where your biggest growth is going to come from. Failure is not to be feared. You should not feel your failure. If you anticipate failure, look forward to failure and dive into what am I supposed to learn? What am I supposed to learn from the thing that I tried that didn't work? It's lessons. Lessons are learned in the messiness of life. Message comes from mess. So if you're looking for growth, you have to embrace failure. Growing pains come when you grow. You're going to feel those growing pains when you embrace that failure. But along with that, what you learn, the knowledge that you glean far outweighs the feeling of failure. That just didn't work. It doesn't mean there's anything wrong with you. It just means that that idea didn't work, that process didn't work. It has nothing to do with you. When we make it about us, you are stifling any type of growth or positivity. You know, you think about you way more than anyone else does. There are times where you think everybody's looking at you. You think people are judging you. You think people are laughing at you. I promise you, percent of all of that time, are they really thinking about you? We think about ourselves and our insecurities way more than anyone else does. We give ourselves a little too much credit there because honestly, we get wrapped up in our own stuff. People do not think about you nearly as much as you do. So get out of your own way, embrace some failure and stop being afraid. Now you have, the next thing we're going to talk about is innovate or stagnate. So if you're playing not to lose, you're just going to keep doing what you've always done and getting probably similar results. That's stagnation. Innovation is so Much fueled by the willingness to take risks. Risk taking is required to innovate and to be innovative. You have to take some risks. So don't be afraid of stepping out of that stagnation and looking at your business and your life and say, okay, where am I stagnant? Where do I need to grow? Where do I need to innovate? What do I need to change? Because stagnation will keep you in. I'm playing not to lose column every single time. The last thing I'm going to talk about is building a play to win culture that you live by every single day, Whether it's about your life or about your business. You have to build a culture that is all wrapped about playing to win. It's about setting goals that have metrics tied to them, accountability tied to them, calculated risks that will drive your business and your life forward. You know, are you stuck in a job that you just really don't like? You absolutely do not like this job, but you feel stuck there. A risk would be maybe in your mind talking to your supervisor and asking for a promotion or leaving that job and taking a job somewhere else. Or do you just stay there because it's safe? Well, I have health insurance. Insurance. I have paid vacation. I just. I'm just gonna stay where I'm at. And, you know, if you're content there, I guess there's nothing wrong with that. But if you're not content in a certain area of your life, then you have to ask yourself, am I playing to win here, or am I just going through life playing not to lose? Which category do you want to be in? You know, I think, I deeply believe this, that if you opened your eyes today, if you opened your eyes today, you were chosen for something special. Because not everyone got to wake up today. Not everybody got to wake up and live another day. Some people didn't get that privilege, didn't get that opportunity. So if you woke up today and you are listening to this podcast, there is something so special, so huge, so dynamic that you are meant to do. It's your charge, it's your commission. Your commission to play, to win and do big things and make not good things, but great things and exceptional things. And if you had the privilege of waking up today, then there's something very special and something very big that God has for you specifically. Only you, only you can do today. So as I wrap up this episode, I just want to remind you that playing to win is not about blind optimism, that I'm just blindly going to be optimistic. But it's about making strategic choices, embracing uncertainty, and taking calculated risks that are going to propel your business to new heights and to new levels to take you to the top level. Having a profession with a purpose is such a driver for me. My purpose is to pour into you. That's my purpose every single day, every single podcast that I record, every coaching client that I work with is to pour into you so you can live your very, very best life. Life filled with purpose, God given purpose that you have. So if you woke up today, if your eyes got to open today, you are chosen and you are very special and you are meant to do great things. So my friends, are you playing it safe or are you ready to play to win? Thank you so much for joining me on a New Life podcast today. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, leave a review and share with fellow entrepreneurs, business leaders and friends. Until next time, my friend. Let's play to win.

Thank you for joining us today on a New Life podcast. We will see you next time.

Sam.