Winners are grinners, but how much competition is too much?

Competition is great. We all have been brought up hearing mantras like ‘survival of the fittest’, ‘winner are grinners’ and ‘may the best man win’.

• In the workplace and on the sporting field winners are rewarded, whether it is with money, a medal, a promotion, or even just praise. Winners are celebrated. In recent years, there has been some backlash against this ‘win at all costs’ attitude.
• There are times when we need to be more conventional and to follow orders without question. There are times when it is more productive to be relentlessly focused on moving forward, even to the point of being unforgiving of mistakes.
• Competitiveness comes under the cluster of aggressive defensive behaviour. At the extreme end of this scale, individuals don’t just desire to win, they feel a compulsion to win at all costs. These are the people who are willing to risk everything in order to be right. They will put themselves, their teams and their families in precarious situations to avoid failure or the possibility of losing.
• Many of the successful people we admire are driven and unrelenting, single-mindedly focused on reaching the top, sometimes to the point of forgetting the people around them. These people set the bar high and don’t let anyone take advantage of them. They can always be relied upon to be 100% focused on getting the job done.
• If being competitive got us to where we are, is there such a thing as too much competition? And if so, how much is too much?
• Competitiveness and the relentless need to win, to do better, to be better is causing us stress and is ultimately killing us. This need to win and be better is also not making us happy.
• Stress puts strain on our health, our families, our children, our marriages and even our careers. Stress, a leading contributor to heart disease, is an inevitable result of continuously pushing ourselves to outdo each other in work and in life generally. With one Australian dying of cardiovascular disease every 12 minutes, removing stress from our lives is more important than ever.
• Our children are pressured to be better students, to look more attractive, to get more likes, retweets and followers, to go viral. Much of the time, they are competing against people they have never even met. Plastic surgery is increasingly popular. For women alone, the rates of plastic surgery have grown 538% since 1997. This is directly related to the competitive desire to be skinnier, younger and prettier.
• Divorce rates are also increasing because our spouses aren’t sexy, romantic, sensitive or fun enough. Social media suggests that everyone else has these amazing relationships, so we should too.
• In the workplace, employee satisfaction is decreasing, in part because it has become less acceptable to be content with simply doing a good job. Instead we are supposed to be continually focused on the next promotion, the next role or that next big bonus.
• This competitiveness means that we can’t be happy when a colleague does well; instead, we turn a critical eye on ourselves to work out why we aren’t doing as well, or we look outwards to others we might blame for our lack of success.
• Employee tenure is dropping as all of us strive to be better than one another. More of us are looking for the next best thing. The grass is always greener, there is always someone to surpass, another promotion to get, another business to start or to buy.
• Bigger cars, buffer bodies, more money… This non-stop drive to be and to have the best in everything is simply unsustainable. Something has to give.
• How do we find the right balance? How much competition is enough and how much is too much? Now I know that what I saw as a strength – competitive nature – becomes a weakness when it is taken to its extreme. It causes stress, physical exhaustion and an inability to be proud of what I have achieved. I am always chasing the next milestone, the next challenge.
• I also know that when I manage to balance my competitive drive it becomes the key to my success. Finding the balance isn’t easy but I recognize that it’s essential in order to be successful over the long-term, at the same time as maintaining my physical, emotional and mental health.

Each of us needs to find our own answer to how this necessary balance might look for us. So, how much competition is too much for you?

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