My Experience

I am not a fan of competition. I never liked it. Ever since I was a young child, I had bad experiences with competition. Every time I engaged in some competitive activity,I instantly felt alienated and unwelcome among my peers. It seemed that everybody was trying to get to the top at my expense.

For example, when I played basketball, the other basketball players would try to put me down and belittle me.  They achieved their goals. Their negative words and attitudes would get into my head. My performance would suffer. Moreover, my spirits would go down and I would feel unmotivated to play basketball. It was hard and unpleasant for me to even walk into the locker room. I started becoming afraid of my teammates and even the game itself. Naturally, any competitive act caused me to feel negative emotions and would instantly paralyze me.

These emotions are still with me today. They are not nearly as strong or as powerful as they used to be, but they are there. I have learned to deal with them. Yet, for a long time my confidence suffered. My overall view of self-worth went down and it was hard to bring it back up.

Change

Yet, I knew it was up to me to change. I had to change my perspective and take responsibility for my actions. I realized that other people will not change. It was not worth my effort or being upset over it. I had to change the way I responded to and treated people around me.

Let us go through my experiences with basketball. The first thing I tried to do to bring my confidence up was to lift harder and work harder every day in practice. It worked. I was becoming stronger and more athletic. I was able to compete with others and even gain their respect. However, I started loosing respect for other basketball players myself. I felt like it was the time for me to pay back for all of my bad experiences in basketball. I became overly aggressive, angry and pushy. Naturally, nobody liked it. It caused resentment and people did not want to play with me. Team basketball suffered and I felt hurt again.

At that time, I did not recognize exactly what was going on. All I knew was that people were not fond of playing basketball on the same team with me. I realized that I was treating others just like how I was being treated myself for a largo portion of my life. I needed to evolve. The change came. I was not aware of it until recently. The change came because I changed my perspective. Instead of looking through the glasses of competition, I started using the glasses of competitive collaboration.

Competitive Collaboration

Competitive collaboration is all about growing while helping others grow. It is about engaging yourself in “win win” situations. The first “win” stands for your own “win”. The second one stand for helping others “win”. My experience with basketball illustrates that. Early in my basketball career I was engaging myself in “lose win” situations: I would lose; others would win. Later on, it changed to: “win lose”. I would win, while others would lose. Only recently it started evolving into “win win” situations.

Competitive collaboration is about creating a friendly and supportive environment where you are striving forward by helping others become better at the same time. It is not all about you. It is about respecting other persons. It is about pushing yourself to reach new goals and pushing the other individuals to achieve new heights as well. See, if you surround yourself with positive people who you show respect for and help them grow, you will naturally foster and an environment of support and respect for yourself.

Key element of competitive collaboration is sharing of information. It is beneficial on many levels. You get to test your ideas with others and see how they react. Your “competitors” might provide you with feedback and ways to improve on your ideas. They might offer you support in implementing them. They might also share their ideas and you could learn from each other.

Notice, however, that sharing information is beneficial for both parties involved. You would be naturally forced to keep innovating, keep thinking of better ideas to keep growing. Sharing of information opens up doors to opportunities that would not have otherwise existed.  It also shows that you are confident and mature person who is constantly pushing oneself to new heights.

Let us see how this applies to my experiences with basketball. I noticed that if I stared respecting others and recognizing people for doing a good job, I would get more respect back. I would get the ball more often. In playing pickup games, people would be more likely to pick me up. There was no resentment and no anger while playing; that reduced the chance of injury or even a fight. It made the experience of basketball much more enjoyable and fun.

Engage Yourself in Competitive Collaboration

In short, if you want to stop competing, but want to start competitively collaborating do the following:

1. Show respect towards others.
2. Show appreciation of others.
3. Push others to grow.
4. Support others when they are down.
5. Share your knowledge and ideas with others.

So, stop being a competitor and become a competitive collaborator. It will change your life.