544. Stop Playing to Not Lose. Start Playing to Win.

In any area of life that matters to any one of us, there are people, majority of people, I would say, who are playing to not lose. They approach relationships so as not to offend anybody, not to upset anyone. They approach their money and their business goals in a way that says, make sure we don’t lose money. Make sure we’re not losing in this area of business, that we’re not failing in some way. And they approach even their health goals from the aspect of, let’s not get sick instead of let’s get strong and let’s create what we want.

Now, I want you to take a guess at which group of people are achieving the kinds of levels of success that you’re going to want in your life, my friend. They are the ones playing to win. They approach everything from the aspect of how could I win? Now, in order to win, we risk losing and we need to account for that as well. We’re going to dive into that topic today, my friend, because I want you to be the kind of person who is playing to win, because that is the only way to win. Let’s go.

Welcome to Better Than Happy, the podcast where we transform our lives by transforming ourselves. My name is Jody Moore. In the decade-plus I’ve been working with clients as a Master Certified Coach, I’ve helped tens of thousands of people to become empowered. And from empowered, the things that seemed hard become trivial, and the things that seemed impossible become available, and suddenly, a whole new world of desire and possibility open up to you. And what do you do with that?

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Hello everybody. Welcome to the podcast. So excited that you’re here. I want you to ask yourself a question for just a minute here. If I said to you to try on two different scenarios, which one do you have more energy around, more emotions, more passion, which one feels more critical to your brain to pay attention to? Okay? Scenario one. You have the ability to make a million dollars. And if you choose to, you could focus on it, you could come up with a strategy, you could go after it, and you could create for yourself a million dollars to do with whatever you choose in your life. That’s scenario one. Okay? Pretty exciting, right? Sounds kind of fun. It’s a true scenario, by the way. Anybody does have that ability. But at any rate, let’s go to scenario two. You have a million dollars sitting in your bank account already. You’ve already created this million dollars. And there are certain things you need to do to protect that million dollars, to make sure that it doesn’t get wasted or lost or stolen or taken from you by a scammer, protecting the million dollars that you already have.

Now, I want you to notice there’s, maybe these are subtle differences if you’re not used to checking in with your body, paying attention to the energy and emotions that are created by your thinking. I want you to pay attention to the difference in the energy around these two topics. What comes up for you? Now, we’re all different, we’re all unique, so it’s not going to be the same for all of us. But let me give you what I’m guessing would be some possible answers if I had you here in the room with me and we could have this experiment live and in person. Some of you would say that when you think about making a million dollars, creating a million dollars in your life in some way, that you feel some excitement and energy and anticipation and something that you might describe as positive. Maybe you feel sort of motivated or even just intrigued or curious. Okay? That’s going to be coming from one set of thoughts. Others of you might say that you feel discouraged or doubtful or hesitant or cautious, right? If you have doubt around this topic or this kind of like, maybe that’s possible for some people, but not me type of energy and thoughts, it’s coming from a different series of beliefs in your mind, right?

So thinking about making a million dollars is going to be different energy for each of us, but I want you to pay attention to the energy. Now, thinking about not losing your million dollars, protecting your million dollars, not wasting it or having it stolen or scammed away from you or something, right? What kind of emotions does that create for you? My guess is we’re all going to have similar emotions around this topic, which is a either a sense of responsibility, a sense of urgency, maybe, and it’s going to be more extreme for some than others, depending on a lot of factors in your life, right? But there’s going to be a sense of like, that’s an important thing to spend my time doing.

My guess is that if we had 100 people in a room and we said, how many of you want to go for it and try to make a million dollars, we would have a, I don’t know, maybe my guess would be 25 to 50% would say, yeah, I want to try that. Let’s go. But if we said if you all have a million dollars in your bank account, but you need to safeguard it, you need to protect it, you need to make sure it’s not stolen or scammed away or wasted, we would probably have 80 to 100% of the people say, yes, I want to do that. Right? And this is just because of the way the human brain is wired. We are wired to make sure we don’t lose. And this is just a basic survival thing, right? Ultimately, to this survival part of the brain, the ultimate loss is simply death. And so we are ultimately always just trying to survive, then on some level trying to thrive, but protecting what we believe is necessary for our survival is going to always take precedence. Okay? So this is basic human wiring.

Now, what you need to know about basic human wiring is that we all have the ability to override it and it serves us to do so at times. Not all the time. We want that to be our basic wiring. We want the first thing that kicks in by instinct to be survival based and protective. But if you don’t override that part by simply being aware of it and simply choosing something different, then you will keep your life very small, right? Because how do we not lose? If I decide, listen, I just want to make sure I don’t lose at basketball, you know what the best way is to not lose? To just not play. I just won’t join the team. I won’t step on the court. I won’t even try to play basketball. It ensures that I never lose at basketball. Right?

And this is true in life as well. And maybe it’s in subtle ways because there are certain things that you can’t just opt out of if you’re going to be a human being living in modern society like we do today, right? But we will live a small, unfulfilling, less happy, less expansive, less amazing life if we continue just playing to not lose. Like literally we could just sit in our houses all day, lock the doors, not do anything or try anything. That is the best way to not lose, but not the best way to have an extraordinary, fulfilling, happy life even. That would ultimately probably lead to depression and a lot of other problems for us, right?

Okay. So, I want to talk about this in relation to several different areas in your life and just give lots of examples and I’m hoping you’ll take the examples and then you’ll apply it to whatever area of your life you want to apply this to. But I think these are going to be pretty relatable to most people. So I want to start by talking about relationships. Okay? If I’m playing not to lose in relationships, let’s talk first just about having more relationships in my life, about making friends. Okay? I am 51 years old now. I have lots of good friends. I’m really grateful. I have some really close friends that I’ve had for many, many years, and I have some friends that are newer friends that I’ve just met in recent years that I still would consider to be friends, people I could turn to, people who I have a good time with, people who I feel like would have my back if necessary, people whose backs I definitely want to have and want to support and be there for.

But I don’t think there’s any end point to which we think, I would love to have even more friends, or I would love to have deeper connections with some of the friendships that I have in my life. I would like to be more a part of someone’s life or have more people be more a part of my life. I would like to have more intimacy in my friendships and meet more people, right? So if I’m playing to not lose, it’s going to be really hard to create that because in order to make new friends, I have to go up to people I don’t know. I have to first of all go to places where there are as many people as possible that I don’t know. How many of you if I was like, hey, we’re going to go to a place tonight where there’s going to be a whole bunch of strangers, like a room full of 3,000 people, you’re not going to know any of them. How many of you would be like, that sounds amazing. I can’t wait for that.

Not me. I’m usually like, yeah, I’m good. That sounds like a lot. That sounds uncomfortable, right? It requires that we not only hang out in rooms of people we don’t know, but then we go up and talk to people we don’t know, introduce ourselves, ask them about themselves, make that uncomfortable small talk, feel like we sound dumb and we’re saying the wrong thing, and all of our insecurities and vulnerabilities tend to come up in those situations, right? Not to mention meet a bunch of people who you don’t really connect with and learn how to just politely maybe move on and distance yourself and then find who are your people. All of this is so uncomfortable to the brain.

Not to mention the fear of rejection. What if you meet somebody that you think you could be friends with, but they don’t, they don’t feel like you’re their kind of person? Now, we are, quote unquote, losing in the brain’s mind, right? Or what if we walk into the room and we don’t, everybody already knows each other and we’re just standing in the corner alone. That feels like losing to the brain. That’s why we’re like, yeah, I’m good. I’ll just stay home, thanks. It’s a lot of vulnerability. It’s a lot of discomfort. It’s a lot of awkwardness and therefore most of us do not put ourselves in those situations as much as we could if we wanted to make more friends.

Now, when I do engage in conversation, how open am I? How honest am I? How vulnerable am I willing to be? How good am I at just being interested in them? Which requires quieting my mind, paying attention, focusing, listening to what they say, being curious. All of these things are a lot of work, right? But if I want more friends, that’s going to be required. What if I’m trying to meet a romantic partner? For those of you that are dating, that are looking for a romantic partner or a spouse who want to get married, right? Are you playing to win or are you playing to not lose?

Now, listen, I’m not saying again to get rid of the part of your brain that’s trying to protect your heart from heartbreak. We want you to keep that part, but you have to sometimes override that part and be willing to give it a shot. In order to fall in love, you have to risk rejection. There’s always the risk of rejection, right? There’s the risk of heartbreak. Even getting married itself or getting into a romantic relationship or a committed relationship means there’s the risk of it going wrong. There’s a risk of somebody not being faithful or not turning out to be who you thought they were, or unhappiness at some point down the road, and there’s the risk of divorce, there’s the risk of emotional pain. That is what is losing to us in a relationship, right? Is emotional heartache and pain or having to end a relationship and feeling responsible for somebody else’s heartache and pain. All of these things are risky.

But if you want to get married, I’ve said this before to all of my young adult listeners, listen up. I wish somebody would have told me this when I was dating because I wanted to get married. I didn’t get married till I was 30. And I remember a little bit feeling sorry for myself and asking God, where is my husband? I’m doing all the things I’m supposed to be doing. I’m trying to live right. Why isn’t he showing up yet? But I was not playing to win. If I were to go back and talk to past me or to talk to any of you in that situation, I would say, play to win. Decide that you’re going to go on 100 dates this year. What if you did that? What are the odds that you would meet your person? Would they go up or down?

If you decided I’m going on 100 dates this year, I’m committing to 100 dates. How am I going to find 100 people to go out with? I better start putting the word out to everybody I know to start paying attention to look out for somebody that might be a good fit for me and set me up. I better start saying yes to all those blind dates people want to set me up on. I better start asking people out. I better get on the dating apps. I better, you know, my flirting game, I don’t know. What are you going to do? If you decided to go on 100 dates, that’s playing to win, right?

Now, we have all the negative emotion that we know would come along with that, the discomfort, the vulnerability, the, you’re going to go on so many bad dates in order to get to the one that’s a good fit for you, right? Or to get into a relationship. But wouldn’t it be an awesome journey to do so? Here’s the thing. As we play to win, think about the growth that comes along the way. Think about the person that you would become as you learn to put yourself out there.

As you met all these different people, you would get better and better at conversations. You would get better at being vulnerable and honest and telling the truth because there would probably be a lot of people you would meet who you would have to say, hey, I had a great time with you, but I just don’t think this is going anywhere. You’d have to tell the uncomfortable truth, right? You’d get better at that. You’d even get better at connecting with yourself when you were at the receiving end of the rejection. Being rejected can be a painful thing, but it’s also a great opportunity to learn how to connect with yourself, how to love yourself, how to turn to God, how to connect with your other friends and family who are there to support you and comfort you. Like so many amazing skills would come from going on 100 dates.

And that’s playing to win. Sitting at home, feeling sorry for yourself, asking God where is my spouse, like I did, is just playing to not lose, right? At some point, you got to play to win. Now, let’s say you’re already married or you have some other like intimate relationship in your life. Maybe there’s distance in your marriage, maybe you’re not as connected as you want to be. Maybe there are downright big problems, or maybe you have a relationship with a distant family member like a parent or a sibling, right, from your family of origin. Maybe it’s your relationships with your adult children or even your, your younger children, your relationships with your kids, right? These relationships that already exist, are you playing to not lose or are you playing to win? And what’s the difference?

I’ll tell you for me, playing to not lose looks like just avoiding those topics that are difficult to talk about. And instead of having honest, open, uncomfortable conversations with people, I just keep it to myself, try to get over it, quietly build resentment, and grow even more distance in my relationship. Right? Sometimes it looks like that. Other times it looks like trying to control other people, trying to manipulate them, becoming passive aggressive about it, instead of being honest and telling the truth and being vulnerable. Okay? In our existing relationships, well, in all relationships, but especially in our already existing relationships, I think what serves us best, playing to win, is just telling the truth with kindness as much as possible.

And I talk about this a lot on here, but it’s been such a game changing tool for myself and my clients that the whole truth is messy and contradictory. It sounds like, I love you and I want you to feel supported, and I’m also not able to come to that thing you asked me to come to because it doesn’t align with who I’m trying to be or what I think is right. And I hope you’ll understand because the last thing I want is for you to be upset or think that I don’t support you and love you. But also, this feels like the right decision for me and so I got to stick with it and if you need to be mad, I’m here for it and I love you anyway.

Right? That’s the whole truth. See how it’s contradictory? See how it’s kind of messy? It doesn’t really make sense, but it’s honest. It’s honest. And honesty is where we have the opportunity to connect with one another. And if you need some help cleaning up your judgment of yourself or others or whatever to get to honesty, again, I can help you to do that. But that’s what it looks like to play to win in your relationships. Playing to win is, I don’t even know what I want, but I, this is on my mind. I want to bring it up. I want to share with you what my experience is and what I’m struggling with, and I want to hear your experience and what you’re struggling with and I want to understand it better, not so that I can tell you why you’re wrong, but so that I can just genuinely understand what it’s like for you to be in this relationship with me.

And I don’t even know if I’ll be able to fix it or change it, but I’m interested in hearing it. Can we talk about it? And maybe they’re open for the talk and maybe they’re not, but I’m playing to win in this relationship. I’m not going to play to not lose. When I’m living the way I want to in my relationships, which I’m not always good at doing, let me be first to just claim that. I’ve got so much work to do in this area, but I know a lot of times I play to not lose. It’s just easier not to talk about it. Just to move on. Just to deal with it, just to coach myself around it. That’s okay. Like it’s not going to blow up my relationship if I can really manage myself, but it’s not playing to win because what I ultimately want is real honesty and connection in my relationships.

What do you think, you guys? Do you have opportunity like me to play to win more instead of playing to not lose? I know I do. Let’s talk about it with regards to our money and our businesses for those of you that are entrepreneurs like me or all of you are working on whatever money goals you have for yourself, saving more, investing better, feeling more abundant and comfortable with money, making more money, or whatever it is you’re trying to do. Okay? Are you playing to not lose or are you playing to win?

This is another one where I have sometimes some fear and hesitation, right? And I’m not suggesting that you should take all your money to Vegas and play to win and let’s put it on black, right? I’m not even suggesting that you would take huge financial risks to invest in your business or invest in the stock market or something. There are a lot of risky things that we do to get ahead financially. And I don’t want you to do anything that’s going to create a huge problem for you if you do, quote unquote, lose, right? We have to acknowledge the fact that losing is a possibility.

But what I am saying is, are you at times taking some risk? Are you investing your money or putting your money into areas where you might win instead of just trying not to lose? Here’s what I mean by that. So, I work with a lot of you as entrepreneurs building your businesses, right? Those of you that are in my Coach Access program, we’re building businesses. And I see people putting money into their businesses in all kinds of ways and you get to decide how you want to invest money in your business, if you’re going to invest money in your business. Okay?

But what’s interesting is I’ve never had anybody say to me, well, what if I hire a personal assistant and it doesn’t work? Right? If they decide to hire a personal assistant, they usually are like, okay, I’m going to hire a personal assistant. Hopefully I’m going to get a good one. If not, I’ll have to let them go and find another one, but this feels like a good use of my money at some point in your business, right?

But what I hear all the time is, what if I put this money into Facebook ads or marketing of some sort, some sort of ad, and it doesn’t work? Right? And I say, what are you, what are you talking about? What would it not working mean? Obviously what they mean is that it doesn’t get clients, but the reason I ask them the question in this way is because I want them to see that if I invested money in marketing and it didn’t bring in clients, that would be a good use of my money still because I would have just learned something that doesn’t work. I would have learned that my offer isn’t right, my ad isn’t good, my copy isn’t good. I’m not offering a good enough offer, or I don’t have the sales skills, or I don’t have enough traction yet, or I didn’t put it in front of the right audience or any number of things that I need to figure out to build my business. And I’m not going to figure it out if I don’t go out there and play the game. I got to get on the court. So I would be willing to pay money to learn those things, to discover those things, to develop my own skill in those areas.

And so, again, people saying I’m not going to put money into marketing because I’m afraid it won’t work is playing to not lose instead of playing to win. But I’m not suggesting that you put in any more money than you can afford to spend on the learning process that marketing is 80% of the time. You see what I’m saying? Play to win, stop playing to not lose. This comes up all the time in business in so many ways. I hear it in my own self even. You know, I have different demons I’m fighting, but this whole topic of stop playing to not lose and start playing to win, I have been thinking about because of something my coach James Wedmore said to me probably six months ago at a mastermind. I don’t even remember what I was saying. I don’t even remember what the topic was or the strategy was I was working through. I just remember as I asked questions about it, James said to me, well, it sounds like you’re playing to not lose instead of playing to win.

And as soon as he said it and I saw it, I went, oh, yeah, you’re right. So it’s just shifting your energy, which changes everything because it changes your reasons. You still will make strategic decisions, but your reasons why will change. Let me give you one other example. So I was just at a conference recently and I was talking to a fellow coach who was asking me questions about her own business. She has a membership and she said, I only let people pay in a certain way. I think they had to make like a couple payments a year instead of paying monthly.

Most memberships give you the option, it’s like a gym membership. You pay every month and you come to whatever the program is, right? And when you want to cancel, you cancel. And it’s nice for the client because some people just want to come try it out for a month or two, or maybe they get what they need after three months, six months, a year. Others really like it, they want to stay longer, but the client has flexibility and so it’s just a nice service to provide. It’s a nice way to offer a lot of things.

So when she says, well they only can pay, you know, in these two payments or whatever throughout the year, because I don’t want people just coming for a month and then leaving. I’m afraid if I let them pay monthly, they’ll pay for a month, they’ll come in the program and then they’ll leave after a month. And so I don’t let them do that. And I was like, that doesn’t make any sense to me at all. Like who cares if they only want to stay a month and they want to leave, what’s wrong with that?

And she said, they’re not going to get nearly the transformation that’s available. And I said, of course they’re not. But that’s up to them. And maybe they’re not ready for it yet. And who are we to judge? Maybe they just wanted to dip their toe in the water for a minute, but they’re not actually ready for a full transformation. And that’s okay. You won’t help someone if they’re not quite ready yet. They’re just checking it out. And she’s like, well, here’s the second part of this, right? Is I said, listen, that to me is playing to not lose.

Like, I don’t want to have a retention problem where people come in for a month and then they leave. But what if you played to win? What if you decided, listen, even if you think you just want to try this for one month and then leave, come on in, I got you. And you decided in your mind that your program is so good or you did whatever was necessary to make it so good that once they got in there, you knew that most of them are going to want to stay. They’re going to be like, this is amazing, this is exactly what I need, this is changing my life. I’m not going anywhere. I thought I was only coming for a month, but I think I’m going to stay here longer. What if you played to win? And maybe you’d have to make your program better, maybe you’d have to make the onboarding process better. But wouldn’t you rather play to win than just play to not lose? Which one is more likely to get you the success that you want?

Okay? So pay attention to this, all my entrepreneur friends. And again, for those of you who have jobs, are you asking your boss for a raise? Are you applying for promotions or are you not because you’re afraid that you’ll be rejected? You’re afraid that you won’t get it. Right? Are you looking out for the next opportunity? Are you developing your skills? Are you raising your hand to do whatever’s necessary to achieve whatever are your career goals or your financial goals? Because that’s going to require playing to win instead of just, I just want to make sure I don’t get fired. I just want to make sure that I don’t upset anybody. I just want to make sure that I don’t offend anybody. Nothing wrong like those things are bare minimum. But are you playing to win above and beyond that?

Okay. And then the final area where this I think comes up for people is even with our health goals. And I don’t want to belittle playing to not lose because sometimes that’s just where we’re at around a certain topic. Sometimes you’ve been losing at something, quote unquote losing, which is personally defined, right? But you feel like you’ve been losing at something for so long that you just need to get to a point where you’re playing to not lose. Maybe you’ve neglected your health a lot and you just need to stop gaining weight. You just need to stop eating so much junk food or you just need to move your body a little bit and not worry about what it’s going to do for the scale or any other metric that you might choose to measure. Okay? There’s a time for that.

But at some point, you got to start playing to win. And this is the way I think about it with regards to health. Like there’s, I’m just need to stop gaining weight. Cool. That’s where many people start out. Then there’s, I need to lose some weight. That’s where I think the majority of the people live most of the time. I just need to drop some pounds. Okay? But then there’s this playing to win level, which is, I want to build muscle, or I want to get stronger in this way so that I can live my life in a certain way or so that I can achieve something pretty extraordinary. Do you have to do either this? Of course not. You don’t have to, right? Like you can live a really fulfilling life.

You can be very healthy by just sort of playing to not lose. This is how I honestly have lived most of my life when it comes to my health goals is like, I just want to be okay. I just don’t want to be too overweight or I don’t want to be unhealthy or I don’t want to not have energy to do what I need to do. But there’s this whole other level that I have not even ever tapped into at this point, which is called playing to win, right? And I know people that do this. And they’re not just on the scale hoping it’s down a pound or two.

They are like trying to increase the reps they can do or the pounds they can lift or, you know, they’re trying to set records in the gym. That’s like so beyond where my head is, to be honest. But I’m fascinated by it. I’m like, there are people playing to win and they know they’re going to gain some weight in that process and they’re going to need to eat more food in order to put on muscle. That’s playing to win, right? It’s this whole other level that’s available.

So, I don’t know, those are the three that just came to my mind as we kind of round out the year here and start to move into the new year. I feel like we think about our relationships, our money, and our health. And so I picked those three to talk about, but obviously this can apply in so many areas of your life. Even, you know, I was like straightening up my office the other day and I kind of have rearranged the furniture a little bit in here because we’re going to start to do some YouTube videos and I got to just change it up to make room for cameras and all that.

At any rate, I was trying to make everything fit, but I realized, okay, I could just play to not lose, which is like, how do we fit everything in this, in this tiny little office I work in that’s necessary? But what if I played to win? What if I was like, I want to create a space that’s beautiful and helps me get into the mindset I want to be in when I’m coaching clients and when I’m working on my business, and where I just enjoy being, that’s kind of a sanctuary.

Like that’s kind of the next level, not just like, how do we make it all work? This is what interior designer does, right? How do we create a space that works, is functional, but also is inviting and beautiful and calming and zen. And so in any area, there’s this opportunity. And again, sometimes we just play to not lose and that’s okay. But is there an area of your life where you want to play to win? Because guess what, my friend, here’s what I want to leave you with. You are designed to win. You’re here to win. That’s why you’re alive on planet Earth. You’re in the game. God sent you to Earth and you said, pick me, put me in coach. And he said, tag, you’re in. And now you’re here and you’re playing the game and there’s so many things you could win at. What do you want to win at? It’s totally up to you. And what does winning even mean to you? You get to define that. You get to decide that. I’m not talking about any set definition, but play to win.

Now what prevents it, and this is what I’ll leave you in closing, there’s a couple things that prevent it. Number one, fear. Okay? Because to go out there, to get on the court, to play the game is scary. My daughter who’s now 18, when she was little, like probably six or seven, we put her on a soccer team and she wasn’t amazing at soccer, let’s just say, okay? And she said to me one day, you know what, mom, I actually can run a lot faster. Like usually the, you know, there’s the like the huddle of toddlers running down the soccer field, all clustered around the ball. It’s kind of painful to watch, but that’s what they do. And then they’re all kicking at it at the same time and then they go back down the other end.

Well, my daughter was usually like on the outside of the cluster, a couple feet away, just like kind of keeping a somewhat safe distance, following the pack, the trailing behind. And she said one day, mom, I can run a lot faster. I just don’t want to get up there where the ball is because I don’t want to get kicked. And that’s why she’s not a pro soccer player today. She’s a pro hairdresser instead.

But that’s what we do, right? We’re like, I could do more, but I don’t want to get kicked. Okay? So we’re scared because there is the possibility of getting kicked if you go out there and you join the huddle and you try to get to the ball and you run faster and you put in some effort. And of course, getting kicked is the metaphor for all the things that you’re afraid of. But they are possible. And so you do want to account for that and you don’t need to put more on the line. Like you do want to put on your shin guards before you go to the soccer game because you might get kicked in the shin, right? And we’re going to plan for that. But you got to go for the ball. You got to show up to win. That is the way. So it’s okay to be afraid. Fear doesn’t mean go back. Fear just means, all right, I’m in the game. I’m really playing now. Let’s go. And you have to move through the fear at times and you have to allow it.

We are mostly playing defense instead of offense in our lives. Most of us are most of the time. We are just waiting to see what comes up next and how we’re going to handle it and trying to survive. And I want you to know that you do not have to live your life that way. You’re capable of so much more. And listen, you’re using your brain to be strategic and solve problems and get creative and be resourceful, whether you just deal with problems as they come or you go after what you want. Either way is challenging. Either way requires some resourcefulness and some creativity and some thinking and some hard work. So it’s not that by just sitting back being on defense, we’re avoiding challenge, it’s just a different kind of challenge. But if you go on the offense instead, you prevent a lot of defense, defensive things from coming up in your life. Does that make sense? I shouldn’t try to use sports analogies because I am not very knowledgeable about sports, not a sports girly, but it literally applies in so many areas of your life, right?

So, in order to go on the offense, what does that mean? It means you have to think about what you want. And then you have to be strategic about what you want and you have to go after what you want, not just avoid what you don’t want. You have to consciously choose ahead of time what you’re going to focus on this year. And we’re coming up on a new year. So what do you want to be the main thing you think about in 2026, the main thing you accomplish? I’m not saying you have to do this in every area of your life, but pick one area. What’s the area that if you won in that area, it would make everything else a little bit easier? Pick that one and decide that this is going to be the year that you play to win instead of just playing to not lose.

And the last thing I’ll caution you with is that the many of the people around you, in whatever area you choose, are probably still playing to not lose. And they’re going to offer you their thoughts and their perspective and you’re going to notice their behaviors and how they are. And your brain may tell you, if you’re like most people, that’s the right way to be because you want to fit in. And if everyone else is doing that and thinking that and believing that and feeling this way, that you probably should too. But I want you instead to look at people who are winning, quote unquote, however you define winning, in that area. They’re going to be fewer and further between. You’re going to have to go on the lookout for them, but you can find them thanks to the internet. You can find them on YouTube, you can find them online, you can find them somewhere if they’re not in your neighborhood or in your community. And look at how they think and how they behave and let them guide your own who am I going to be as you choose it. Okay?

Majority of the people around you are playing to not lose because they are not thinking about this. They haven’t listened to this episode and they’re not consciously choosing it. So do not let that pull you off track if you’re going to play to win.

All right, my friends, thanks for joining me today for another episode. I hope you’re having a beautiful December and I’ll see you next week. Bye.

Oh wow, look at that. You made it to the end. Your time and attention is valuable, and I don’t take it lightly that you made it this far. In fact, it tells me you might be like me; insatiably curious about people and life and potential and connection. Maybe you have big dreams but a small budget and no time. You’re tired, but bored. You’re content, but dissatisfied. Sound familiar? Come to a free coaching call and see for yourself what’s possible: JodyMoore.com/freecoaching to register. That’s JodyMoore.com/freecoaching.