Did you lose, or did you get beat?

A few years ago, I watched this Masterclass by Geno Auriemma, a basketball coach, because he was talking about running great teams. I don’t know a lot about basketball, and my subscription to Masterclass has expired, so I apologise if today’s analogies are a little rough around the edges!

The class itself I remember as being fairly generic in that I don’t remember much of it – except for one thing he said about when their team would lose a game. Did they lose, or did they get beat?

So let’s think about basketball for a second. When you play a game, unless you tie, there is a winner and a loser. And when you’re on the losing team, it sucks.

But Geno Auriemma reframes this into a question for when the team loses: did you lose, or did you get beat?

Losing means that you screwed up. The team made bad judgements, or performed poorly, or failed to collaborate, or in some way contributed to their failure.

But getting beat is not the same as losing. Getting beat means that in spite of how well the team performed, the other team was just better.

So that’s basketball, what does this have to do with work?

There are probably multiple ways to think about this analogy, but the one I like most for it is when thinking about why you didn’t get a job or promotion you wanted.

Did you lose the job, or did someone just beat you?

Losing is your fault – which means it’s in your control. If you recognise that you lost, you can start to figure out what caused it, get feedback, and work on improving. Knowing that you lost is almost more empowering because you can do something about it.

If you got beat, then it’s not something you can control. Maybe in other circumstances you would have won. And it sucks a bit because you can’t fix it, but you can be assured that you’ve played well. 🏀

Losing out on an opportunity you really wanted can really hurt and knock your confidence. Taking a time-out to reflect on what happened can be a good first step to making progress after a big blow, and then you can start to move on.