The Whole Parent Podcast
The Whole Parent Podcast
What to do about a SORE LOSER..... #56
In this episode, Jon explores why losing hits kids so hard—and why meltdowns over games are rarely about the game itself. Centered on the idea that “losing feels like a threat when a nervous system can’t predict what’s coming next,” he reframes sore losing as a regulation issue, not a character flaw. Parents will walk away with clarity, compassion, and practical ways to build frustration tolerance and resilience without shaming, fixing, or lowering expectations.
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If you've ever had a child lose a game and thought, why is this such a big deal to them? You're in the right place. Because when kids lose, it's rarely just about the game. It's about fairness. It's about control. It's about belonging. And a nervous system that just doesn't know how to handle these big emotions, often in public moments. In this episode, we're breaking down what's going on inside a child's brain and body when losing turns into melting down, quitting, or blaming, and why trying to teach them a lesson in those moments usually just makes things worse. We'll talk about why sore losing isn't a character flaw and how responding in ways that build regulation and resilience over time without shaming and lowering expectations actually makes kids into really good losers. If that sounds good to you, let's get into it. I have so many stories that I could tell you about my kids being bad at losing, but I actually want to tell you a story about me being bad at losing. Because the John who is whole parent John, the John who is pastor John, occasionally I will mention about being at my church where I am a pastor, is not the John that always existed. This John is a more mature, more well-regulated, sometimes, most of the time, version of me. But when I was growing up, I was super, super competitive and I hated losing. And I'll give you an example of one of these moments that really sticks in my mind. I was uh the coach, this may sound strange. I was the coach of my church's church rec league softball, co-ed 16-inch softball league back in the day, or team in the church league back in the day. And my wife used to play with me. We were high school sweethearts, and so she was on the team too. Uh, she did not originally go to my church, but once we started dating, I had to recruit her in because you had to have four girls on a team, and she's pretty athletic. She was really good, so it was nice to have her on the team. My cousin, also a female, was pretty good, and so having a couple of good, really good girls who could play well was a huge advantage. Now, 16-inch softball, for those who might be listening and not aware, uh, is a unique game in Chicago. We are like the only ones who play it, I think, basically in the world, but it's softball without mitts, so there's no gloves. In our league, the girls could wear gloves because they tended to have smaller hands, but the men could not wear gloves. So you there's no mitts, and you're playing with this big ball, which at the beginning is not really soft at all. It feels like a baseball in the first couple innings, but then eventually it softens up and it's pretty heavy. And so it's kind of this unique game, but it's kind of the definition of not super competitive, what I'm what I'm describing to you. So a lot of the people like there are games where we had, in order to be able to field a team, you had to have a minimum of four girls. Like I said, my mom, who's like the most unathletic, like never played softball, she would get out there if we needed to, otherwise, we would forfeit a game. And so this is not a highly competitive environment, but I took it so seriously, like so seriously that it would like make or break my whole day or week if we lost a game or if I didn't play well, which is kind of crazy because there were absolutely no stakes, but I just it just was a big deal. And I I I could be, you know, I was notorious for like arguing with volunteer umpires over a call that they missed. Of course they missed it, they're a volunteer, like they didn't know what they were doing. But I used to just get so heated. And I remember this one specific moment when I knew that I had a real problem. And it was because we had recruited the uh chaplain supervisor. She was a woman who went to our church, the chaplain supervisor to come with her son, who was like maybe in high school, to come and play because we needed, again, probably an extra girl for that day. And I was like so mad about something. And she said to her son, essentially, like, don't worry, we we never have to come back. And we were like winning the game. And I thought it was going pretty well. Like, we think we're probably winning by a few runs. Our team was pretty good. Um, and she said to this, this like 15-year-old kid, like, don't worry, we never have to be here again. I know it's like really stressful and intense the way that these you know that they're doing this. And it was, she was talking about me, and I like really ruined it for somebody else. And I'm not gonna say that that moment fixed me or anything like that, but it was one of the experiences that led me to realize that I had a real problem with things that felt unfair, and I had a real problem with losing. And losing felt very threatening to me. And I needed to work on that, and I have worked on that. I don't play rec league, 16-inch softball, the league disbanded. Um, maybe if I played today, I would be just as aggressive. I highly doubt that I would be. Four kids has very, very much softened me. The last year that we played, my wife was pregnant with my first. And so uh, yeah, it's been it's been a long time, but I remember that. I remember that vividly. Uh, this mom saying to her son, it's okay. The the people on your team have made this unfun by being too intense, by essentially being sore losers before they even lost the game. And so I'm excited to do this episode because this is something that I need help with. And I don't want to pass that on to my own kids. And so I usually give an example for my own life of my kids doing stuff, but this is an example of like this is a lesson that I struggle to learn. And you know who is the one arguing with the umps right alongside me? My dad. He was also on the team, and he also was the one screaming at everybody and being way too intense for the circumstances, probably chasing people away that didn't say in front of me, we're never coming back because of these Fogels who may take everything too seriously. And so I'm trying to do better by my kids. I don't want to raise three more Fogel boys who don't know how to lose and don't know how to uh take a chill pill and don't know how to just make things fun. And so uh we're talking about it today. I have three questions from people, and I want to get into the first one right now. So the first question comes from Maddie D M M-A-D-D-Y. I like to spell this out. Some people say Manny? No, Maddie. And she says, hey, John, so my four-year-old is really bad at losing, kind of like me, but instead of four, I was 20. Like full-on meltdown, board gets flipped. It's not fair, over and over, etc. He'll quit halfway through and storm off and then come back crying because he never gets to win. This is in quotes, which is not true. I'm trying to teach him that losing is part of life, but honestly, sometimes I want to just be like, dude, it's Candyland. Is this just a phase? Or am I raising that kid who can't handle be not being the best at things? Because it feels embarrassing in front of other parents. And also, I don't want him to grow up thinking the world owes him wins. Great question, Maddie. Um, I have an almost identical experience playing Candyland with my kids when they were when my oldest when he was five, stopping in the middle. This isn't fair. I don't want to play anymore. And I will start by saying it is kind of a phase. It's a phase as it relates to Candyland, but it may not be a phase as it relates to losing. Because as I just expressed, if we don't do a good job with framing games around what they really are, we can raise kids who are kind of these testosterone heavy, uh especially in my experience, especially boys, but I it could it definitely could be girls as well. Uh, these testosterone heavy, like just really rough around the edges, losers. And the reason why a toddler experiences this is the actually the exact same reason why I was experiencing this at 16, 17, 18, 19, 20 years old. And it's because we we have evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to no longer live in caves and small tribes and villages out in you know the the uninhabited wildlands where we were constantly under threat. Are we gonna have enough food? Are we gonna be able to survive the winter? Are we going to come into a um a conflict with another tribe, even another species, right? There was a time in which Homo sapiens were not the only humanoid species. Well, what about another species like a saber-toothed tiger? I mean, you know, I'm being kind of facetious here, but you know, big predators that are out there in the wild. And we, our threat response was evolved to keep us alive in an environment where the overwhelming majority of people died before they were 30 years old. And so understanding that our threat sensor as a four-year-old is designed to keep us alive when the tiger comes running at us, or when the bear comes running at us, or when we think that we're out of food, or when we think that we're separated from our parents, which is the only way where we're gonna get food and warmth and comfort. That threat response is still buried deeply in our brains and our evolutionary biology. The difference is those things are no longer true for by and large, right? Uh occasionally there are threats that appear, but most often our brain is actually participating in something called amygdala hijack, which is when we feel like something is a threat to our survival, even though it's not. And in the case of a four-year-old, it's probably just that this is a big emotion. You know, there's there's adrenaline that comes from playing games, that comes from luck-based games, right? You turn it over, you don't know what it's gonna be. If it's that thing that you like, you get a little hit of dopamine. Yeah, that's great. You get a little hit of serotonin, I'm winning. That feels good, right? A little hit of testosterone. Like, like there's emotional like chemicals in your brain that are running around as they're playing the game, which is why kids like to play games. They like to get all those good chemicals coming in. The problem is they also have, we also have loss aversion, and we also have those kind of cortisol chemicals, the stress chemicals that come in when you flip over that card and it's not what you're expecting. I remember one time when I was playing Candyland with my son, we were at the library. This is a cheat code, by the way. We didn't keep Candyland in the house because it got too crazy. So we just went to the library to play Candyland. And we went to the library to play Candyland. I set up the board and him and I are playing, and he had was doing really, really well. Like he was almost close to the end. Um, we had not even been playing for that long, but he had drawn a couple of the candy cards where you get to skip ahead for those who are familiar with the game Candyland. But there's always a chance that either you, I, the opponent, could draw another candy card that put me even further ahead of him, or that he could draw a candy card that sent him back. Now, some parents have told me since, you know what, we don't, we never go backwards in Candyland. That's just, but you know what? That that's not, as far as I know, that's not the rule. The rule of the game is that you're supposed to go onto the square, that when you draw a lollipop or a popsicle or something, you're supposed to go to that square. I'm not here to argue over the the house rules of Candyland or not. But when he in in the course of this game, he drew the card and he had to go way back to the beginning and he like just stormed off. It's funny because he didn't even lose the game, right? Like he was not even much further behind me, but he was much further than when he what than where he was. He still easily could have won the game with a couple of good draws. I think he went back to about the same place that I was. But because he was close to the end and he had this expectation of winning, then all of a sudden the cortisol kicks in and he's like, I don't want to do this, this is unfair, this is, you know, you're cheating. Which, of course, all of those things are not kids want to call things unfair when they don't go according to their expectations. And that's really what all of this is about. When we talk about losing with kids, what we're talking about is there is an expectation for them that they are going to win. And that is because the way that they future cast is not logically, they future cast emotionally, they want to win, and so their in their underdeveloped prefrontal cortex essentially just fills in the gaps. Okay, then you will win. You want this, then you'll get it. And it's really easy for then that not to happen because of the course of the natural course of a board game like Candyland. And what will happen is that then that feels like a threat to them because what they predicted would happen, which is that they were going to win, again, not logically, but emotionally, they predicted they were going to win, is no longer happening. And their brain goes into like amygdala hijack, where if you can't predict what's going to happen next, or if your predictions are not coming true, that feels threatening to our nervous system. So then they they are kind of get into a spiral where they start to panic about the fact that they're not winning and they just start saying, it's not fair, I never get to win. And again, a lot of this is just age and developmental in phase. What we really want to work on is not placing value in winning as like the ultimate goal. But that's not even what they're they're worried about it for, right? I'm not even really concerned about that at four. Really, at four, all you're taking in is okay, this feels threatening to them. This is the fairness perception, is that they aren't getting like my son never complained about it not being fair when he was winning, like by double, double the distance to the to the end. He cares about it not being fair when all of a sudden something doesn't go according to his expectations. And so fairness is not things are equal, fairness are things are going the way that I want them to go, or things are going the way that I expected them to go, which often are the same thing in the mind of an underdeveloped, underdeveloped mind of a child. So what I would kind of hold here, I would hold the boundary around losing because kids do need to learn how to lose, but I would not try and teach a lesson in this moment and make this like a character-building opportunity. This is an example or an opportunity for frustration tolerance and emotional distress tolerance, not an opportunity for like empathy and teamwork and all of these skills that require perspective taking, which your child just probably is not at yet. And that's where a lot of parents fall short. They're like, well, you know, if you don't like to, if you're not willing to lose, then nobody's gonna want to play with you. Well, a child does not have the perspective taking ability. Like, if they're able to say, good game, good job, let's play next time, that is a trained behavior, but it doesn't come from an under deep understanding of like next time we're gonna play, I'm gonna, you know, we can I can potentially win. Like it literally is just a trained sentence that they that they spit out because they feel that they must. Because again, their parents have conditioned them into it. So I would go in, I would hold that boundary and I'd say, you know, I I can't, I'm not gonna cheat. I'm not gonna fix the game so that you always win. Um, losing feels really big to in your body right now. Let's take some dragon breaths or let's play an emotional regulation game, and then you tell me what felt unfair. Right? So just reconnect, just focus on the connection because often what kids are experiencing when they're losing is this experience of disconnection from their body and disconnection from their opponent. Like they don't I this is another piece. I just I know that there are times to play games with kids. Like I said, I I played games, but I don't I don't play Candyland with my my almost four-year-old now. Like I've learned over time that like there are just there is just no reason to put myself and put him through that. If we're gonna play a game, we're gonna play a game that's some in some way cooperative. Maybe we're uh I reframe the rules. I'll play Candyland, but I'll reframe the rules of Candyland where like we're not racing each other. We're just both trying to make it there. And can we both make it there before the timer is up or something? And and and then we're collaborating against the board. I I think that those work a lot better for kids. So don't fix the game. Don't like cave and give in and do just kind of do whatever they feel like doing because they don't understand it. Instead, just reframe and say, okay, yeah, the game doesn't feel fair fair right now. I hear you. Don't lecture them about how it actually is fair. Just say, the game doesn't feel fair right now. I hear you. We can't change the rules of the game. Let's co-regulate in a number of ways. Again, go to the bottom of the show notes and get your copy of my top five emotional regulation games. Use any of those emotional regulation games. By the way, the five emotional regulation games are sh are changing. So by the time that you listen to the episode, it will be updated with a new five emotional regulation games that you get. Um, my top five, I've I've matched the branding. My wife uh beautifully illustrated a new, a brand new complete emotional regulation game guide that's available for purchase. And it's based on the illustrations that she did for our children's book that's coming out at the end of April. And so uh we updated the branding and we updated the art, and actually we updated the games in our top five to more clearly reflect the top five that we really use the most, instead of just like, oh, here are five. These are really our top five. So you can go down to the bottom, you can get those games and play one of those games when the Candyland game doesn't go well. And so that's that's my that's kind of my script here. You don't have to bail out, but then also think I like I would just be more preemptive and I would think a little bit more about like, do I really want to play winning and losing games with my four-year-old, or do I want to wait until they're five or six and they have an ability to do some perspective taking and logical thinking before I do that? I see so many people, like even in my family, playing Candyland over and over with like three-year-olds and two and a half year olds. I'm just like, why are we doing this to ourselves and others? It just feels like you don't have to do that. They there will be plenty of time for that later. You don't have to like push your kid into that early. Okay, let me take a quick break, and then I will come back with a comment from TikTok from Josh. All right, this is on an old video that I had. It's a TikTok comment, and the video was about sore losers, like how to play games, cooperative games. And Josh said, My daughter is six, and she's fine playing games if she wins, but if she loses, she shuts down. Like totally, won't talk, won't keep playing, won't look at anyone. It feels kind of weird as a reaction. Any thoughts? Yes, I do have thoughts, actually, and I'm gonna go back to what I talked about towards the beginning of the episode. with my example of of being overly competitive in a s only mildly competitive church softball league. The work that I've done internally through journal and I did do therapy for a long time. I don't I don't do regular talk therapy right now. It's just a it's a season where I haven't felt like my therapist and I felt like that we didn't have to meet monthly right now. Things are kind of I have the tools and I'm using the tools. But through those tools and through a lot of deep introspection and and and self-reflection, I realized that a lot of my feelings that I had to win came from a feeling that if I won people would like me. If I was a winner if I was successful if I was a champion that somehow that would change how people viewed me. And when I read this comment that my daughter won't talk, won't keep playing, won't even look at anyone one of the first things that pops out to me is how losing to some people, especially highly sensitive kids, and again um if you don't know this 20% of people according to the work of psychologist Elaine Aaron, I think she might have a PhD too 20% of people in across all cultures and times have been more sensory have had a more sensitive sensory and emotional internal world. And these people she identifies as highly sensitive persons. Highly sensitive persons, according to her work and research, really struggle to get things wrong and really struggle to lose because they feel that their achievement in performance and ability to be seen as like a person who doesn't make mistakes is central to their identity. And she goes into lots of reasons why this is I'll have to do a whole episode on that another time. I've already done actually an episode on highly sensitive kids that you can go back to listen to it's one of the earliest episodes I don't know which number it is but like in the first 30 or episodes or something there is an episode on highly sensitive kids. It's one of my most listened to actually but when I hear about a six year old who won't even look at somebody after she loses it does feel like a weird reaction because she's experiencing some shame, some social anxiety over losing and when I experienced that my response was to double down to try harder to like really focus on winning. And it was because in some way I really felt like whether I won or lost defined me as a person. And um even when I recorded the intro I usually don't fix myself in the intro I just kind of read it and if I make mistakes so so be it. But I had to re-record the intro because I said something that like slipped out that kind of betrayed this I said like being a good loser and then I said if you can even be a good loser if that's such a thing. Of course it's a thing but I am still processing that and losing and like losing that part of myself because you know for some people they just feel like that's really centrally important that they that they win and that they're an achiever in that way. And so with a kid like this I think you take a two pronged approach. The first aspect of this is before you ever play the game you set expectations that sometimes new things are hard and sometimes we win these these are these are two affirmations mantras that I use my kids and myself one new things are hard new things are always hard by their nature. If they weren't hard they wouldn't be new nobody is naturally gifted uh so naturally gifted at anything if they are it's just because that thing is drawing on something else that they've done and so it doesn't feel new. If it was truly felt new if it was new uh in other words they wouldn't be good at it it would be hard and so new things are hard always because we have to build neural path new neural pathways and sometimes you can kind of intellectualize this for kids and it helps them to say yeah you know your brain has to learn how to do this thing. Did you know that your brain has to change and it actually has to grow to learn how to do these things and sometimes kids really appreciate that really smart intellectually stimulated kids they look at that my son who's nine he loves that right he used to hate when I said new things are hard until I explained to him what I meant by that. Like there are literal pathways in your brain that have to be built and it feels unconscious to you to catch a baseball now but it was so hard for you at first when you didn't have those neural pathways in place. And he's like oh yeah that's true. That's so true. And so you can do that new things are hard and you can also say sometimes we win and sometimes we learn that's another one that I love right and you set these expectations ahead of time. These are not the mantras that you use after the fact when a kid is experiencing this kind of performance based shame or this social anxiety around losing or just avoidant behavior after a loss. I don't think that that's the time to do it. These are the things that you can do in the off periods between games even after a win right yeah you did win. Also you could have lost right like sometimes you win sometimes you learn I think that those are the times to do that. The second pronged attack on this one is after the loss happens, I wouldn't talk about winning and losing at all. I'm not saying I would avoid it right I would not like just be dismissive and be like oh let's just never talk about this again. I would just say your job is to reconnect to play another game to read some books to draw with her to um play with some of her favorite toys with her to reconnect in whatever way works for her so that it becomes very very clear that her belonging does not disappear just because she loses and her belonging would not be better. She would not have a better place in your family if she was more winning. And I want to say here this is you're identifying this in at six and I think that this is really important. But what I when I see this more in society is with like 13, 14, 15, 16 year olds when they have severe anxiety around winning at school and not winning in terms that we think about it, right? Like the game a game of school but like getting good grades is a form of winning in school. And when kids don't do that they feel like they don't have a sense of belonging they feel like they have to perform for their food and their place in their family. And many of us grew up in families where we had to perform to belong we had to be a certain way otherwise frankly affection was held back and um punishment was laid on and all of that stuff like that that is a real reality. And I don't think if you're listening to this podcast if you listen to my podcast on a regular basis that that's the type of house that you want to live in. I don't think that you want to live in a society in a family where your kid thinks that they're that your love is conditional for them. And yet so much of our way of parenting older kids feels transactional and conditional. And so I think it's a great opportunity Josh at six years old when your daughter loses at a like we were saying Candyland or a soccer game or you know some competition that they're in don't withhold and not put her in anything right like this is different than a four-year-old a four year old who's struggling to lose at a game where it's 1v1 in a board game I think that there's some place for us to go they're not ready for this yet let's let's wait a year. But a six year old who's maybe about to be seven she probably is seven now because this comment's pretty old like I don't think that you at this point go, yeah, I'm not going to give you those good stress environments. Those are good stress environments but the difference between good stress and toxic stress often and tolerable stress is a supportive home environment, a supportive home base. And what you want is for her sense of belonging and love to never be tied to winning. And so I I would not talk about winning and losing at all after she loses I would go I'm so happy that I get to hang out with you now. You know I'm glad that game's over I'm so happy that I get to hang out with you now. Let's go do this fun thing that we love to do together. I don't want to I just lost oh I'm sorry I I'm not even thinking about the game I just love spending time with you and I just want to hang out with you like that's what I would be I that's what I would be focused on I don't know if that's helpful to you Josh but that's I think we're parenting with the long and long term in mind we're starting with the end in mind and and I think that's where we that's where I would want to start thinking about how we want her to be and how we want her to perceive perceive her value not as being tied to being a winner like I did but being tied to being loved which is what I try and do now and what I'm trying to do for my kids. Okay take another break and then we'll get into Annie question number three is the longest question today comes from Annie it was an email often they are the longest she says my seven year old is in soccer now and every single game they're losing he just spirals he starts blaming his teammates he yells at the ref. Sometimes he cries or refuses to play at all the coach pulled me aside last week and was like he just really wants to win but I don't know I don't know what I'm supposed to do with that. It doesn't seem like it's coming from the coach he's super laid back about winning and losing it's just my son having the issue. We tried talks in the car taking breaks from sports altogether even bringing him with us for ice cream if he keeps it together which I know was bad but I was desperate is this emotional immaturity is it too much pressure is this testosterone he's seven I feel like I'm watching him become someone who I don't want him to be and I don't know when to step in without making it worse. Annie thank you for this question this is very normal seven year olds colliding with their own competition and understanding and their loss of control and autonomy and coming into themselves. And so I don't want you to feel like this is the end of the world. I think that in many ways everything that like you don't have to worry about this if you do what we've been saying so far. And I'm going to give you some practical tips of how to work with a kid who's specifically a little bit older seven as they're doing this. But I want to begin by saying don't listen to the shark music for those who have not heard me talk about shark music in the past I try and talk about it a lot it's one of my favorite parenting concepts comes from Circle of Security and shark music is this idea that in the movie Jaws when the shark is coming you always hear this dun dun dunun and when you hear that you know that the shark is somewhere. And oftentimes the kind of the beauty of the movie Jaws Spielberg's one of Spielberg's early movies one of the beauties of the movie Jaws is that they didn't really have the technology to make the shark look very good. And so they use the music John Williams music and like very simple props like some barrels that they drag around in the water to make you deeply uncomfortable you know underwater camera shots that make you feel like you're looking at the perspective of the shark making people feel vulnerable. And they really leverage this music to great effect to make you feel every time that the music comes that something bad is going to happen and that death is on the horizon. There's blood in the water the problem is in parenting we often do that. We see something that is pretty typical I coached soccer for seven year olds and I had a kid like this on our team. In fact my son kind of was like this but not as much as some of some of the other kids. So there's one kid in particular who I'm thinking about who has really struggled with losing. And we see that and we go oh my gosh this kid is going to be one day you know if they keep on this path one day they're gonna be come on John screaming at people on a 16 inch softball field. No, or they're gonna be really aggressive like you know at least I was just yelling at people in the context of the game and I wasn't acting on aggression in other ways. But I don't want you to hear the shark music because oftentimes it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. We start to treat our kids in a certain way because we're worried that they are going to become a certain way and then actually they hear that message I'm becoming this way and then they lean into it. This is the same way reason I I can't get into it. I I have a lot of things about this self-fulfilling prophecy and parenting but whatever we're worried about with our kids like you are becoming this bad thing like they like they hear that even if we're not saying it they see it in the way that we interact with them and engage with them and that becomes like their narrative and you just don't want to get to that point. So it's normal hear that first it's normal it's their nervous system colliding with all of these things at seven their sense of autonomy, their sense of agency they really have a sense of agency but like all of a sudden they're interacting with other people some seven year olds like there's a there's a broad spectrum of athletic ability early in childhood and then it starts to kind of there there are different phases where it kind of equals out and then it kind of you know by high school it kind of separates and there's kids who are really athletic and people who are less athletic. But at seven there it's a collision of of where some kids were really really athletic at four and five and they were like faster than all of their friends and they were like more coordinated. And then at seven their friends catch up with them or get close enough to them where it's not like easy anymore. Right. Five year old soccer is just like two kids are really good and they're they're kind of running circles around everybody. By seven eight like there is a level of like everybody's coordinated enough that that there can be some stops and it can become frustrating for other kids who who it was easy before and now it's not and so I kind of all of this swirling together it's just a difficult time to be in in doing this athletic endeavors. And what you have to think of it as I want to reframe it instead of like my child really cares about winning I just want to say my your child really cares. Right? Ultimately he really cares and he doesn't have the brain developing development yet to to perspective take he probably has some perspective taking but but not enough to see how that caring affects other people like I didn't have that ability at 17 years old. I was still developing that how does this affect other people this is something that he's going to develop for the next 20 years of his life at least 18 years of his life he's gonna be figuring out how his actions impact others and so you can consciously draw his attention to that without shaming him because ultimately he cared too much and it costs some other people some other things. But just like in the previous two examples Josh's daughter and Maddie's son your son's brain too is being amygdala hijacked it's going into fight or flight and he's trying to figure out how to like make sense of this panic mode when they're losing he tries to give regain control by taking over the game he tries to like flee like this we can go through them right fight flight or freeze right freeze is just like I'm done playing I'm not playing anymore. Flight he's trying to get distance from the responsibility he's blaming other people or he's blaming the rep. Fight he just tries to play as hard as he can to try and win the game in spite of this or like really you know slide tackles an opponent or something I don't think they let seven year olds do that but you get the point. So you can see him going through this hard time and and that's what's happening. He's having a hard time he's not giving you hard time he's having a hard time so what number one I would try and stop processing I would the same thing is true of Josh. I would stop making it about winning and losing he's gonna make it about winning and losing I would stop trying to process this in the game hey do this well I would even stop trying to process it immediately after the fact you said that if you did well then we went to ice cream I would remove that I would go okay we're not gonna process this in the heat of the moment I would process this with the seven year old they have a memory and process it the next day or maybe you know if it the game happened in the morning you could process it at dinner and you could say something to the effect of you know yesterday was hard it wasn't hard because you lost it was hard because losing made you feel out of control and that's something that we can work on together can you tell me more about what that felt like and that's that's like that's how I would process that I would be looking back at this going okay so like yesterday it felt like you were really out of control during the game did you feel out of control no I just thought that the ref was like messing up at everything. Yeah yeah yeah yeah so it felt out of your control because the ref was doing that and and and I'm and I'm kind of modeling this as though I'm leading I think actually asking the questions generally like genuinely and say tell me what's going on like I want to understand what makes you so frustrated about this so that I can understand how to help you. I think he might be able to give you some language that you can then repurpose and use. And then when do you use that you use it before the game not after the game so as you go in you know you're you're driving on your way to the game this is where he's probably already thinking okay we got to win this game we got to like I want to score a goal like we got to beat the other team shift it into not have fun but hey I want to see like I want to see you grow today. I want to see like how you're growing today and give him a job that has nothing to do with winning or losing like I want to see if you can get like three really good passes today. Oh man like I want to see if you can smile and wave to me three times during the game. I want to see if you can if you can collect 20 high fives I uh I recently heard a TED talk about this the guy the I think it was about Steve Nash who's a famous MBA point guard and they were trying to figure out how why he won the MVP. He was an MVP twice and both times it's kind of like a suspicious MVP where like he didn't have really the stats to do it. It's a sports metaphor I guess you guys can listen to in episode about winning and losing. But Somebody went through and and were able to record, they looked back at these games and everybody always says that he was like the best teammate to play with. It's like, oh man, Steve was so good. And oftentimes we think of that as because he was a great teammate because he took care of the ball, he didn't turn the ball over, he was a great passer. But what they found was that he was like the best at high fiving people of anybody in the NBA. He he collected more high fives every game than anyone else. And it made people feel different. It made people feel different around him because he made this intentional effort. So tell that story to your kid and go, like, I want to see if you can collect 20 high fives during the game today. And give him goals that look like growth, but they don't look like a win and loss column. Because those are the goals that he can actually control. And my guess is a big piece of this is about control. That's heaven. A big piece is control. And so everything that I've said up to this point, right? If it's about shame, if it's about feeling like he has to win to be accepted, listen to everything that I just said to Josh about his daughter and apply that. That may be a thing. But if it turns out that it's really about control here, at its at its base, then I think that you want to shift this from like in into some sort of process-minded, progress-oriented things that he can control. And I think if you do that and it's not about outcome, which he can't control, then you can start to say, like, wow, you did that. You did like a really great job. And I'll say, um, when I was a volleyball coach, this actually did affect really positively outcomes as well. So I stopped caring about wins and losses in my tenure. I I inherited this team that was terrible. They couldn't win anything, they were just literally had not won a game all season. And I turned the team around and had us winning within like two weeks of me starting as their coach. And uh I take massive amounts of pride in that. Not because I was like the world's greatest gift as far as a volleyball mind, but because I totally reframed it from like, if we're not gonna win any games anyway, like let's just let's play for different points. Let's see how if we can go the entire game without doing this bad thing, or let's go like, and then just focusing on on the progress, right? These were like 14-year-old girls, like they were not going to join the professional or like get scholarships to college the next year. They were not gonna join some sort of professional overseas volleyball league in the next six months. They didn't matter, like volleyball didn't matter. What mattered was how they experienced the game and how they were going to improve. And I gave them those jobs, and it was amazing. It did actually impact performance in a really amazing way, and they started winning games, partially because uh I didn't really care if we won or lost points if they did the right thing, right? Like if they did the right thing and the outcome didn't come, that's fine. I don't care. Like I I care about the progress, right? Like you did the right thing, like you guys worked together in this way, and that was great. And if they didn't do it right, I didn't come down to them with punishment, I just came down, oh, we gotta work on that next time, right? So if you're uh in the back of your mind going, okay, yeah, but I do want him to like also he he wants to be good and I want him to encourage him. Yeah, and this will lead to results too. Steve Nash was the MVP because his team kept winning. Even like even the like the other people who were better basketball players than him were on teams that didn't win, so they didn't really care. And they gave him the MVP instead. Again, those MVPs are kind of suspect. One of them probably should have gone to LeBron, but anyway. Uh, we've reached the end of our time for this evening. It's kind of a longer episode because I love talking about this. I love talking about how to create good losers and uh kids who love to play, but don't make other everybody else hate to play around them. And so I hope that this has been a good episode for you. Uh yeah, that's what I got for you. I'll shut up so that we can get to the outro. Bye for now. 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