Is This the Life You Want to Be Winning At?

“You’re always winning at the life you have.”
— Gary John Bishop

Always winning at the life you have means that you are winning whatever game you are currently playing in life.

Whatever the current circumstances of your life, including how it’s proceeding, the patterns that seem to be ever-present, the approaches you take to overcome those patterns, the things you don’t like, the things you do like, and everything else about your current life — you are always winning at creating ALL of these things, again and again.

That means that, generally speaking, in spite of your best efforts to the contrary, most of the things you try to do on your own will feed back into the same kind of life. You’re naturally set up to keep creating these conditions. Or, put differently, you’re set up to continue creating the life that you have, including the ways you’re growing, getting better, and including the ways you’re getting worse.

This is why hiring a coach to “get better” in your life is a waste of your time and money. You don’t need a coach for that. Just keep living your life. You’re always getting better at it.

(The real point here is that you need to actually get clear on some kind of specific result you want to create in your life, outside of what is predictable, to really warrant that kind of investment into yourself).

Because of this, when people hire a coach, or therapist, or start working with a transformational leader, they’re usually intending to create some kind of result outside of the life they currently have; a result outside of the life they are currently winning at.

And because of that intention, it also follows that there’s going to be a period of time where they are playing a different game, and they start to lose at the life they have been playing up to this point.

The part where you start to lose sucks.

Maybe you’ve spent your whole life learning how to make people like you, to be considered charming and polite and to avoid rocking the boat.

But now you want to create something new that is not possible within that way of life, and so you start to practice leaning out of your comfort zone, asking for what you want, and being a demand for getting your needs met.

While you’re learning to win at that new game, you’re starting to lose at the old life you are used to having. As you practice asking for what you want, you are clumsy. You haven’t yet developed mastery in these new approaches, and people find you, at times, rude. Other times, people are taken aback when you don’t agree to what they’re asking for, because it no longer aligns with your commitment.

This part where you start to lose is the most dangerous part — that’s the part where you haven’t yet created the wins in the new way of life, and all you can see is what you’re losing.

This is an essential and natural part of the process — it’s what we sometimes call “The Breakdown”. You losing at your current life doesn’t need to look traumatic. It can look any number of ways: Anger, frustration, sadness, grief, not having an easy answer anymore, not being able to figure things out, things feeling like “something’s wrong”, feeling confused, feeling lost, and any number of other ways.

However it looks for you, it will predictably be in opposition to the experience of life you are comfortable with and currently relate to as “winning”. So if part of the life you are currently winning at usually means you have the right answer, your losing game will probably involve either being wrong, or more likely, not having any answer at all (and possibly not even being able to figure out the question).

You’re always winning at your current life.

Is this the one you want to be winning at?