It’s a little sentence I whispered to myself backstage at a national-level competition. I was standing there, nerves buzzing, and I said:
“I give myself permission to lose today.”
And I’m telling you… the moment those words came out of my mouth, something shifted.
All the pressure to walk away with a pro card? Gone.
All the noise in my head? Quiet.
What I felt instead was focus—pure, grounded focus on what needed to be done.
And that moment taught me something big:
When we give ourselves permission to lose, three things happen.
We turn failure into a learning opportunity, we flip negative thinking into positive thinking, and we actually motivate ourselves to take action.
Let’s break those down.
1. Permission to lose turns failure into learning
I used to beat myself up if I didn’t win. It was like winning was the only acceptable outcome, and if I didn’t, well… it felt like everything was worthless.
But that mindset leads nowhere. Because here’s the truth: in any competition—literal or metaphorical—there’s only one winner.
So what do the rest of us do?
Sit in misery? Wait for our moment for years? That’s way too long to be stuck in negativity.
Instead, we can choose to see every loss as a lesson.
And for me, being a teacher by trade really put this in perspective.
I didn’t expect my kindergarteners to walk in on day one knowing the entire alphabet. Learning took time. Growth took time. And we celebrated every milestone, not just the big ones.
When we give ourselves permission to lose, we’re giving ourselves permission to learn. To be students of our craft. To grow on the road toward mastery.
2. Permission to lose flips negative thinking to positive thinking
The second thing that happens is we stop spiraling into negativity.
When you allow yourself to lose, you can finally say, “Okay. I’m not where I want to be yet, and that’s okay.”
Suddenly the world opens up. You can look around. You can ask:
Where do I want to go?
What could this look like in the future?
What’s possible?
That’s called hope.
And hope is a powerful antidote to negative thinking.
Most of the time when we feel like failures, it’s because we’re measuring ourselves with someone else’s yardstick. We’re living by someone else’s definition of success.
But when we soften that internal voice—when we speak kindly to ourselves—we stop sinking into that mental quicksand. We start moving forward again.
3. Permission to lose motivates us to act
This one sounds backwards at first.
How does losing make us more motivated?
But here’s the thing:
When we’re terrified of not being the best, we avoid everything that might expose that. We skip the small opportunities because we’re focused only on the “big win.”
But when we give ourselves permission to lose?
We give ourselves the freedom to try.
To take the first step.
To take the smaller steps.
After that show—where, by the way, I did not win—I ended up more motivated. I changed the way I trained. I reached out for help. I put systems in place. I got in front of the right people who critiqued me and helped me grow.
Losing pushed me toward the actions I actually needed.
Closing
There can only be one winner.
So what happens when you’re not the one standing at the top?
You don’t sulk. You don’t quit. You don’t bounce from one thing to another because you’re scared to look imperfect.
You use the loss.
Because losing isn’t bad.
Losing is an invitation.
An invitation to try again.
To improve.
To learn new ways of doing things.
To stumble forward until you find your footing.
To build something within yourself that you’re proud of.
So give yourself permission to lose.
To not have it all figured out.
To fall short and get back up again.
That’s how growth happens.
And that’s how you move toward the version of yourself you really want to become.
The Art of Losing 
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