You’ve heard the phrase “win-win or win-lose,” right?  It’s this thought that a situation only has two outcomes:  you’re either winning and achieving what you wanted, or you’re losing and you failed.

The great part about this phrase is that it’s high stakes, and sometimes that can be extremely motivating to us!  Anyone else thrive off of writing those college term papers last minute??  That impending deadline can set us up with the higher stakes we need to get in gear and get writing.

But when it comes to pursuing our health goals, having a win-win or win-lose mindset does us a disservice.  

Think about it: if we achieve the goals we set for ourselves, we feel like winners.  But if we don’t…well…let’s just say feeling like a loser isn’t all that motivating.

Fortunately, there’s a different way to think about our health goals:  win-learn¹.

With this outlook, we either achieve our goals and feel like winners, or we don’t achieve our goals but recognize there is still something we can learn from them, namely, what didn’t work for us.

This win-learn mindset mimics that of a scientist.

Scientists are all about experimenting to see what works and what doesn’t.  When they set out to do a new experiment, they often formulate at least one hypothesis, which is their educated guess as to what the outcome of their experiment will be. 

The beauty of the experiment, though, is that these scientists get to see if their hypothesis was correct or not.  If so, it adds more proof that the current way of thinking might be true, and if not, it can lead the scientist down another path to find out what really is true.

And you know what?  The best scientists don’t find their identity in their hypotheses always being correct.  Rather, they enjoy the process of experimenting and trying things, and often get surprised by what they uncover.  And those who are willing to move forward and experiment again when their hypotheses are proven wrong help us all progress through their findings.

So how does this relate to our health journeys?  

If you come into the goal setting process like a scientist-willing to try it out and experiment a bit to see what works and what doesn’t-you’re much more likely to stay motivated to find out what DOES work for you.

Why?  Because you’re approaching your goals with a win-learn mindset.  

When you achieve your goals, you can celebrate and take note that what you initially thought might work did indeed work.  And when you don’t achieve your goals, you don’t have to feel like a failure.  

There is no shame, rather, there is beauty in the process of trying.  You can take note of what didn’t work, make tweaks, and then set new goals.  

Your identity doesn’t have to be in whether or not you’re always achieving your goals, but whether or not you continue the pursuit and the process of learning what works.

And lest we forget, there is a great lesson to learn from a scientist you may have heard of-Thomas Edison.  He and his team knew the importance of trying and tweaking and learning through a myriad of attempts…

“This [the research] had been going on more than five months, seven days a week, when I was called down to the laboratory to see him [Edison].  I found him at a bench about three feet wide and twelve feet long, on which there were hundreds of little test cells that had been made up by his corps of chemists and experimenters.  I then learned that he had thus made over nine thousand experiments in trying to devise this new type of storage battery, but had not produced a single thing that promised to solve the question. 

In view of this immense amount of thought and labor, my sympathy got the better of my judgment, and I said: ‘Isn’t it a shame that with the tremendous amount of work you have done you haven’t been able to get any results?’  Edison turned on me like a flash, and with a smile replied: ‘Results!  Why, man, I have gotten lots of results!  I know several thousand things that won’t work!'”²

Sources:
¹Moore, M., Jackson, E., & Tschannen-Moran, B.  (2016).  Coaching Psychology Manual.  Philadelphia, PA:  Wolters Kluwer.
²Rutgers School of Arts & Sciences. (2012, Fall). Thomas A. Edison Papers. The Edisonian. http://edison.rutgers.edu/newsletter9.html#4

Photo Credits:
Photo by Bonnie Kittle on Unsplash
Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash
Photo by Hannah Middleton on Unsplash