The Unconscious Struggle Between Ambition and Fear
This is an excerpt from: “The Winner’s Mind: A Competitor’s Guide to Sports and Business”
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We all fall victim now and then to the most basic problem of competition, the factor that thwarts most people in their quest for success—the unconscious conflict between the desire for success and the fear of failure. To escape this conflict, we construct various defense mechanisms that reduce our anxieties by clouding our minds. Unfortunately, though they may make us feel better, these defense mechanisms also make us poor competitors.
WHAT ARE DEFENSE MECHANISMS?
Defense mechanisms are unconscious distortions of perception and interpretation that act to protect us from unpalatable facts and fears. Cold reality can sometimes be too unpleasant to bear. Reality may force us to face our own inadequacies and fears, deal with desires and actions that may conflict with our moral upbringings or self-images, or accept stressful conflicts that we cannot resolve. At these times, it is comforting to change things around in our minds so that these conflicts can appear to go away.
REPRESSION AND RATIONALIZATION
Repression is one type of defense mechanism. Here one selectively and conveniently “forgets” facts that are difficult to deal with consciously. Another defense mechanism is called “rationalization.” It is a form of self-delusion that also works unconsciously but involves conveniently rearranging facts rather than forgetting them. Presented with an unpleasant set of facts, we create a more attractive overall picture by restructuring the facts and changing our viewpoints. In the process, we may reduce the importance of some facts while amplifying the importance of others. We don’t simply make up false facts; we just change the emphasis of real ones. Facts that are inconvenient to the picture we want to see may be forgotten, while more convenient ones are brought to center stage. The final picture is designed to make us feel better and/or to reduce conflicts that would remain unresolved if the original (true) picture were kept intact.
WE CAN SEE THEM WORKING
Psychologists usually suspect that defense mechanisms are operating when a person’s actions appear counter-productive—that is, when they carry a person in a direction directly opposed to his or her stated goals. There is a reason for everything. People do not act randomly. We may not know what is motivating a certain behavior, but something is certainly causing it to take one direction over another. The reasons may not be good or productive ones, but they are reasons nevertheless. When this happens, people are usually satisfying some unconscious need that they are unwilling to face and consciously accept.
SELF-DELUSION IN TENNIS
Defense mechanisms are insidious and come in a thousand disguises. When they appear in sports or other areas of competition, they are almost invariably driven by fear. Their hidden purpose is to reduce stress, relieve the individual of responsibility, and lessen the pain of loss. Losing is unpleasant in any case, but it is a lot less unpleasant if we don’t try too hard or it’s not our fault.
In tennis, for example, satisfying these psychological needs causes players to lose lots of matches. Figuratively speaking, most people compete with one foot on the accelerator and the other on the brake. They want to win but know, at some level, that losing will make them unhappy. The harder you try and the more deeply you commit yourself to winning, the more painful it will be if you lose. People fear this pain, and to avoid it, many compete with less than a wholehearted commitment. Instead, they rationalize.
Sue at the club tells herself that she doesn’t care whether she wins or not—that she is just playing for the exercise, the social interactions, the love of the game, the feeling of hitting the occasional great shot, or just a good suntan. She tells herself that winning doesn’t matter. Of course she is lying to herself. Everyone would prefer winning to losing. It may not be practical to pay the emotional or physical price required to win every match, but that doesn’t mean winning would not be more fun than losing. Sue doesn’t want to accept this. Doing so would put her under pressure during the match (which is not much fun, I must admit) and put her at risk of feeling badly if she loses. The price Sue pays for avoiding this unpleasantness is to become a less effective competitor and lose frequently. At the same time, Sue has the niggling feeling that she really would like to win and that she is kidding herself. As a consequence, she inhabits a competitive “gray” world where she doesn’t try too hard to win, but doesn’t feel too bad when she loses (which is often), and doesn’t feel too proud of herself either.
A better alternative would be for Sue to admit to herself that she wants to win but that there are simply some occasions when she is not up to competing with 100 percent intensity. It may be too much work, and she may not be prepared for the pressure and unpleasantness. At such times she will simply not do so. (After all, nobody is holding a gun to her head.) On the other hand, she doesn’t have to lie to herself about her motives either. Facing the truth gives Sue control of the situation. Otherwise, she will forever be passively responding to forces of whose existence she is fatally unaware.
And on those other occasions when she has the stomach for it, she can decide she wants to win and test herself by doing everything in her power (within the rules) to do so. Here she risks feeling badly if she loses, but what the heck, she’ll get over it. And she will greatly improve her results. (Test question: Who has the best chance of winning a long, tough match played on a hot day—the player who says she is playing for the pleasant feeling of hitting the ball hard, or the player who overtly acknowledges that she wants to win the match?)
A COMFORTABLE PATH TO NOWHERE
All of us are sufficiently insecure to run for shelter, if shelter from fear of competitive failure becomes a plausible option. We can replace the uncomfortable obligation to perform with a dose of self-deluding repression and rationalization: “It doesn’t matter; it’s not my day; I was cheated; my foot hurts; etc.” These all make the slide down to failure more pleasant. Unfortunately, this does not take into account the fact that winning is simply more fun than losing, and that lying to oneself is a bad habit to get into. Excuses and rationalizations, be they in sport, business, or anywhere else provide an insidious path to losing.
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