On Sundays after the under 9 and 10’s football tournament. I always ask my kids the same question. Out of 5 how do you rate yourself today?
“5” came the reply from my youngest. If you knew my youngest, that would not surprise you!
“One of the girls on the other team made it more fun for me because she made it more difficult for me, and so I played better.”
The follow-up question is always. “What would have made it a 5?” Or in the case of my youngest. “What would have made it your best 5 ever?”
My eldest said, “4, if I had scored, it would have been a 5.”
The world is competitive. And one of the best ways to take action in a competitive world is to reduce the risk of getting it wrong.
Low-risk actions allow us to discover, develop and test our ideas. The payoff, our reward, needs only to be a small win, to encourage us to keep going. Get it wrong and we can have the resources to go again.
Ways to increase the risk include:
Reduce the reward.
Increase the complexity of the decision
Increase expectation
Increase the resources required.
In a competitive world, competition helps us rank our efforts.
Competition can also help us make better decisions when used as a risk-reward tool. For example, for kids that are less confident in their decision-making, the argument for small-sided games, with multiple goals, that provide a greater number of opportunities to score, is hard to ignore.
It is on us to decide how we use competition. I know plenty of coaches who tell me their kids are competitive. I don’t know many who tell me that their kids make good decisions.