Finishing in second place hurts

About

Leadership

PERSONAL COACHING
Leadership onboarding coaching helps the executive adapt to the employer's culture, create rapport with their team and develop productive ways to achieve necessary goals.
SELF ASSESSMENT CENTER
Leadership skills and style testing. Know how you motivate and coach people to gain success at work and in life.
SELF-COACHING RESOURCES
Effective leaders keep up-to-date with effective self-coaching.
WHAT IS LEADERSHIP?
Leadership is an interactive conversation that pulls people toward becoming comfortable with the language of personal responsibility and commitment.
LEADERSHIP TIPS
“The crux of leadership development that works is self-directed learning: intentionally developing or strengthening an aspect of who you are or who you want to be, or both.” Primal Leadership by Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis & Annie McKee (Harvard Business School Press)

Career Management Books

« They are called "dreams." | Main | Turbocharged Brain Power »

Finishing in second place hurts

Neal Roese, author of "If Only" (Random House, 2005) and a professor at University of Illinois at Champaign, recognizes the amazing resiliency and optimism people display after dusting themselves off from a bad situation.

In speaking with high-achieving athletes, he explained, researchers found that the unhappiest people on the awards podium are usually the silver medalists. Why? Because they compare themselves to the athletes who won, and they always come up short.

Bronze medalists, on the other hand, are surprisingly happy. Because they are often comparing downward, to those who didn't medal at all, their thoughts run more toward, "I'm lucky I got here; I could have missed being on the podium at all."

When you seem to always be coming up in "second place" in your life or career challenges it may be time to consider getting up, dusting yourself off, and deciding it is time to be coached to success.