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Though making enemies out of your competitors may push you to compete intensely, it is seldom a good long term habit for success.
Leaving a trail of burnt bridges and vengeful entities isn’t a foolproof plan on the path to winning a long, consecutive series of competitions in your domain. The envy of past competitors can grow vast in its effects down the line.
If you cross-multiply the pitfalls that negative post-competitive feelings can open up, the variables stacked against you become clear.
This article proposes limiting jealousy in competitors you win against and explains three methods of how to do it.
Keep Their Weaknesses You Exploited to Yourself
Competitions are decisively won due to a lack of responses to your strengths and a lack of solutions to your exploitation of your opponent’s weaknesses.
The strategies you deploy in whatever field you compete in, will be clearly visible to both yourself and your competitors. You’ll know of the exact factors which resulted in your victory, and your competitors will taste each ingredient which led to their defeat.
Analysts will make observations from the sidelines. However, the ones who don’t take part in the competitions they analyze seldom fully internalize all the nuances at play. They can be objective with what they’ve seen, but can only take guesses on the pressures, feelings, strategies, and internal dialogues of the competitors at play.
After the competition fizzles out, you’ll thereby possess the most sensitive knowledge of your competitor’s vulnerabilities. Not only would you possess in depth knowledge of their sensitivities, there would be nothing they can do to stop you from divulging those sensitivities to the public.
Respect is easily attained when someone in such a dominant position decides to not exploit it. Should you keep the learned holes in your opponent’s game to yourself, your competitors will clearly see and understand your decision to spare them from further embarrassment and future losses.
Your lack of desire to publicize your competitor’s weaknesses communicates that you’ve formed a team of sorts. They’d perceive you to be protective of their interests and will feel a developed sense of respect toward you.
Take Their Side Against Their Detractors; Even if Their Detractors Are Your Supporters
By having decisively won the competition at hand, the balance of power will be on your side. You’ll have nothing left to prove; as any ounce of contention your opponent has left within them will be paralyzed by their loss of a recent competition.
This is the reason why winners of boxing bouts, for instance, have total freedom to celebrate and boast about their victory. Though their fallen opponents may have an issue with their post fight antics, they are well aware that they can’t assert their will to silence the winner’s antics due to the mere act of losing just moments prior.
Though it may be difficult to resist basking in enjoyment and rubbing a victory in your competitor’s face, you may gain more out of defending their efforts in the competition you came out a winner of.
The easy path to take is to exploit your decisive victory over someone else. They’d be helpless in their experience of your gloats and triumphs. You’d go unchallenged, and would serve to abuse the power you worked hard to earn by way of honest competitive means.
By ignoring the desirable acts of diminishing your opponent’s efforts in a bout you won, you’ll realize that defending their efforts serves to paint you in a better light.
By doing so, you’ll ensure to make your victory against them seem more impressive due to your firsthand acknowledgment of their skills. Playing up the size and aggressiveness of the coyote we fended off on our morning hike makes us seem more brave, more skilled, and more able.
The opponent in question will only appreciate you telling listeners about the difficulty of the fight they put up. You’d be reassuring them of how they feel about themselves, all whilst making yourself look even better.
Try your hand at defending the skills of those you win against. Ensure to play up their tactics, strategies, and efforts.
Your protective dialogue will mean a great deal during their vulnerable moments of defeat. They’ll feel bare; with every criticism hurting more than it typically would prior to a loss. Defending those who lose against you from their newfound critics is a strategically wise effort to win their loyalty going forward.
You’d present yourself to be teamed up with your past opponents against public perception. Though the development of a partnership with you is a bitter pill to swallow for those you win against, the protection you provide against their detractors serves to improve that bitter pill’s taste.
Sportsmanship Means More Coming From the Winner
Either in the events around you or in videos online, you’ve likely seen people seem unexpectedly cordial toward one another after a physical dispute. For whatever reason, as soon as we give everything we’ve got against our competitors, we tend to feel a desire to be genial toward them.
That deep feeling of altruism and comradery will have barriers placed against its expression however.
You’ll be motivated by a desire to upkeep a certain image of power and authority after your victories in life. As you seek to utterly dominate those whom you compete against, you may not consider extending a hand of friendship to be a good idea.
You’ll want to not only win the battle at hand, but also show no mercy in your post competitive interactions with those you beat
That egotistical yet logical attempt to keep your competitors at bay even after you win against them will compete with the gratefulness you feel in concluding a heated competition. You’ll believe it to be weak to fall into such feelings of sportsmanship but will be teased by the deeper satisfaction their expression ultimately provides.
Know that as the winner of a competition, your act of extending a hand of friendship after it’s all said and done carries with it weight.
It’s a sign of forced submission when the loser extends their hand in friendship after a competition doesn’t go their way. They’d have nothing left to give, so with their back against the wall, they often see no other option but to respect your efforts in coming out victorious.
As the winner however, initiating the expression of the comradery that both competitors feel will be a respectable attempt at keeping your pride at bay. In doing so, you’ll operate in accordance with a deeper truth than simply posturing and distancing yourself from those who lose against you.
Being sportsmanlike and grateful toward those who competed well against you communicates your core values to be wider in scope than simply being tied to any competitive realm. You’d develop an understanding between yourself and your competitors that both winning and losing a certain competition are equal in what they ultimately mean on the grander scale. You’ll make them feel okay, and you’ll even motivate them to continue on their journey as you express an understanding of the deeper lessons of competition, victory, and defeat.