The NO LOSERS delusion
When I was about 12, I was on a soccer team... I remember almost nothing about it, in fact I don't even really remember a single soccer game I had, but what I do CLEARLY recall is that I was the worst player on the team. There was no question about this, and I don't think I really let it get to me, but I sort of passively accepted that I was (and still am) a terrible soccer player. Doesn't make me any less valuable as a person, necessarily, it's just a fact. I never scored a goal, I was fatigued easily from running... my thought process was "So I'm bad at soccer, so what?" and I still think so.
What I also remember pretty clearly is that at the end of the season we went to Mountain Mikes Pizza for our end-of-season pizza party/award ceremony to give out trophies. AND THEN EVERYONE GOT A TROPHY. EVEN ME.
This practice (of giving everyone a trophy), in my opinion, is flawed.
Before presenting the trophy to a specific team member, one of the two coaches would say a few words about how great this team-member was and then at the end, announce who this team member was. There was no secret in decoding their methods, though... the first people to get their trophy were the strongest players on the team. Again, NO QUESTION about this method. Anyone who had seen our soccer games could tell.
And, following suit with that, the last people announced were the worst players. I was the last person to get a trophy. Not only that, but before giving the "award speech" (which by this point was obviously going to be about me, since everyone else had received a trophy) the two coaches were quarreling over who would have to give the speech because neither of them wanted to. Then, finally, after a few forced sentences by one of the coaches, my trophy was granted to me. The trophy, which I recently threw away during some early spring cleaning, still felt like a sorry conciliation prize.
That was the first time I REALLY felt bad about being a bad soccer player... when the "consolation prize" was given to me at Mountain Mikes.
This. Must. Stop. I know that that wasn't an isolated event in society, people everywhere are petrified of implicitly calling their child a loser by not giving them a trophy. In my experience, at least, the most painful part of not being a good soccer player was having others be forced to essentially lie and tell me that I in fact WAS a good soccer player anyways... especially when it was so obvious that I was not.
I think this fear of calling children losers stems from the fact that so many of us are our own toughest critics, and to receive any form of criticism from an outside source is a "worst case scenario" in so many ways.
The "no losers" practice of doing things like giving everyone on the soccer team a trophy for ALLEGEDLY being a valuable component of the team highlights people's preexisting tendencies to compartmentalize virtually everything we do into either "total success" or "total failure" .... and god forbid we send a message to children (or anyone, for that matter) saying they're anything other than a total success at every little thing that they do...........
Instead of telling children that everything they do is amazing, and giving them a trophy out of fear that they'll believe they're a total failure, we should be teaching kids that PARTIAL SUCCESS exists, and that it's something that's distinct from total failure. Also, that lessons learned from something that might be a 'total failure' can transform a failure into something valuable.
The ease of falling back on the self-criticizing path of defaulting everything that isn't "total success" to be a "total failure" is just setting us up for feelings of inadequacy and hopelessness. Things that aren't distinctly a "total success" (like getting a trophy or other forms of acknowledging achievement), CAN also be partial successes. And I think more and more people seem to believe that 'partial success' is something that doesn't really exist, and that it's just a sugarcoated way to call something that is actually a total failure.
"Partial success" and "total failure" are not the same thing, in my opinion. I think the belief that they ARE the same thing... well, that sounds like the definition of being a perfectionist to me.
I don't believe that my soccer playing days were a total failure... and largely because they've driven me to the distinction between total failure and partial success... and it's this distinction that has helped me be happier with my life.