Happy Sunday, y'all.
Elise Hu here.
And today we're bringing you a Sunday pick where we share an episode of another podcast from TED handpicked by us for you.
No one loves to lose.
With the World Cup just ending, every soccer or football fan around the world is feeling mixed emotions about the wins and losses of their favorite teams.
But the truth is, even if you are a goat on a great and lucky team, no one wins every single time.
So how do people who face loss after loss keep fighting to win?
To reflect on these questions, we dug into our archive and returned to a beloved episode of our show from 2023, Good Sport.
In this episode, host Jodi Avergan speaks with Nikki McCray, a retired WNBA player who played on three all-star teams and now coaches at Rutgers about the secrets to perseverance.
Then he chats with psychologist and neuroscientist Ian Robertson to discuss what losing can teach us about winning.
If you want more sports content from TED or just want to see the world through a new lens, check out Good Sport wherever you get your podcasts.
Learn all about TED podcasts at podcasts.ted.com.
Now on to the episode.
Some of the deepest thoughts I've ever had, biggest emotions, have been in a post-game team circle, especially after a loss.
Sitting on the grass, exhausted, slowly taking off the cleats, trying not to look your teammates in the eye, or you might just start crying.
Someone has to say something in these moments.
I once had a coach tell me after a brutal season-ending loss, don't replay this game over and over in your head.
You can't fix the past.
You can try and learn from it, but you can't fix the past.
Yeah, I know.
Wise words.
Great coach.
And really hard to do.
I've always been one of those people who hates to lose more than I love to win.
I think a lot of top athletes are that way.
That might be why I'm so fascinated by losing because it's an inevitable part of loving sports, but it never gets easier, at least not for me.
And I'm particularly fascinated by losing streaks.
I've been lucky enough to never have been on a truly hard luck team.
But sometimes I look at a college or pro team with an awful record and I wonder, how do they deal with it?
Loss after loss.
How do they keep going?
That's how I ended up talking to Nikki McRae, Women's Basketball Hall of Famer.
When you're a pro, your job is to perform, you know, and it's a short season.
So there's a lot of expectation.
She knows what it's like to be on a losing team.
For most of her career in the WNBA, she played on teams with losing records.
It started with her season on the Washington Mystics, which was then a new WNBA expansion team.
Their record in 1998 was 3-27.
Three wins, 27 losses.
Winning had followed me up until that point.
That year, we only won three games.
That was very hard for someone like me, who everywhere I've gone, I've won.
Up to that point, winning really did follow Nikki.
She grew up in a small town just outside of Memphis where she'd play basketball outside until the streetlights came on around 9 or 10pm.
She played for Collierville High School where she set four state records.
I started all four years on the varsity team.
By the time I was a junior and senior, our team was making it to state.
Then Nikki spent four years at the University of Tennessee, one of the greatest college programs ever.
She was SEC Player of the Year in 94 and 95.
Olympic gold followed in 1996.
Years and years of winning.
I think where I hit a little bump on the road was with the Washington Mystics.
Nikki spent four seasons with the Mystics, and every season they lost more games than they won.
And then she went on to play for the Indiana Fever, another losing season.
You know, we just, we didn't win.
Nearly every WNBA team Nikki played on struggled.
Even if she personally was making all-star teams, I had to ask her, how did it not get to her?
How did it not get to the team?
And that's when Nikki said something that really surprised me.
Even though we were three and whatever in D.C., every night the expectation was to win.
Really?
Really, really?
Yes.
Every night the expectation was to win.
I think that would surprise people, right?
I think people, you know, three quarters of the way through the season, like, you know what kind of team you are, but really people expect to win.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, you know what team you are, but you have to be realistic and understand where you are.
But the expectation is to win.
You know, you don't ever want to go into a situation thinking we're not going to win.
My name is Jody Avergan, and this is Good Sport from the TED Audio Collective.
Today, we're talking about winning and losing.
Look, yes, in sports, you play to win the game, as coach Herm Edwards famously yelled during a press conference.
But if he's right, then what do you do when the wins just aren't happening?
What do you do with the pain of losing?
And how do you truly keep expecting to win, as Nikki McCray put it?
On this episode, how a losing team keeps going.
Thank you.
I'm so blown away by Nikki McRae's insistence that the expectation to win is still there on a losing team.
Even when all the signs point to the fact that, you know, that team's probably going to lose the next game just like they lost the last one.
I think when you are a competitor.
You have expectations to win, you know, and every day you go out and compete.
That's what you're doing.
Nobody works 20 hours in a gym to lose.
Nobody does that.
Expecting to win is a little different, a little deeper than just wanting to win or deluding yourself that you have a chance.
In a way, when I hear Nikki say that even a losing team expects to win, she's kind of saying even a losing team should keep their expectations really high.
And when I asked Nikki about where that expectation came from, she told me about playing for Tennessee under legendary coach Pat Summitt.
At Tennessee, you recognize the culture immediately as you walk through the door.
Decades of excellence.
You just knew that, yeah, we're probably going to be one of the best teams in the country.
And that practices are going to be just as hard as the game is.
You know the expectations.
That's one of the reasons why I went to Tennessee, because I didn't want to go somewhere where it was going to be easy.
You knew that you were going to have to come in and battle every day, that you stepped out on the floor.
You were going to have to compete against another All-American.
You just have all these expectations.
Great players that you're surrounded by and no one is trying to undercut each other.
We're just trying to, you know, keep the tradition going and do our jobs.
Do your job, a classic sports cliche.
For Nikki, that meant bringing it on the court, scoring, passing, facilitating.
But also the dozen little things she did off the court, her routine.
And she carried that into her pro career, even as the winds stopped following her.
I think part of it is no matter what, you just have to be consistent in your routine.
For me, if we had a back-to-back game, if we were playing L.A., then we had to get on a red-eye and fly to Connecticut and play them the next day.
You better believe I'm going to have...
A masseuse ready, like I'm going to do stuff to get my body ready for the game.
Routine can be one of the most annoying parts of being an athlete.
Like, it's tedious.
On the bus, off the bus, packing, unpacking, tape your ankles, do your warm-up, day in and day out.
And especially if you're losing, I wonder if a routine can sometimes feel like some small hopeless attempt to change your luck or hold on as things unravel.
But actually, Nikki insists that routine is the key to this do your job mindset.
But you got to stay consistent with that, whether you're winning or losing, because it's all about performing and you want to be able to go out every day and give it your best.
A consistent routine can also protect you, give you a foundation to go back to as you ride the emotional rollercoaster of a season full of wins or losses.
As Nikki's pro career went on, there were a lot of those ups and downs and mixed emotions, things that would put a strain on any team.
Have you ever...
I don't think you've ever done this, I can tell.
But have you ever seen teammates who have like started to play the blame game or get grumpy or kind of hit a wall when things aren't going well?
Well, definitely.
I mean, I think that's on any team, but that's where you educate.
Somebody's not playing, fix it.
I mean, fix it.
Figure out a way to get on the floor, you know.
So you try to educate players on being a professional.
Professionalism, another sports cliche.
But I want to linger on that word for a bit, because if we think professional athlete, we may imagine someone who is fiercely competitive, driven to win, someone who might get eaten up by a big loss.
But Nikki's version of professionalism is not that.
These days, Nikki is a college coach, and she talks about professionalism with her college players, actually.
And her version of professionalism is that.
It's do your job.
The small things matter as much as the big things.
Be disciplined.
Train hard.
Respect your teammates.
And by that definition, everyone, not just athletes—
Could stand to be a little more professional.
I'm sure Nikki would have loved more wins in her pro career.
She never made the playoffs.
But she's learned some deep lessons about staying focused on what matters.
And, well, for our podcast's sake at least, all these years later, I'm thankful that she learned those lessons because now we get to learn them from her.
Up next, the psychology of wins and losses and how winning actually changes you, body and mind.
You still have a job to do.
You still have to stay ready.
Nikki McCray, consummate professional.
Even on a losing team, always doing her job.
Always ready.
Consistent.
It's almost like if you're on the bench and you're not playing, you still got to stay ready because your number is going to be called.
See, that's a very mature and healthy and I think a positive way to approach sporting performance.
Ian Robertson is a psychologist and the author of How Confidence Works.
I wanted to ask him about what losing does to us and why some people can handle it more than others.
And he really liked Nicky's framing of professionalism, which sort of puts the outcome of a game off to the side.
Because in Ian's research, he's seen how much of a problem it is that so many athletes judge themselves on whether they win or lose.
There's always going to be someone better than you, which means you have to build a self esteem and evaluation of yourself.
You have to base that on many other things.
And professionalism is a lovely way of capturing that.
On getting the pride of doing things well, the pride of working hard, the pride of persisting through failure, the pride of being a good sportsperson.
Huh.
Maybe we should have called this show Good Sportsperson.
Ian has noticed that the very best athletes focus on the small day-to-day things.
And he says that you can build that into your routine.
Even for a team on a massive losing streak, there are lots of opportunities for other kinds of wins.
You can compete to win at practice.
You can push yourself in training.
You can win your matchup during a game, even if your team is probably going to lose.
A coach I've worked with talks about the reindeer games that happen on her favorite teams.
Players are constantly competing, playing cards, playing video games.
Maybe you're a soccer team, but you play a little flag football during warmups.
All of that creates a texture, a low-level hum of competition, a bunch of smaller challenges that help you keep your edge.
You need to have intermediate goals, and that's what professionalism gives you, which is why that Nicky McRae comment is so important.
Ian told me a story about Sonia O'Sullivan, a middle-distance runner from Ireland.
She was the favorite heading into the Atlanta Olympics in the 5,000-meter event.
And she famously bombed out of that terribly.
It was a kind of, it felt like a humiliation for her.
It was a huge disappointment for the country and the expectations just collapsed in the face of reality.
How did she cope with that great kind of, not just personal sense of failure, but public kind of humiliation?
And she said, her goals completely changed.
She just forgot about Olympic medals.
And she built her way back until eventually she just missed a gold medal in the Sydney Olympics and got a silver medal.
This makes sense to me.
If you create smaller goals for yourself, then you avoid feeling inadequate or like a total failure just because you didn't hit that one big target.
You get to celebrate more success along the way and you get back in touch with that feeling of winning.
Ian says this is because of something called the winner effect.
He wrote a whole book about it.
The winner effect is we're all fighting for dominance hierarchies and there's always contests.
And just winning a tiny contest just boosts your chances to win the next one.
And it's cumulative and it's compound interest.
And it changes your brain in ways to make you more likely to win in the future.
The idea of the winner effect dates back to the 1950s, and it comes from outside the world of sports.
Researchers were trying to figure out how different animals establish dominance, which in nature comes down to how often they would win confrontations with other animals.
One mathematician found an answer in chickens.
The chief chicken, I'm not sure if that's a scientific term, but I'm going to go with it.
The chief chicken would come to rule a flock by pecking other chickens into submission.
That's where we get the term pecking order.
This scientist wanted to figure out what traits landed some chickens higher on the pecking order.
He put in things like body weight, testosterone levels, group size, but he never managed to find stable hierarchies until he hit on one variable to put into the equation.
And that was if you won a contest, a small contest.
Then your statistical chances of winning a subsequent contest were slightly increased.
And that is the winner effect.
You know how it is.
You peck one chicken into submission, you start to think you can do it again.
Then scientists saw the winter effect with green sunfish, a really aggressive fish species.
They fight for territory by flaring their gills and biting each other until another fish backs down, as we all do.
The researchers set up an experiment where they would put pairs of green sunfish into a tank and watch their behavior.
Even against a same-sized opponent, how a fish performed in one match had a lot to do with how their previous matchups had gone.
And then, finally, researchers looked for the winner effect in humans and spotted it in men's tennis.
If a player won a tie-breaking set, they were more likely to win the next set.
Part of the mechanism of that is confidence, the confidence that comes.
But there are also biological effects on the brain of winning, increasing aggression and motivation.
Winning begets winning.
It's not perfect science.
Sunfish aren't pro athletes.
But you can see this phenomenon in sports.
Do you know the boxing world has a word for that?
It's called tomato cans.
Mike Tyson, when he came out of prison, they gave him a couple of tomato can fights.
That is fights that were against people who had no hope against him, simply to give him that experience of winning.
And the experience of winning gives you confidence.
That, Ian Robertson says, is at the heart of the winner effect.
Confidence really is one of those magical things.
Fake it till you make it.
It really works.
To get the benefits of confidence...
Remember, confidence treats the belief that you will achieve something as having achieved it.
And so you get the performance enhancing effects of that.
You know, when I was chatting with Ian about the power of confidence, it helped me understand something that Nikki McRae told me, a story about that Washington Mystics team and where they found their confidence.
You don't always have to find it on the court.
That 3-27 season, it was the first in Mystics history, a new women's basketball franchise in a new city.
What I really enjoyed was the fans.
They never wavered.
We had so many wonderful people in the stands.
That alone was an exciting reason to keep showing up.
A little boost of confidence and motivation every time they walked into the arena.
I think fans will support you as long as you're giving everything.
Maximum effort.
We always played hard.
And then afterwards, we always gave back to our fans.
I mean, we would stay after, sign those autographs.
I think when the WNBA really started, it was very fan-friendly.
Mothers, daughters, fathers, daughters.
It was so new and people just were so excited about having a women's basketball league.
And that was the beauty in it.
Confidence and the winner effect and all that goes into gearing up for game after game.
It's a really tricky balance, right?
Expect to win and still try and focus on other things, manage your expectations so that you aren't completely crushed every time you lose.
So it's important to go in believing that you can win without hanging everything on that.
So you want to get the brain enhancing benefits of believing you can do it.
Without having the confidence sapping effects of feeling despair at the first setback you get.
Imagine a chart.
On the x-axis is the time of the game and the y-axis, up and down, is your confidence.
How do you start the game with your confidence all the way up at the top of the chart and then somehow not have it come down and go back up and come down and go back up as a game or season progresses?
Ideally, that chart is just a straight line.
Confidence turns on, you play the game, game over.
I've struggled with this.
My chart does not look like a straight line.
I mentioned to Ian my rollercoaster feelings about losing, being hurt, being upset, feeling regret, that thing about trying to fix the past.
He told me those feelings are pretty universal and they're hardwired.
You have this emotional reaction to losing, which in the brain corresponds to a decline in dopamine activity in the brain's reward network.
And it's actually very close to some of the pain centers of the brain.
So it feels like pain.
Not only is it an absence of reward, it's a failure to get an expected reward.
And that lowers your mood and it lifts your anxiety.
Losing feels like pain.
It hurts and it can change your mindset.
And so it's much easier for us to default to very imprecise modes of thinking.
Thinking big thoughts like, oh, I'm useless.
Oh, this is terrible.
This is the end.
These big kind of thoughts that are really motivationally debilitating.
So that is how we go from a little upset over a loss to landing in a long funk.
But Ian says there's even more to it than that.
Actually, the human brain finds it much easier to learn from winning than it does to learn from losing.
Let me say that again.
The brain finds it easier to learn from winning because there is less emotion getting in the way.
It's fun to reflect on a winning performance.
You want to go back and relive the joy of the moment, appreciate your highlights.
But Ian says it's the losses that often have the best information about what you need to fix.
When you lose, there's usually a more limited set of reasons for why you lose.
Losing is potentially a much better teaching signal.
But evaluating what went wrong in a losing game is much harder because you're emotional.
You don't want to go back and look at your own failures.
Still, you should try.
If you can get your mind away from the anxiety and the big debilitating thoughts, to analyze them, they're actually a fantastic tutorial for you to actually try and correct these things.
You can learn from a loss if you can just get past the emotions.
If you treat it as an opportunity for learning,
Then you've really potentially got an advantage for your future development of your skills and performance.
It's so hard to look past the gloom of a loss, focus on what you can improve.
And everything we've been saying has just been on the individual level.
What about a team, a group of 5, 10, 20 people?
Getting a whole team to do their job, stick to their routine, embrace the small victories, learn from losses without turning on each other?
People are complicated.
Groups of people are really complicated.
It's possible to have cultures where people don't feel overly protective of their egos, where their ego is not a major factor.
Individualistic cultures like America and Western Europe, ego is important.
Every single person is a brand and everyone's trying to protect their brand.
And so if your team suffers a string of defeats, that's threatening to your individual ego, your individual brand.
And so you're going to try and engage in all sorts of activities to try and protect your good opinion of yourself.
If you're an individual tennis player or golfer, for instance, usually that has to be you sorting things out in your own head.
But if you're part of a team, so easy for you to protect your threatened ego by attributing it to other people's behavior in the team, other people's failures.
And that, of course, is hugely corrosive of team bonding and therefore team confidence.
Team confidence.
You can think about confidence in yourself.
You get out there, you get the job done.
And yes, that is confidence, the belief that you can go out there and do something on your own.
But trusting that your team won't let you down when you need them, now that is powerful.
Collective confidence is the belief that we as a group can do something.
And that is even more powerful than individual confidence.
But it's also a much more difficult thing to attain and to maintain.
So what do we have here?
Being prepared, professionalism, celebrating small wins, building individual confidence and then collective confidence, which walks us right up to the thing that really makes a team go.
It's another cliche, but one of those cliches that's a cliche for a reason.
Culture, the right culture.
You always want to have a culture of love, competitiveness, trust.
When you look at a losing team, you may see a record, maybe 3-27.
But what I'm realizing is, as much as you want that record to tell the full story, as much as it hurts to lose, you can't focus on just the record.
The only way out is to focus on something else.
And that's how connected the team is.
We had great team chemistry.
Like, we liked being around each other.
You know, I think when you enjoy being around the people that you work with every day, that makes it better.
We evolved as a group species.
Our natural state is to be bonded with other people.
We find purpose together.
So our connection with other people is our biggest source of meaning and of motivation in the world.
What's the motivation?
Why do it?
You play to win the game.
Yes, winning is fun.
Losing sucks.
But when I think back to those season-ending huddles, taking the cleats off, pissed and regretful, one other thing I notice is that with time, my mind does shift from trying to fix the past to appreciating why I do this in the first place.
My whys, as they say, are building confidence, discipline, and overall relationships.
Loving your teammates.
If you can create a team where people aspire to the same, feel as if they are all in with the same values, the performance enhancement you will get from that will be quite remarkable.
Nikki McRae doesn't really remember 3 and 27.
She remembers the people she stood shoulder to shoulder with.
Because after the glory of winning or the sting of defeat, you're left with the people who were there through it all.
You got to love the people that you work with every day.
And the way you do that is by spending time with them and getting to know them.
And then once that happens, then trust starts to happen.
And then you start to fight for one another.
Wait, really?
That's our ending?
We're literally ending it on maybe it was the friends we made along the way?
All right.
Sure.
Yeah.
I mean, what can I say?
Friends are the best.
Thank you.
Up next on Good Sport, a history of why we separate sports by gender and an argument that maybe it's time to rethink it.
The history of and practice of organized competitive sport is so riddled with purposeful biases that go beyond physical differences.
Yes, there are physical differences, but you know what?
There are some guys that I'm better at tennis than, right?
I believe it.
Me.
Good Sport is brought to you by the TED Audio Collective.
It's hosted by me, Jody Avergan.
The show is produced by TED.
Thank you.
Fact-checking by Kate Williams.
Special thanks this episode to Tina Booth, one of the best coaches I've ever had and the first person who really got me thinking about that magical bubble that great teams find themselves in.
We'll be back soon with more Good Sport.
Make sure you're following the podcast in your favorite podcast app so you get every new episode delivered straight to your device and leave us a review.
We love hearing from our listeners.
And our email address is goodsportatted.com.
Thanks again for listening.
My name is Jody Abergan, and we'll see you soon.
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