More and more these days, it seems that it is politically incorrect to “label” someone as a loser. Nobody’s a loser – everyone’s a winner.  Or, one team finishes first, and the other team finishes second. Parents try hard to protect their children from acknowledging “losing” for fear of damaging their self-esteem. However, in a baseball game, clearly one team is the winner when that team scores more runs than the other team. We all can’t be winners every time. The fact is: In any kind of competition, someone is going to “win.”

However, “losing” doesn’t have to be bad. Kids need to learn  how to be good winners and good losers. What one might call “losing” is simply not reaching a particular goal – at that time. And, it teaches us to examine what we did, learn from our experience, and make changes for the next time around. Every experience – winning or losing – is an opportunity to learn something. And, it should be seen as such – not as a final defeat, rather as a lesson to be learned.

Philosophically speaking, though, we ARE all winners – when “winning” is synonymous with “personal victory,” when “winning” is synonymous with “success.” We all have “wins” everyday, and in that sense, we are all winners.

We get caught up in the semantics of winning and losing. We’re all winners and all losers at various points in our lives. But basically we get caught up in labeling. And most of the time, labels are usually both stereotypical and inaccurate .