“Shame you’re not the best columnist in Bermuda …” someone informed me recently.

That stung. I didn’t know what they were talking about. It hadn’t occurred to me I was in competition for the Best of Bermuda awards. I love Catherine Burns’s column and fully agree she deserves that title but momentarily, I felt like a ‘loser’. And that smarted.

As a child, I grew too fast for my co-ordination to keep up, so didn’t play sports or compete in much.

I’ve grown up convinced I just don’t have a competitive nature and yet I almost came to blows over a Scrabble game once, and hesitate to enter ‘fun runs’ because I know I won’t win.

I couldn’t watch Euro 2016 even if I wanted to, because I always feel so sorry for the losing teams!

Motherhood opened up a whole new arena of competition. Mums comparing the sleeping, walking and pooping talents of their little geniuses made me cringe, and yet I’d get sucked right on in, feeling like a failure because my child didn’t have teeth yet at age one. Pretending I wasn’t interested was one way to protect me and everyone else from my secretly fierce competitive nature. But perhaps that ferocity was exacerbated because I’d never really learnt how to compete — how best to cope with winning and losing.

I boned up with some parenting articles on teaching children good sportsmanship.

They advised that getting them to focus on their own performance and improving their own skills is a healthy way to approach competition: beating ourselves and getting better at the game is the real win.

Highlighting the good plays and the small victories, as much as the areas to improve, can ease the disappointment of losing. Recognising that winning and losing are just temporary states and amount to a small fraction of the time spent in the game itself also helps us find a healthy perspective on it.

Hearing Tyler Butterfield on the radio the other day, welcoming the competition and the day someone beats him, I sense what real sportsmanship is.

Those professional footballers aren’t crippled by the disappointment of losing.

They know if they’ve played well or not, and celebrate just being in the competition.

Let us be inspired by others’ excellence but not turn it into a comparison between them and us.

In comparing, we only tend to see our shortcomings: all the ways we are not them rather than our personal strengths that make us different.

Winning and losing is not personal. Losing does not make us a ‘loser’, it makes us a competitor; participating and trying to be the best that we personally can be, whatever our game might be.

Congratulations, Catherine! Thank you for the inspiration and your great columns.

Julia Pitt is a trained success coach and certified NLP practitioner on the team at Benedict Associates. For further information contact Julia on 705-7488, www.juliapittcoach ing.com.