The Broad Experience · The Broad Experience

Episode 186: Our Obsession with Winning (and how to re-think)

December 17, 2021·24 min·1 clip

Olympic silver medalist Kath Bishop explains why gold medalists often feel empty and depressed after winning.

Winning arrives as a cultural reflex. The host starts with the idea that the pressure to win does not stay in sport; it follows people into school, work, and the way they talk about themselves. The guest knows that pressure up close. As a three-time Olympian, she says her first two Olympic Games came with a macho winners-and-losers script. If you lost, you were expected to show how much you hated losing, because that was supposedly what winners did. The episode goes looking for a less brittle frame. At the US Open, one athlete's coach keeps the match result out of the stated goal. The point is to enjoy the game, learn from game to game, and build success without staring at winning the whole time. The results can still be strong, which makes the idea harder to dismiss. The conversation does not stay in sport. The host keeps noticing how winning culture leaks into ordinary life, even for people who never hit a ball or run a race. The language gives it away: win-win, killing it, crushing it. She does not like the aggression baked into those phrases. The guest hears it too and adds targets and deadlines to the same pile. The tone is careful, not anti-achievement. The episode asks what changes when people can want to do well without needing to hate losing. Winning may still happen. It just stops being the only thing in the room.

As heard by us

A smart workplace conversation about winning, ambition, and the aggressive language business borrows from competition.

This episode takes the language of winning out of sport and puts it under a workplace lens. The Broad Experience uses Kath Bishop's Olympic rowing experience to question the macho story of success, where winners are expected to hate losing and every contest becomes proof of…

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Why you'd press play

If winning language makes you tense, this one asks why.

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