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How to embrace competition?

How do YOU deal with your competition? Do you get territorial and defensive and perhaps even look for ways to make yourself look bigger by cutting your competition down to size? Or do you USE your competition to learn from so that you are constantly competing with YOURSELF in a process of continuous improvement…..I personally love the notion of co-operative competitiveness ….in last week’s Success Newsletter I apologised for being highly competitive but in fact I am highly co-operative too…..in order to create win/win solutions you have to be highly co-operative and highly competitive.  

I am pleased to say that in the coaching industry we DO walk our talk and help each other whenever we can…. …we grow and learn from our competition in a way that is highly co-operative and competitive J My fellow coach Sarah Litvinoff  sent me the following example of racism and prejudice in response to my comments in last weeks’ Success Newsletter: 

For years I used to spend summers in an Italian village by the sea. It drew an avant-garde mix of nationalities and colours: unconventional people who seemed to the villagers more like visitors from outer-space than fellow human beings. We were treated with courtesy and much merriment: they thought we were so exotic and mad that they regarded us as living theatre.  But their attitude to the inhabitants of the next village, scarcely half a mile away, was quite different. Open hostility and suspicion was expressed towards these neighbours, whom they called ³foreigners². Centuries of rivalry over fishing rights had developed into full blown prejudice. If you lived ³over there² you were inherently bad, and not to be trusted. There were no exceptions. Prejudice, it seems, is built into human nature. It appears to act as a warning signal of danger, alerting you to people who might threaten your livelihood or your very life. In that Italian fishing village we, the real foreigners, brought revenue and prosperity, so weren¹t to be feared. Instead, the village down the road was a constant threat.
Prejudice - literally ³pre-judging² can serve a useful function. You use your experience of life and people to make snap judgments. You quickly form impressions and make lightning decisions based on them…….. 

What would YOU have done in the above example? Follow the status quo of perpetual prejudice or would you have the courage to find a NEW way?

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