Losing a fight can sometimes feel like the worst possible thing that could happen to a fighter. Apart from a permanent or lasting major inury, what could possibly be worse?! In my experience, losing a fight reshapes you dramatically. It’s crucial to growth. The learning from my losses has been invaluable in my personal journey as a fighter.
I know this is an over used concept-that losses define you and you benefit from them more. But sometimes cliches exist for a reason: because they are true. Here are some things I have learned from my losses, plus the perspective of fellow boxer, Rianne Ware, who brings almost 20 years of boxing experience to this conversation.
Feelings of embarassment are normal
Rianne started training in her teens, and was 23 years old when she had her first fight. As she described her emotions, I could relate to the immense anxiety, the feelings you have as you are imagining the worst that could possibly happen. So-how did she go?
“I ended up getting pummelled,” she said, laughing, “I just stood there and took hits.”
She had travelled down from Karratha to compete in Perth, and had a lot of friends and family there to watch. “I was embarrassed. I got smashed in front my family, ” she said.
When she said this, how hard I related! This was my exact thought after my first fight-which was also a loss. The instinct is to feel acute embarrassment that you have had your family and friends either attend, or watch a live stream, only for you to let them down.
My words after my first loss were along the lines of “everyone was watching, I’m so embarrassed!” My coach at the time, assured me of something. He told me that they don’t come to watch you win. They come to watch you fight. There is a difference. They are there for you as an individual, not for the result you might bring in. This can be hard to believe when you are working through the devastation of having failed to grab the win. But eventually you do realise that this is the truth.
It can make you want to quit
Many people fight once, lose, then never show up again because the pain of losing was so great.
I’ve personally had 4 losses since I started competing. A couple of these have been impactful enough to give me the feeling of wanting to quit afterwards. Thankfully, with the support of coaches and trusted friends, I was able to work through these experiences. I came out the other side and still wanted to keep boxing.
It can be devastating to train so hard for hours and hours, to diet and sacrifice, only to come up short on the day. I know now that if this comes up for me again that I can work through that feeling, and get back to training for the next one. I think understanding your why is important during this process. This is because the feelings after a loss can make it almost impossible to imagine subjecting yourself to that experience again. Having a broader reason why to hang onto helps.
Dealing with negative feedback after a loss
Rianne talked me through feedback she had from a trusted person in her life directly after her first loss. This comment has stuck with her throughout her fight career. It was broadly negative, and only served to add to her own feeling of devastation after the loss, particularly as it came from someone important and influential in her life. “Everytime I’m in the ring, and I feel like I’m tired, or I feel like I’m not pushing hard enough, I’ve got that voice in my head. For a long time it was demoting me, instead of driving me, but now it’s turned to driving me.” The process of flipping this into a motivating force in her subsquent fights took time however, and intentional effort.
It’s an unfortunate truth that the support from family and friends is not always consistent. This is not neccessarily coming from a place of malice. The reality is that people who don’t fight don’t know what it feels like-like any experience in life. What looks obvious to a bystander watching the fight is inordinately difficult to do in the moment when you are the one wearing the gloves.
It’s easy to tie your worth as a fighter to the win or loss
I have learned to accept that you can only control so much when you fight. Sometimes it’s just not your fight, and that’s ok. If you believe that a win or loss doesn’t define you as a fighter, it’s much easier to accept the outcome, learn from it and move onto the next. I have thankfully learned to keep my confidence intact regardless of outcomes. I can trust myself to work through the emotions of a bad session or fight, and that is really freeing. It helps me to recognise how valuable it is to experience losses, and to actually be grateful for them.
Dont beat yourself up further. This is why, in my opinion, you can’t have just “fighting” in your bucket of things you do in life that bring you joy. Maintaining interests in other areas of your life allows you to stay balanced in your approach to the loss. When I first started fighting I was so all-in I had nothing else to fall back on when it wasn’t going well. I’m happy to say that now I am much more objective and balanced in my approach to both training and fighting.
Learning from the loss
After my first “bad” loss, a trusted friend said to me that losing that fight was the best thing that could have happened to me. And she was right.
It forced me to:
- analyse my preparation leading into the fight
- recognise that I had been fighting through a major injury that I needed to correct
- assess my recovery approach. It was non-existent at this stage-it’s now an essential part of my training
- adjust my weight reduction and cutting better, as I was landing well under weight and depleted
- be better at managing my emotional overwhelm going into fights. I had been ignoring the fact that I was fighing on the anniversary of my mother’s death
The biggest thing it did for me was help me realise that I had some fairly major shortfalls when it came to my confidence, my mental resilience in the ring and my approach to emotional self care during training, fight preparations and after fights.
Knowing why you lost helps
When I did the analysis on two of my “bad” losses I realised that I gave up in the moment. That’s why they felt so inherently bad to me. Because instead of fighting back, mentally I gave in and accepted the loss before the final bell. To the audience, I was in the ring still boxing, but internally I had accepted defeat already . One of these was a split decision. Imagine if I had pushed past that feeling of despair and clawed back just a few more definitive points?
At the time, I was miserable. I wanted to give up boxing. Now looking back, they were formative fights which helped shape the way I box now. Without those experiences, I would not have stumbled upon a major weakness in my mental game. The opponents themselves were not especially challenging, it was my response to them that was an issue.
I like to start looking at footage immediately, but Riane can’t watch any of her fights back straight away. It takes her time to work up to it. Then when she is ready, she will “analyse every little step, every little punch, every little move, every emotion that (she) felt in there, and work out what (she) could have done better.”
If you keep winning all the time, you take a bit out of it-but you can take so much more out of a loss. As Rianne says, “With losses come growth. If you keep winning all the time, you’re gonna take a little bit out of it, but there’s a lot more to a loss. There’s the physical side, the mental side…..your thought processes.” Rianne may have lost her first 3 fights, but she then went on to win 5 in a row.
There’s no denying that losing can feel embarrassing, devastating even, and make you want to give up. But the gift you get when you stick with it, when you embrace the learnings and then see improvements afterwards are priceless. And when you do have that win-it’s so much sweeter knowing you had to work past a loss to get there.
Image Left: Rianne working her craft on the pads
Image Right: Rianne gloved up and ready to spar
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