Most of us love competition. We love watching sports. We love reality TV and coming up with winners and losers.

But we sometimes also demonize competition, especially in youth. We give people participation trophies and we get upset when someone seems to be trying too hard to win.

There are certainly ways to compete and ways not to. Playing fair is important. Being a “bad sport.” Talking down to people that did not win. It is possible for competition to go too far.

Yet, there are also, many, many, many benefits to competition. So many, in fact, that we may need to consider introducing more examples of competition into a person’s life.

Examples of the Benefits of Competition

Competition has many benefits, not only for children, but for adults as well. For example:

• Fun – The excitement of competing, overcoming obstacles, beating your own records, winning, and even the rewards like trophies and the feeling of accomplishment are all fun. They’re enjoyable. They make what could be a dull experience more energizing.
• Motivation – Competition and getting recognition like trophies or the feeling of accomplishment by going for it all feed into motivation to keep going, get better, get stronger, and learn. We are motivated by our desire not only to beat others, but also beat ourselves, in a way that motivates us to do better.
• Socialization – When you are competing with others and against others, you learn to interact in healthy ways. You try to beat someone but then also learn to be friends with them after. You figure out how to be a good winner, how to be polite, and how to treat others with respect.
• Grit – You won’t always win, and that’s a good thing too. When you learn to lose, you learn how to cope with setbacks and overcome them. You get grit. You learn how to pick yourself up and not get discouraged. When we’re too used to things being easy (eg, without competition), we don’t learn these valuable cognitive tools.
• Baseline for Improvement – Often, we need to lose or experience defeat to know how to be better. When we see someone else that excels, it teaches us what we CAN be and pushes us to excel. That requires competition, as activities without a competitive component can make it harder to determine where we are and where others are.
• Handle Pressure – Finally, competition is a good form of stress, and one that can teach us to handle pressure and learn how to withstand challenges and perform under pressure.

Competition is immensely useful. It’s great for development, and continues to be a mentally healthy way to help yourself reach incredible goals. We integrate competition in a controlled, very encouraging way here at Master P’s World Class Tae Kwon Do. Try it out for your child, today.