How to Compete

By Tim Shriver| CEO and Founder, Dignity.Us

We live in a culture that prizes competition. Siblings compete, sports teams compete, businesses compete, students compete, and of course, politicians compete. If you think about it, we compete all the time—whether we like it or not.

But who teaches us how to compete? Not how to win, but how to compete. Where is the wisdom that teaches us how to have a healthy mindset for competition? A smart way to view your competitor? A strategy for nurturing a self-image that can survive winning or losing? An approach to what the competition itself should reveal?

I’ve spent most of my life watching Special Olympics athletes compete in the healthiest ways.

They’ve taught me that the definition of excellence is doing your best, not being better than others. They’ve taught me that a competitor is a friend whose purpose is to bring out your best, not your enemy whose purpose is to defeat you. They’ve taught me that competition can reveal your dignity but never diminish it. In short, they’ve taught me how to compete while never diminishing the dignity of the other nor ever allowing the competition to diminish your own dignity either.  

Their lessons should matter to all of us, far beyond the playing fields of sport. If we’re all involved in competition, we all would benefit from learning how to compete in healthier ways.

It’s not easy to compete with dignity, but the difference between competing with dignity and competing with contempt makes all the difference.  

Contempt turns competition into a zero-sum game—only winners and losers.

Dignity turns competition into a purpose-driven experience—everyone can improve and get better. Contempt makes competition scary and threatening to one’s self-worth. Dignity makes competition challenging and a pathway to new insights and skills. Perhaps most importantly, contempt makes competition run the risk of shame and exclusion. Dignity makes competition build belonging and mutual respect.

As I thought about these insights, I thought again about our Dignity Voter campaign.  

Dignity voters are all about making politics into a competition of ideas, rather than a stage for shame and humiliation. Dignity voters want to compete when it comes to policies, but they don’t want to humiliate those whose policies differ from ours. They see our current model of political discourse, dominated by contempt and dehumanization, as broken. And they see dignity as the way to change it.  

Does your family talk politics, or has the contemptuous model of political competition made conversation or debate impossible?  

Sadly, many of us have concluded that political contempt has made free speech and substantive debate too risky. So we resign ourselves to a toxic combination of anger toward those we don’t know and muffled resignation when we encounter those we don’t understand. We’re on the verge of resigning ourselves to a model of competition that we too often think of as toxic but inevitable.

We can’t accept that. Contempt is a destructive way to compete. Special Olympics athletes have been teaching me and millions of others that there’s an alternative: compete with dignity. Politics needs their lesson now more than ever.    

So this week, I took a page from my brilliant colleague Tami Pyfer and challenged my family to join the dignity voter movement. Tami’s newly released TED Talk explores the way dignity can not only heal a country but a family too. Click to Watch.

As a tribute to Tami and so many others who have families that have struggled with contemptuous competition, I asked my wife and children to name themselves as dignity voters.  

So here you go: my wife and children—who have many diverse political positions—all joining the dignity voter movement.  

The one thing all of us agree upon is that we’re all dignity voters and we want dignity leaders too.

Fun right? Why not ask your family to do the same—make a video identifying yourself as a “dignity voter” and ask your family members to do the same. Ask your friends to join, and ask your political leaders to join too. Every single one of us has the power to do this. Every single one of us can make a difference, and now is the time to try.

The vast majority of us want more dignity and less contempt. Claiming the identity of a “dignity voter” is a powerful way to act on that hunger. It’s not a small step; it’s the beginning of an empowered majority stepping up and changing the country.

Special Olympics athletes have been showing us how to compete with dignity for more than half a century.

It’s time for the rest of us to join them.

-Tim Shriver

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Join us on October 20th at 7:30 PM ET for an engaging conversation! We’ll share new ways to get involved, hear what you’ve been working on, and keep learning from one another.

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Tami was thrilled to help kick off this year's SHRM Visionaries Summit in Indianapolis, where she participated in the opening conversation with our partner Calandra Jarrell, Global Employee Networks Executive at Bank of America, and Marianne Viray, Executive Director of Disagree Better. The conversation focused on the role disagreement plays in building adaptive, high-performing workplace cultures.

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