Competition has always been in my blood. I primarily attribute that to my dad who swam at the state level in high school and always challenged me to compete as a child. Even though my competitive nature has led to plenty of negative situations, I still consider it one of my greatest strengths today.

Competition certainly isn’t something I’ve always seen as a strength. In college, I took my very first StrengthsFinder test and found out that competition is in my top 5 strengths. Up until that point, I had never thought of my competitive nature as a strength. I more just saw it as an attribute of my overall makeup. “Hi, I’m Daniel. I’m from Amarillo, have brown hair, am right-handed, and am competitive.”. Seeing that competition is considered a strength helped me to rethink how I viewed that characteristic. Strengths are traits that we may naturally gravitate toward, but they’re also things that we can sharpen and choose how to employ.

With this new perspective, I started looking at my competitiveness as a tool that I could dial up when it served a situation well. Sports are an obvious example of this, but school and work also presented plenty of chances to tap into my competition strength. When I first started my career in healthcare consulting, the performance statistics for our hire class were public knowledge. This meant I could tap into my competitive nature to motivate myself to higher levels of performance based on the performance of my peers. On the other hand, I also had to be mindful of situations where my strength of competition was the wrong tool to employ. A friendly game of volleyball between casual players? Probably a good time to dial it down. Working with a peer who struggled to grasp a concept and felt they were falling behind? Probably not the best time to point out a difference in our stats.

For those that still see competitiveness as an alpha, douchy trait, let me share a couple of other benefits to the trait:

One, having a competitive streak can make you better at literally everything IF you pair it with a healthy amount of humbleness and maturity. When I was younger, it wasn’t uncommon for me to give in to the urge to be a sore loser mentality and refuse to play something I couldn’t win at. But as I grew older, I started to understand that I wouldn’t be good at everything but I could still “compete” by training to grow personally and beat my own standards day after day. By making competition more so caring about playing a good game versus just winning, it helps me to be more invested in anything I do and to seek to improve.

That leads me to my second point. Competitive people are incredibly easy to motivate. If you want me to be locked into an assignment, literally all you have to do is make it some sort of game or competition. It could be the most menial task imaginable but if it’s a competition, I’ll put forth a maximum effort. Knowing this about myself has helped me to stay motivated throughout my entire career and has helped me motivate others that share that trait.

For all the competitive people out there, I challenge you to see that trait as a strength that can be used or put aside depending on the situation. I also challenge you to learn how to be gracious in defeat. For all those that get rubbed the wrong way by competitive people, I challenge you to embrace that strength a little more and to also extend a little grace to the guy or girl in the office that makes everything a game. Sometimes that’s the only way that they can stay focused.

-Daniel