While competitiveness certainly has advantages, too much competitiveness has been tied to significant psychological drawbacks. Psychologically, hyper-competitiveness can be defined as “an indiscriminate need to compete and win (and to avoid losing) at all costs.” Hypercompetitive people can push themselves to take on too many roles and tasks, ultimately resulting in falling short of their goals as well as over-expending time and effort. Intensely competitive people also tend to have poor interpersonal relationships — an intuitive observation borne out by research.
When we think of competition, we often think first of sports, or perhaps of overtly competitive and adversarial fields such as law or finance. The truth is that competition is everywhere, in academic, social, professional and family settings alike. If you understand the psychology of competition, you have a deeper, more nuanced understanding of human behavior and motivation, and that has practical applications everywhere.
Anne: What if these kids are not their labels? Instead of buying into any labeling that is done to these kids, what if we could ask questions instead? Let’s talk for a minute about questions. I love the description of question that Gary gives: A question is not a statement with a question mark at the end of it. A question is a question. Unlike what we are taught at the school, the purpose of a question is not to find “the right answer”. The purpose of the question is to create awareness.
Dain Heer : The question is the key to opening other doorways of possibilities.