You should not care whether you win or lose — really!

Our culture is obsessed with winners and losers, with finding heroes, villains, and jokers in every story to entertain us and simplify things. We are also biologically wired to dwell on things that aren’t going well, to notice what is going wrong, not to notice what is going right.

Forget all that! We need to learn to recognize our done-wells, to realize that it is our level of effort and our commitment to improvement and learning that we need to focus on. We should not be obsessed with the fact that someone else did better than we did or that our effort has not yet produced the results we seek. The real “winners” I see around me are giving themselves a break when results fall short, but not giving themselves a break for not giving a full effort. The “losers” are focused (and frozen where they are in life) on worrying only about the things that went wrong and not the effort or adjustment it would take to change their results.

Evaluate yourself often. Am I doing my best? What could I do better? If you do this throughout the day and follow through on the results of that self-evaluation, you are miles ahead of most and you can accept each win or loss with the knowledge that you did your best. It is a great way to operate.

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IBEX Payroll extends our profound respect and immeasurable gratitude to all the ancestors and keepers of the land on whose traditional territories our work takes place. We acknowledge that we are on Treaty 1 territory, the traditional gathering place of the Anishinaabe, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota and Dene people and the traditional homeland of the Métis people. This land is sacred, historical, and significant.

Every time we acknowledge this truth, we have an invitation and an opportunity to reflect on the wrongs of the past, what we do in the present, and what we can do to continually honour the people whose lands and water we benefit from today.

This statement only acts as a first step in honouring the land we reside on and its peoples, and must be paired with education, understanding and informed action.