We all go through times when we have to dig deep within ourselves to know how to stop losing. 2022 humbled many investors and everybody, even me, to not be overconfident and to let things happen. The best thing you can do is to walk away from everything and remain patient.
When times are good, things are great. The 2010 – 2021 bull run created some of the wealthiest people alive today. However, when times are bad, times are bad. The popular saying is that bull markets take the stairs up. Bear markets take the elevator down.
As someone who lost over $100,000 in the 2022 bear market, believe me when I say I know exactly what you’re going through. I never thought that I could lose. However, there were many events throughout the year that crushed my spirits and I had to learn how to stop losing so much.
It is absolutely within your control whether you stop losing and start winning. You are not alone in feeling failures. Many people went through immense failures in their journey to success. It’s one of the things that humbled them and shaped who they are as a person.
If you are not careful, you can put yourself in a losing spiral to never come back. The good news is that there’s always a way out. You are in full control of your life, as long as you take the right steps to get there. Even if it may not seem like it, there’s a way out at the end of the tunnel.
For any setbacks and failures you go through.
How to Stop Losing and Start Winning
Below are the 9 ways on how to stop losing and start winning again, slowly but surely.
1) How to Stop Losing? Walk Away from Everything
Too many people chase losses instead of getting their mentality back to even. When you are losing, you have to walk away from everything and keep a calm mind. Now is not the time to double down. Now is the time to take a step back and evaluate whether you’re doing the right things.
How to stop losing actually requires for you to take a step back. You’re not in the right headspace and mentality right now. I’ve been there. No matter what you try to do, it’s not going to work until your headspace is in the right place.
There are days I just wanted to crawl inside a rock. A deal didn’t work out or a company rejected me for a job I really wanted. Stop and take a step back for weeks and even months. Your mind has a beautiful way of fixing itself.
Our bodies and mentality are more resilient than anyone else ever gives it credit for. However, it can’t heal itself if we don’t give it a chance to do so.
2) Take Time to Recoup and Heal
You can’t keep going and constantly provide value. You need time to recoup and heal because you’ve taken a huge beating. How to stop losing means you have to heal your mentality. Your reality comes from what your mindset, psychology, and mentality is.
The healing doesn’t happen tomorrow nor will it happen in one month from now. It’s going to take time, months, and even years before you make a comeback from the scarring. Take it from me, who’ve lost a lot of things in 2022 and never thought the losing would ever stop.
It took me months of stepping away and recovering mentally from the trauma but I went through it all and came out OK by the end of it all. Take the time to recoup and heal because it will really make a huge difference when going about through your life.
Your life is completely within your control.
3) Leave the Failures Behind
Maybe you lost $50,000 over a year. Maybe you lost a lot of time you poured and invested into a project. Whatever the case may be, leave the failures behind. Don’t dwell on them and think about how to best move forward. How to stop losing means letting go of everything you lost.
You have to truly walk away from those failures because you can’t move forward if you’re dwelling on the past. You will get a chance to move forward again. Dave Ramsey lost everything and went broke by age 28. Then he started over and over again until he achieved success to where he’s at.
I know what you’re feeling. You feel like you can’t learn from your mistakes if you don’t remember your failures. That’s not how it works. You have to completely move away from the past and think about what you’re going to do moving forward.
Your memory is your greatest enemy in this trying time period.
4) Manage Risk Expectations
After losing everything, it really humbles you. You took on a lot of risk because you thought you could manage everything. And you might have been right. But then if you ended up losing, that means you took on more risk than you can handle.
Going forward, it’s time to better assess risk expectations because your life depends on it. Confidence is a great thing. However, confidence without properly assessing risk isn’t the best thing in the world. How to stop losing means managing expectations for the future.
That doesn’t mean avoid risk altogether. You can’t live life without taking on risk. However, it does mean being smarter about the kinds of risk that you take on. Going forward, I personally expect to take on safer investments and taking on safer projects that require less money investment.
There will come a time when I take on riskier investments. However, right now, I’m just worried about rebuilding everything.
5) How to Stop Losing? Shut Off Social Media
People are just on different journeys. The thing about social media is people LOVE to talk about when they won. People do not talk about when they lose. Shut off social media and all of the wedding and engagement announcements. About the new and expensive house or car they just bought.
And just about anything else. How to stop losing means shutting off the ability to compare yourself against others. Even others that you are ahead at, you’re not going to feel better when comparing yourself to them. Shut off the social media and the temptation to compare yourself against others.
Many people lead many unbelievable fake lives that you’ve ever seen. Sam Bankman-Fried is definitely one example who everyone thought was successful but was actually a massive fraud. Social media can only hurt you during this time instead of help you.
You want to slowly build your life over time on your own terms, not anybody else’s.
6) Slowly Take Risks Again
This doesn’t mean go as big as you went before. However, this does mean taking risks again. For me, personally, I took on a six month break from investing. I sold and liquidated everything and kept everything in cash. Even when we had bear market rallies, I didn’t FOMO into those investments.
After the six months was up, I started taking on risk. I started to slowly dip my toe into investing again and dollar cost average back into the market. I didn’t plop every single dollar that I had into the stock market. Instead, I patiently waited until I felt I was ready to do so.
How to stop losing means dipping your toe back into the water after you’ve been burned. When I got into a car accident in early 2022, I didn’t start driving 100% right away. I let the trauma resolve itself before I slowly started doing so.
It will take some time but you will get through it all and be ready to start taking on risk again. Even if it seems impossible right now.
7) Believe You are Worthy of Winning
You took on a lot of risk because you thought you were unbelievably capable of winning. Then everything you thought turned out to be a lie and your entire confidence is now gone. That’s not the right approach to life. You are capable of winning. You ARE a winner.
Winners don’t win 100% of the time. Winners have lost some and won some throughout their journey. How to stop losing means having the belief and confidence that you can win again. It’s not going to happen tomorrow nor will it happen a year from now.
However, the time will come when you have the chance to shine all over again. You didn’t come this far to only come this far. There’s much more game left to play and more opportunities to show the world what you’re made of.
Winners are slowly built over time. Rome wasn’t built in a day. You will be in a position of strength once again.
8) Calm Your Emotions
You will feel the pain of failure for possibly years on end. The psychological trauma that comes with winning doesn’t go away. Therefore, there comes a time when you have to calm your emotions. When you have to get back to a level of neutrality before taking on any new meaningful projects again.
How to stop losing means getting your emotions in check. Emotions can be a good thing but too much emotions can lead to your downfall. We make the worst decisions of our lives when we don’t have our emotions under control. When emotions rule us, bad outcomes happen.
Whenever I felt like I was in a rush to get a new job was when I only got bad job offers. Once I took my time and rejected job offers that weren’t a good fit did the truly great job offers come in. When your emotions are running high, more people will take advantage of you.
That can’t happen when time is on your side in the first place.
9) There is ALWAYS a Path Forward
How to stop losing means believing that there’s always a path forward for you to come out on top. Many people went through worse than what you went through and still came out ahead by the end of it all. Too many people think they can’t make it in life, until they do.
As long as you slowly take the steps to improve your life, everything falls into place. There’s no need to rush your life. Your life is a lifelong project with many ups and downs throughout it all. The true winners aren’t the ones who win when the going is good.
The true winners are the ones who know how to come back after they lost everything. You have to learn how to ignore others and carve down your own path. You are in full control of your life and the hero of your story.
There will always be a way to move forward and you can make it happen.
Knowing How to Stop Losing is Key
There will be periods of your life when you lose. Not a single winner in the world went through life without experiencing setbacks or failures. Mark Cuban’s secretary stole $82k of Mark Cuban’s money in broad daylight. The key is to know how to stop losing so that you can get back to winning.
Even if it doesn’t feel like you can get back on track, you will get back on track as long as you put in effort. We, humans, are optimistic by nature. Therefore, whenever we put in effort to slowly regain our consciousness and a sense of control, can we forge on ahead.
We’ll slowly get back to taking risks, no matter how small or slow we take it. We’ll slowly get back on the road even after we’ve been through a car accident. Trauma is temporary but winners are forever. Even if it seems like the world is ending, the world isn’t ending.
There are many people who came out ahead of the 2007 – 2009 financial crisis fully intact even after they thought their life was over. They’ve been through a layoff and no other firm was hiring at the time. They slowly regained everything they lost and then some in the coming years.
Knowing how to stop losing is the key to regaining control in your life and forging ahead when the world is crumbling down in front of you. The true winners are the ones who know how to turn a failure into a success. And eventually, that’s what you will be.
It just takes a little bit of time and effort.
How to Stop Losing: Shortlist
- Walk away from everything
- Take time to recoup and to heal
- Leave the failures behind
- Manage risk expectations
- Shut off social media
- Slowly take risks again
- Believe you are worthy of winning
- Calm your emotions
- There is ALWAYS a path forward
