Dear Children: What Mommy Has to Teach You About Finishing 2nd.

As many of you know, the last month has been voting time for Circle of Moms Top 25 Canadian Moms. Last year this blog finished in 1st place. I was thrilled, friends, family & fans were thrilled, and my kids..they were PROUD.

Sounds funny but my kids are extremely proud of my website and take every opportunity they can to plug it, to notice when someone is wearing “montrealmom.com colours” and to jump and suggest that I blog about something when we find it great.

My kids fully expected montrealmom.com to finish in 1st place in the 2012 contest as well.

I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t care about finishing 1st, after all, who wouldn’t want to finish 1st? That said, 2nd place in a Top 25 nationwide contest is not a bad place to be and I am proud to be there :).

I like to find teachable moments and I feel that this one’s a biggie.  In a world of stressed-out kids striving for perfection, this is actually the PERFECT opportunity for a little life lesson. I write this as a letter to my children, but we maybe we can all take a little something away from it.

Dear Children,

I saw your faces when you asked whether Mommy finished in 1st place and I told you that I hadn’t. I know that you’re sad and disappointed. Because of that, Mommy would like to explain to you a few things about competition, about where we place and about how we deal with it when we don’t finish 1st.

As you go through life, you will notice there’s a lot of focus on winning and losing. There’s a lot of focus on competition with others- at first other teams, siblings, friends and classmates. As you begin applying to high schools & then university, there is competition to get into the programs and schools you’d like to attend. When school is finished, there is competition against other applicants for jobs and in the workplace, there is often competition with colleagues for promotions. If you have a company of your own, you may have competitors offering a similar product or service.

There is constantly competition and that can often be a healthy thing. Striving to be 1st often makes us practice more, study more, innovate and generally do a better job at whatever it is that we do.  That said, not everyone can finish 1st, and there are lots of good players, students, workers and businesses in the world. That’s when we have to remind ourselves that we have to try OUR BEST.

So when montrealmom.com finished in 2nd place, you didn’t see me cry. You didn’t even see me sad. Did I want to finish 1st? You bet I did. But I asked myself the following:

1. Do I do my best to make the blog a fabulous source of information for moms in Montreal?
2. Did I do my best to let people know that the voting was taking place? 
3. Did I get a lot of support from my family, friends & fans? 
4. Is montrealmom.com still an awesome blog?
5. What do I know about those that came in ahead of me and why that may have happened?
6. Is there anything I can do to make it better next time?

Well the answers to questions 1-4 are YES.

The answer to question 5 is that they are a different type of blog and one that has a much larger following than montrealmom.com as they are not Montreal-focused. Despite the fact that we have a mainly local following, we were still able to keep up, often finding ourselves in 1st place during the voting period and we finished in a very respectable 2nd place. Yay us!  

There are probably a lot of possibilities to answer question 6, but the truth is, I really think that we did the best we could this time around. Maybe that’s why I don’t feel so badly

Mommy wants you to remember: It’s ok for someone else to be in 1st place. We can’t always finish 1st. There will often be others who may be bigger, smarter, better or even luckier than we are, and that’s OK.

BUT- it’s always good to strive for 1st and to improve your skills and yourself as you go for the gold. The important things to remember are that:

• Finishing 1st is NOT everything
• Your growth and improvement as you strive to finish 1st are the real markers of your achievement.
• You should never let trying to finish 1st change who you are or how you treat those around you.
• You should never let finishing 1st change who you are or how you treat those around you.
• For the times that you do feel down about not placing where you would have liked: Remind yourself that you have room to move upwards and go for it!
• So long as you do YOUR best, YOU are ENOUGH and I will always be proud of you.

All said, Mommy’s happy with the way things turned out and I hope that you will be, too.

If you have any more questions about it, please come and speak to me (NOT when I am on the phone, PLEASE) so we can talk about it more

Love always, 

Mommy

On that note I would like to express my sincere gratitude to each and every one of you who have voted and promoted, cared and shared and most of all for stopping by every once in a while to have a little read.

Hoping to bring you more of what you love in the year to come.

With much gratitude,

Tanya