SPEAKER_01 0:07

Okay now. Welcome. Welcome back to the sweet spot, everyone. Today is Wednesday on the sweet spot. But it's not just any Wednesday, like I like to say. It's Win It All Wednesday and Wisdom on Wednesday. The reason I'm saying Win It All Wednesday and Wisdom on Wednesday is that we have had the blessing, sweet spotters, of having my wife, Darcell Dillard Sweet, be our guest this week. We're trying something new here. We're allowing guests to come on the sweet spot and bless us with their wisdom. And so, Darcell, you have done a bang up job on Monday and Tuesday. Of course, we expect no less from you. You're Darcell. You're amazing. You're extraordinary. This is what you do. You are the definition of winning as far as I'm concerned. I've always known you to be a winner. And you certainly made a winner out of me. So I'm grateful that you're here. Happy Wednesday, Darcell.

SPEAKER_00 1:06

Happy when it all Wednesday to you and sweet spotters out there listening. Delighted to be back. Woohoo!

Why Winning Is More Than Scores

SPEAKER_01 1:13

All right. So I'm Dr. Derek Sweet, as you know. I'm a born certified psychiatrist. I'd like to say that because people need to know who you are and why are you talking about science and why are you talking about success and why are you talking about the mind and soul and all that stuff? I work with elite performers and I really enjoy just interacting with folks about this whole thing we call life. It's such a mystery, such a journey. Today's Win It All Wednesdays, Wisdom on Wednesday. And Darcell, we're going to focus on winning for a minute. In my work, winning is so important. I'm in sports, as you know, and winning is critical in sports. But you know what I'm finding, Darcell, is that winning isn't only about the box score, it isn't only about the outcome of the game. Increasingly, what I'm finding is that to win, you have to think like a winner, you have to behave like a winner. I think there's a quote that you have to expect to win. And not only that, Darcell, I have found that even when you lose, as in lose the game, you are still a winner. You're not a loser, you're a winner. And and just taking that in and understanding that sort of identity is super important here at the sweet spot. So, with that said, how do you view winning? What does winning, the concept of winning, mean to you?

SPEAKER_00 2:55

Well, we all grow up wanting a gift. It happens on your birthday, it happens at Christmas, it happens at Hanukkah. Different cultures celebrate differently, and there are gifts involved in some of those celebrations, Dr. Sweet. So, what I think about winning, there's a reward, there's a consequence of getting something good, there's a betterment, a benefit. Winning means getting something. Now, when you talk about sports, when you win in sports, someone had a higher score that gave them the trophy or gave them that game, and they were able to put a W in that column. And as you talk about the person who didn't have as many points, they might have the L, but they still won in that they gave their all and they competed and they too scored. They may not have had the winning score on the board that gave them the outcome of the W, but it gave them points. So when I think of winning, I think of gathering my points, gathering my rewards, gathering my gifts. I get something out of it. Sometimes winning means sitting back and just being bathed in the successes of your family, of your friends, of those around you. Getting out of high school is a win. Graduating is a win. Getting your driver's license for the first time, if you're 16 or 18, whatever years it is. I have some girlfriends who got their license way later in life. But that was a win. So on this Wednesday, we got a lot of winning that we've all done. It's exciting.

Expanding Wins To Everyday Life

From Worldview To Winning Identity

The Lost Cross And Letting Go

SPEAKER_01 4:55

I like it. I like the fact that you're taking not, you're taking winning beyond just coming first in the race. Right? Like I a lot of in sports, it's like who's gonna win the game, who's gonna be first, who's gonna be second, and who's gonna be third. I like the idea of you changing it around to gathering my rewards, whatever my rewards are. And if that means that my brother or my sister or my family or my friends are winning, that's something too. That's that's also amazing. And I think that that's what makes a winner a real winner, is that they actually want you to win. When you want somebody else to win as well. But we live in a really weird time where it's win-lose so much for so many people. Like, and they don't see the things that you just mentioned as wins. They don't see waking up in the morning as a win. They don't see being able to jump on the train and ride into the city with your legs and your arms working as a win. They don't see those things as wins. And I wonder how do we, how do we get there? How do we how do we get to the place that we are no longer just watching who's first, second, and third to be a win? And how do we identify as a winner? How does one, and I want to throw that to you because I don't really have a great answer for that. How does one become a winner in their mind? How do they take on a winning identity even if things aren't working out? Maybe they don't make a lot of money, maybe they're not a professional athlete, maybe they're not, they never came first, second, or third in anything. How do I still wake up and feel that I'm a winner when I don't have accolades or rewards or points that I can see or that are tangible?

Micro Wins, Resilience, And Grief

SPEAKER_00 7:00

I I think it goes back to you and I've talked about this, your worldview. And when you look at the worldview of stuff, we as humans collect a lot of stuff. And some of that stuff has a real sense of pride to it, it has a memory attached to it. Lose it, lose that teddy bear, lose that blanket, lose that ring. I have a cross, as you know, that I absolutely love. And I cannot find it right now. And it's just one of those beautiful pieces of jewelry that I misplaced. And so I know it's somewhere in this house. I know it's somewhere close by. So a win for me was to give up worrying about it, give up looking for it, give up feeling so disheveled and out of place and out of source because it wasn't in my presence. So sometimes the win is an attitude check and an attitude adjustment to fix your mind around the success of having the peace of mind. That's the win. So once I just stop worrying about it, the win for me is at some point it may show up, but I have to give up the discomfort, the discombobulation, the whole idea of, oh, I can't find, I can't find, I can't find it. You've heard me kind of complain about it. So the win now is take a step back. Now, we may not even associate a lot of these normal day life activities and these things as wins, but we need to adjust our attitude and think about these small steps. And Dr. Sweet, you talk about this on a sweet spot all the time. The one step, the small step. So, yeah, winning isn't always the first place situation or game. It's waking up every morning in the game of life and winning the moment, winning the peace of mind, winning the adjustment. You're in sports. They make an adjustment, they go back to the bench, the coach stops, does a different play, shifts things around, throws the other team off. All of a sudden they're banging out three pointers, they get ahead again, somebody else does the same thing on the other team, but somebody walks away with an adjustment that can shift one way or the other. And even that action, we go back to planning and action, it's a win because your attitude allowed you to create a new step. That's a win. I hope I answered your question.

Pressure, Control, And Possibility

Acceptance, Adaptation, And Closing

SPEAKER_01 9:39

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, I get it. I get it. I had to, I was tracking, I had to follow you because you move really quickly and you're dropping these pearls of these. Well, it well, this is wisdom, right? This is wisdom on Wednesday. So we're talking to the queen of wisdom on Wednesday here on Win It All Wednesday on The Sweet Spot. If you just tuned in, you're listening to The Sweet Spot. I'm interviewing Darcell Dillard Sweet on this week on The Sweet Spot, where we're really gleaning wisdom from our guest, our very first guest for seven days on The Sweet Spot. And Darcell, I just wanted to once again compliment you on being able to expand my thinking about winning. You actually made me think about this. You said that if you lose something, like you lost your gold chain or your cross chain, that the win would be to give up worrying about it. And I would never have attached losing and winning in the same moment with that. Like that is just super brilliant to me. And I don't just say this because you're my wife and I want you to cook a really good dinner for me later tonight. I mean, I'm just kidding. But no, I'm not. But no, but that's a great point. That sometimes when we lose something, the win, there's an opportunity to win or be a winner in the middle of that losing. And that just made me exhale. It made me think about how you can process disappointments and setbacks. So, like I can be disappointed by something, and the win might be that I don't let this carry over into my relationship, that I don't make Darcell's life miserable tonight because I had a bad day, or I don't allow myself to get into bad habits because things aren't working out for me. I don't see, and getting back to your point about the worldview, I don't let my worldview cave in just because I lost. Now, I'm not saying that you shouldn't feel the feelings, that we're human and we should feel the feelings. And I, and believe me, when you lost that gold chain that that means so much to you, I felt your pain because you made it clear to me every single day about this thing, and you're still on the hunt for it. But what I'm grasping is that the peace that you mentioned, that you can have peace in the middle of loss. And some of us have lost loved ones. You've lost your parents, you've lost brothers, I've lost my dad and my dear pastor, Pastor Sam, you know, our pastor. We've lost a lot of friends and people along the way. And that doesn't feel like a winning moment. It never does to me. But the the win might be that we carry them in spirit, the win might be that they would want us to move on, carry on, and the win could be that all the all the love and the compassion that they showed us is still alive in in the moments that we remember them and we think about them. And so, yeah, thank you so much for connecting dots about winning, and that there are these micro wins that you can have inside of what looks like loss. And and for me, that is absolutely huge. I think of athletes, for example, who have lost a game. And it was a really big game to lose. Sometimes they're the reason they they they see themselves as the reason that the team lost. They might have missed the last shot or created an error in the game and the team doesn't win. How do you say a winner in that, right? You you don't let the loss become your identity, is what you're saying. And you find a way in the middle of that loss to understand that you're still a whole person, you're still of value, and that losing teaches you perseverance, it teaches you patience, it teaches you resilience. I mean, we don't want to go through these lessons. I don't want to, but they make us stronger.

SPEAKER_00 13:57

Well, there's a lot of pressure to win in our society. There is a lot of power in winning in our society. So that's why I talk about looking at the other side of that. Take that pressure off. That's the win. Take the attitude check off that I must be in power here. I must be in control. I mean, you and I know all about the control freak thing that we do in this house. So even giving up the control could be a win because then you used to say to me many years ago in a class we took, what would be possible? What would be possible if I could give up needing these accolades, needing to be on top all the time. In sports, unfortunately, there is a W and an L. That's just the whole system. But you're better for it. Your team excels year after year after year. You fill gaps and fix changes and you grow. That's a win, the growth. So you're right, Dr. Sweet. There's a lot to be said about the pressure of winning, and there's a lot to be said about the attitude of just accepting whatever that win is.

SPEAKER_01 15:12

Absolutely. Acceptance and adaptation. I'm taking those two away, Darcell, as we end our talk here on Wisdom on Wednesday and Win It All Wednesday, that we can adapt. That in the middle of what's not working, we can be adaptive. And that's something you talked about, adapting to what's going on and learning to accept also. Acceptance has a power. And so, not that we are being passive, but we we start with acceptance because from that place we can build other things. So, Darcell, thank you for being such revelatory light. This wisdom on Wednesday, this winner Wednesday. Thank you for your your constant, just brilliant insights. And I gotta tell you, you I might be out of a job if we keep going. I may not want you to come back tomorrow because you're just too smart. I'm kidding. Tomorrow is uh trust yourself, Thursday, and we need you back here. We've got to complete this week. Will you will you be back tomorrow?

SPEAKER_00 16:15

I'm happy to join you tomorrow, Dr. Sweet. So thanks again, everybody. We appreciate all of our listeners. Thank you so much for having me today.

SPEAKER_01 16:22

All right, everyone. Thank you for joining the Sweet Spot. If you're interested, uh you can subscribe to the Sweet Spot. It is absolutely free. There is no charge whatsoever to subscribe. But if you if you know somebody who might benefit from this and who you think could uh maybe find some value in hearing about winning through adaptation, winning through acceptance, and and winning through being able to metabolize loss in a different way, uh send it over to them. And we'll see you tomorrow. Bye bye.