Photo courtesy of Stefan Schranz
Have you ever experienced the great disappointment of losing a friendly match of basketball, baseball or even hockey and not being able to get over it? Of course, you wouldn’t fall into a depressive mood, but you might become irritated, anxious or even positively aggressive towards the winning team or your own team? If sport is turning you into that kind of person, it’s time to step back out of it and to accept that performance is not everything that matters in life, especially in sports activities. It is likely that people won’t love you more or less if you win or lose a friendly match. It’s a common misconception to believe that what matters in sports is to win. But it’s a difficult task to stop being a sore loser and recognizing the other advantages of sports activities. So before it is too late and starts eating your life will out of your mind, here is a little guide on why sport is good regardless of whether you are a winner or a loser. Indeed, everyone wins with sports, and here’s how they do it!
Channel The Power Of Positive Sucking
First of all, it’s important to get something out of the way as early as possible in this article: Failure is normal. Here you have it; failure is a natural part of life. You don’t succeed at everything, and you will probably fail at different levels every day, whether it is because you didn’t get the job you wanted or because you put too much sugar in your coffee. The problem with failure is not the fact that it happens – deal with it: It happens to everyone and that includes you – it is the way people deal with it. Most individuals have a tendency to react badly to failure – again, this is also a natural response, as people rarely jump with joy when they lose – and to focus only on the negative side of things. In truth, many surround themselves with pure negativity once they’ve encountered a failure. Instead of this, it would be more effective to create a bubble of positive sucking. In short, this means that you sometimes suck, and while losing is not great, that shouldn’t condemn you to days, weeks or months of imaginary dark and rainy clouds. For a start, you should remember that failure is part of your road to success, it’s nothing more than one of the steps that will lead you to success. While it is good to focus on the failure look enough to learn your lesson and identify what went wrong – Was it lack of practice? Lack of knowledge? Stress-related? Poor equipment? Lack of time? – it’s equally important not to linger on the bitter taste of failure. Yes, you lost, get over it and embrace it! Not every failure is negative: Sometimes losing can have some hidden advantages too, such as not getting the job you wanted and discovering that there’s an even better job closer from you, for example. Admittedly not everything works out as positively as this, but you should make it a daily practice to look for the small wins in everything. So, if you lost that friendly basketball match, at least you’re getting fit and having a drink with your pals, and that’s a good thing too!
Learn To Enjoy Yourself
If you’ve heard Louis Prima singing “Enjoy yourself it’s later than you think”, you probably know where this is going. There is nothing positive in picture your own death, but this helps you to review your priorities in life. Was that friendly match really so important? Probably not, and as a result of this, losing it doesn’t matter. What matters is to have had fun as you played, and this is the same argument for any sports activity. You should focus on the fun aspect of it, whether you are running for a ball with the team or working out as a solo jogger on the road, having a great time should be the priority. There is no room for guilt feeling about not hitting the performance you were dreaming of: Firstly, because you might reach it in future, and secondly because it is pointless to repeatedly perform an activity that just leads you to feel ashamed and guilty. Enjoy the freedom of sports and the direct and honest social behaviors about it. Look at all the little pleasures derived from a sport, whether it is the joy of belonging to a team or the excitement of using a great equipment, like for example www.thebaseballdiamond.com/drop-3-baseball-bats for baseball players who can take great pleasure in handling a beautiful bat that is rated for an optimal Batted Ball Coefficient of Restitution for example. Holding one of these babies is guaranteed to make you feel fantastic if you’re into playing baseball, just like getting a world-famous racket brands can be the highlight of your tennis match, even if you don’t win. Besides, if you think about it, the vocabulary you use when you talk about sports gives you an obvious clue about how to think about it: You play a game of hockey, or tennis, or basketball, etc. It’s all about playing! Unless you are doing this as a professional career, sports activities should keep their playfulness at all times. There are enough things in life that you can take seriously, you don’t need to add sport to the list. Take it easy, it is, after all, just a game!
Release Pressure
Everyone suffers from daily stress in life, whether it is at work, in their relationships, or even with friends. You can read about it on http://www.stress.org/daily-life/, to find out that more and more people have difficulties releasing their stress hormones. Stress hormones come from a biochemical response that your body makes to a stressful situation. Meditation and medication are two ways to overcome the problem and feel less daily pressure. But sport is by far the easiest and safest way to increase your production of stress hormones and reduce the tensions that can build up due to stress. In short, you should be grateful for sports activities because they can help you to relax from your everyday pressure, at least they can if you are not set on winning at all costs.
