What is the Quality of Your Mind (in Sports) ?
The reasons why we wake up early, face traffic, negotiate around various social gatherings and raise above seemingly endless work pressure to have our daily dose of sweat are many, but one thing unites us all on this pursuit as we attempt to improve ourselves through Sports: to take our Bodies to new places we must also take our Minds.
From my experience over the last +15 years of training and racing in multiple disciplines (from Shaolin Kung-Fu to Hawaii’s IRONMAN) I’ve learned that this often neglected component of Sports activities deserves way more attention that it presently gets.
As we go about things in our daily lives, we tend to utilize a very partial level of awareness allowing for the real motivations of our actions, desires and “inner-works” of our minds to remain hidden, going unexamined, and therefore free to undergo many types of derailments.
The catch here is that by not being fully aware of the Quality of our Mind we tend to act in ways that are not aligned with our true Self and can be potentially targeted against our best interest.
This lack of awareness can be considered as a root cause for all sorts of negative emotions (read: anxiety, anger, fear) and also as one of the reasons why we inflict violence against ourselves, taking us as far from the initial idea of personal improvement as we could get, stuck with injury, depression and frustration.
In Sports, as it is in life, it is extremely important that we examine ourselves before acting so as to avoid the “backfiring” of these actions.
EXAMPLES (of questions I rarely see being asked with truthfulness):
“I want to run a MARATHON this season, but are my bones even dense enough to withstand the pounding of 42Km on pavement? How about my tendons and ligaments? Can the fitness and enjoyment I seek be reached more safely this time by going for a Half Marathon?”
“I want to do an IRONMAN next season, but I have no time to work on my Swim form and my lower back gets tighter every minute that I am on the Aero position … should I maybe do it in a couple of years (or longer) from now so that by then my Swim is better and I finally get on with those Yoga classes?”
These type of question allow us to understand where we stand in the first place. It is only when we know EXACTLY where we stand that we can make the right decisions.
With a deeper level of awareness, actions can then become equipped with correct knowledge and this is the very duo that what allows us to go to and beyond our goals.
Having said all this, we can see clearly the importance of understanding the Quality of our Mind, specially in the midst of all media hype, peer pressure and an increasingly competitive and over-exposed society.
If we fail to watch ourselves, if we fail to become the observers and to find our inner truth, going beyond distractions, we end up complacent and only reactive to agendas that are not ours — an ill fated path — sending all our efforts down the drain.
