It’s the holiday season and whether you travel or stay at home a lot can be happening in your life. Stress comes and goes as we manage tasks in time with problem solving and breathing. Communicating your needs while making sure to take ownership over the things you can control helps you cope with stressors as they arise. Finding balance or levels of cognitive and physical homeostasis free you up to help others near and dear to you. As you learn to be the master of your own domain, things are easier than they might seem they should be.
At times, you may lose control momentarily and your tone of voice plus body language can communicate it. It’s a moment of failure that you must learn from and ask for forgiveness about from those who have been impacted. Stress and emotion take over and you operate out of survival instincts. You can’t get those moments back so you need to reset your attention to what’s important now based on your core principles of your best self. Goals and standards help mobilize effort in the direction you would like to move. The quality of your motivation fed by understanding you have a choice in how you would like to connect and influence others determines the intensity of your effort.
Everyone is seeking self-actualization in a society and culture where we have the freedom of choice. For this, remind yourself to express gratitude and compassion for those without such freedoms. Yet, you must also acknowledge the competitive nature that freedom to pursue dreams and life-long aspirations brings between like-minded people. This is the essence of a opportunistic society and reflected in the autocratic world of athletics as well.
The grand existential philosophy on life centers on two givens for which you can not exactly determine: you are born and you will die. Everything in between those points on your timeline is up for grabs. However, there are a given set of circumstances upon birth for which you must choose to accept or work toward change. Is luck a factor? Perhaps it is however, we may never know until the pursuit toward being the change in the world you would like to see for a reason above and beyond yourself is started.
This brings us back to now. You are here; right where your feet are. Be present with your mind, body, and soul. Everything you are and have worked to become is directed toward expanding the space between stimulus and response. Continue to check-in on your goal progress but then quickly return to now. We find that is the best way to appreciate what you have, where you have come from, and honor those who have come before you. Acceptance and a state of presence brings calm and clarity of mind.
Author: Brian Alexander | Date Published: 12/17/2019
Brian Alexander, MA, CMPC is a mental coach and co-founder of WellU Mental Training. He works with the USA Men’s Water Polo team and in private practice with athletes, coaches, and teams at the youth, high school, collegiate, professional, and Olympic levels in sport. Please visit www.welluapp.com to download the WellU app and start your mental training program.
