It would be a miracle if you had missed the fact that the Olympic games are on and I’ll tell you, I am hooked. I love the inspirational stories, the underdogs, the people who can’t stop winning, the random sports you never see. It’s brilliant and I am glad that it only comes around every four years otherwise I would be unable to get anything done!
Last night (and the few nights before) I watched Laura Trott become a 4 x Olympic Champion and her fiance, Jason Kenny, become a 6 x Olympic champion. When interviewed Laura thanked her support team, particularly her coach for getting her through the moments when she feels like she can’t do it. She was relaxed, self-deprecating, passionate.
It’s easy to be inspired by sportspeople and Rio 2016 has delivered with bells on, from Michael Phelps (US swimming) who has 23, yes, 23, gold medals, plus another 5 medals in the Olympics alone to the team of refugees competing having overcome adversity that most of us will never know, who were chosen to provide a message of hope.
Finding inspiration
It’s not only Olympians who can inspire, there is plenty of inspiration around us, if only we open our eyes to those people around us in our everyday lives, whom we know, love and trust to those on a TV screen, or radio show, to friends of friends or colleagues or, or, or…(let me know in the comments who inspires you).
Being inspired to make a change can be awesome, we make a decision, go for it and then what? We cycle between feeling on top of the world and feeling like a complete failure much of the time. We forget that these things take time, practice and patience.
I often joke that being a mum has given me more patience and I genuinely believe this to be true, although my partner sometimes disagrees! Now, in the midst of building a business, bringing up two kids and encountering the joy of the summer holidays I am putting my patience into action. In fact, this morning I began a new meditation specifically for patience. It reminded me that we only notice we are not being patient when we are being impatient; when we get caught up in the emotion or thought processes and we try and suppress them.
Sometimes, like an Olympic athlete we need to replay the situation, analyse it, make the necessary changes and move on. We need to appreciate that we will make mistakes, that others may be ‘better’ than us in that moment and that we can give more – or, if we have done all we can, then to accept that.
Success is a few simple disciplines, practiced every day; while failure is simply a few errors in judgment, repeated every day.
—Jim Rohn
Finding focus
It’s easy to focus on the things we aren’t doing, or those that we don’t do as well. To focus on the negative, but, if we do that then we forget about all the positives, all the small, marginal gains that we make everyday. Every step takes us closer to our goal.
Just like the Olympian athletes who missed out on their target, perhaps getting silver or bronze instead of gold or even worse, coming in fourth, with a bit of time and reflection we can see what we have achieved and through patiently getting back to our training or routine we can improve ourselves and perhaps inspire someone else.