What game do you play in life?
To clarify my question, maybe I start with a little story of mine.
I felt sick and very sorry for myself since yesterday. I am having another painful urinal infection, my body is weak, the cold sore on my lips is so big it is now preventing me to talk or eat properly. Things been going so well before. Now it seem to me that my immune system is non-existent, my body is refusing any kind of chemical intervention, my mum is frustrated that she is far away and can’t help and I am feeling useless and not equipped to deal with even a little sign of stress or a pressure of any kind.
So here I am, feeling fear of failure in my beautiful new born business as a Social Enterpreneur. I fear I will have to go back to a horrible 9-5 corporate job that brings me lots of money, but makes me feel miserable and is a complete manifestation of a sell-out to all my dreams.
Thanks to a call with my friend, something has been revealed and I remembered the episode from the old days. I used to play tennis for more than a decade when I was a child growing up competitively. Hours of blood, sweat and tears every day.
There was a lot of discipline and pressure we’ve experienced as children. I was the ‘lucky one’ as my dad didn’t used to smack me – I saw parents shouting on their kids often and got smacked directly on the court in front of my eyes.
My dad used to say to me: “Just go there, do your best and enjoy yourself – you don’t have to win”. Then I saw him chain-smoking – total bundle of stress and nerves behind the fence arguing with my mum who never wanted to join us for this reason.
It was horrible, the anxiety and pressure I had to go through! I felt my arms and legs are tight up in nots and nothing was going the way I wanted. I wasn’t able to communicate, I didn’t understand at the time, I was just doing what I had to do.
I used to pray for the rain, so we don’t have to play and can just be like friends messing about with each other not like enemies going on court playing against one another… At the tournament draw, I wished to chose the No. 1 – the best player to play against in the first round so I can lose quickly, justifying I lost against the best player, so I am not a dissapointment and get the hell out of there to avoid further suffering.
Today I saw clearly how I play the game of life and in my journey of motherhood/new business I am trying to set up. It is exactly the same thing and I am setting myself up for the failure here, so I then can be right about my story of not being good enough, not being ‘the one’. I can then justify it all and get out of the game completely with relief I no longer need to play and… suffer!
Changing the State of Mind during the Game
There was one match that was very different when in fact, I managed to turn around the whole game from losing hopelessly to winning the whole thing with velocity and ease against the No. 1 player in my country at that time.
My friend, who lost with her the match before, advised me to distract her and so losing 1:5 in the first set, I squatted down and started tying up my shoe laces.
What I really did was I changed my state of mind, we sometimes say, I changed who I was being in this situation and somehow, in that moment I created what I believe must of been some form of higher state of consciousness. I remember it vividly. It was like being in the dream, like it wasn’t even me. No strategy, no thinking, no noise, no emotions, just flow.
I was 100% here and now on the court and win was not what I tried to do, victory was what I was being as the most natural thing… and the rest simply followed and it really was simple!
I Know How to Win the Game
As a natural outcome, I won the match with an absolute ease with No. 1 player in my country that was taller, older and much stronger built than little me those days.
She was the one training in Bollettiery tennis school in America. In my small town we had only 5 tennis courts. I always had a faith and unconditional love of my dad, my ‘brutal’ coach demanding discipline and hard work, who was like a second father to me all those years. He also liked to laugh and enjoy a beer on the hot summer day.
I prepared a massive surprise to him, to my parents and lots of spectators I then found behind the fence around this ordinary tennis court that became the place of an extraordinery event of my life I can draw from now as an adult. I realised I have a choice now to apply it to all areas of my life…
I have already experienced this. I know how to win in life! I know how beautiful the victory feels like. I know how to generate this state, in fact, through yoga, life experiences and my personal development education as a coach, I know it very well.
What if I play my games of life in this state? What if I allow this experience to live through me again? What if I no longer see/hear ‘spectators’, there is no time pressure, what if I don’t care about the result or what happens after? Confidence and joy that happens inside of ‘being a winner’.
Here is what my friend Peter Sage shares with us:
So what games do you guys play in your life and what matters to you most right now, so if you have a magic wand, you use it to make this wish come true?
Please, share with us!
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