I have been fortunate to have witnessed beautiful calm in one of the most
unsuspecting places ~ on the volleyball court. It was with awe that I watched a team move through each
point with such ease. The battle included errors and lost points, perfection
and exceptional plays, yet on one side of the court, it was void of mental
digression and excessive celebration.
Daniel Kahneman’s (winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics)
Regression to the Mean Theory states that although there is the belief that
punishment improves performance and praise potentially hurts performance, the
reality is that regardless of praise or punishment, the natural tendency is to always
move back towards your mean performance level thus only giving the illusion
that the outside influence actually had an impact one way or the other. With
performance at an athlete’s peak being extremely difficult to maintain over the
course of a battle as is evidenced by this theory, this would suggest that it is
the basic play, the point-by-point seemingly un-dynamic work that truly wins
the game. This made me wonder then if the mental surge of celebration during
battle would then be as detrimental to an athlete’s performance as the mental
digression that an error causes. A
true warrior has no time in the midst of battle to celebrate or mentally
digress without the threat of being killed. However, on the volleyball court to
be able to stay on task with little to no mental flux, patiently dedicated to
your system regardless of great plays, errors, and the score until the battle
is won is extremely rare, yet that is what the winning team displayed
throughout the tournament I was at.
So then, how is this applied to life? Although our life is not usually looked
at as a battle, it is the everyday tasks that are the core of whom we are and
what we do. It is the bulk of our
life. It is the mean that we
regress to on a daily basis, yet most of us drudge through wishing that we had
more to celebrate and we yearn for the few moments of extreme celebration that
we experience so sporadically in life which causes us to see our everyday mean
as not good enough or deprived of joy. Then there are those who seem to always be in the midst of
the mental calm that was displayed during “warrior” volleyball, enjoying life
to the fullest regardless of the situations around them. The beauty I see and what I witnessed is
the TRUTH that through PRACTICE, this FLOW can be obtained on the court and in
everyday life so we feel joy in EVERYTHING we do. Are you willing to see the beauty in your everyday tasks that
propel you through life?
