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It’s sports day at my children’s school today. The school has put on non-competitive sports in the past but have now returned to a more competitive kind of sports day. Who is right? Should sports be non-competitive? What about those who are no good at sports?

Well my own feelings are that sports day should be competitive and it’s up to the school to do it properly so that those who find sport difficult understand that taking part is still very important.

I think I have quite a unique perspective on all this because I’m someone who struggled with sport at school for quite a while. You see I was always pretty average at sport in the my primary school and I was still very happy just taking part. I hadn’t yet learned that sport was supposed to be all about winning. Then at secondary school (High school) I was ill for quite a while and I ended up rubbish at sport. Sports day became a very bad day for me – struggling to finish races at the back. I stopped trying. It wasn’t until the very end of my school sports career that I managed to pull things back a bit and started to push the winners (although I never actually won).

It is possible to learn a lot from such experiences. It is important to understand what competition is and how to handle it. It’s important for winners and losers.

However, I do believe that children need to be helped to understand what I think is the golden rule of sport.

“It’s not whether you win or lose it’s how you play the game”.

Sport can teach you what it’s like to win and what it’s like to lose but above all of this it can teach you the pride of having done your best. We all need to learn that there are always going to be people who can better us at one thing or another. This doesn’t make us failures as people it tells us that we should be proud of ourselves for everything we achieve.

I admire people who overcome great odds to achieve things – sometimes things that I might take for granted. Those who battle disability to walk or talk, etc. show great determination and effort. It doesn’t matter that in a straight walking race I could probably beat them (I was a race walker for while by the way) but it does matter than they are winners in life because they did their best.

So I say children should learn about competition and especially what it means to compete against yourself. Those who struggle with sport (like those who struggle with anything) should be shown that when they make an effort everyone appreciates them taking part and if no one ever does notice their effort they will at least be able to have some self pride in knowing that it wasn’t winning or losing that mattered but how they played the game.

This is one of those months where everything seems to get tough: the weather is bad, summer seems a long way off, winter colds are hitting you hard. It would be easy now just to give up. This is why it is so important to keep going.

What really makes the difference between a success and a failure often comes down to simply keeping going.

At that very moment when you feel like giving up, others on the same journey will feel like giving up as well. What makes you different (and hence a success) is that you are not going to give up. Let other people give up but not you. Walk past those who are sitting down and giving in. You feel the same pain and experience the same feelings of doom that everyone else feels but you are not going to give up.

If you must then plan in a time of retreat or relaxation but make sure you have a plan for afterwards.

Now is the time to dig out all those dreams you once had and to renew them. Feel the power of them again.

Come on it’s time to get going. It may be tough and hard. Just take one step at a time. Slowly are carefully push your way forward and keep going. You are on your way to success!

Do you want to be successful? Are you successful now? What are you doing to make yourself more successful? It can take quite a long time for a plan to come together and during that time you need to be persistant. However if you keep doing the same thing over and over again then you will only ever get the same results. If you want something different to happen in your life then you need to do something different.

This is such a simple, yet important, rule that you ought to commit this one to memory.

Let’s say you want to be more successful in life. Well you will only get to be more successful if you do something different.

Let’s say you want a better relationship with someone else. If you always treat that person the same then you will always get the same kind of relationship.

Let’s say you want to get fitter. If you only ever take the same exercise that you always take then you will stay at the same level of fitness.

Let’s say you want to lose weight. If you always eat the same kinds of food that you do now then you will always be the same weight (or greater).

Let’s say you want to win a race. If you do the same things that you do now in a race then you will continue to come in the same position.

People who don’t get this basic rule tend to talk a lot about luck. They will say that they will win or be more successful if they can get lucky. They look at others and comment on how lucky those people are to be successful. Luck has nothing to do with it – they are doing something different.

So when you know what you want to do make sure you have a plan to do it and if that plan does not work then change it. If your new plan is less successful you can always return to the first or try another way again. But if you always do the same thing you will always get the same result.

Quote

I demand more of myself than anyone else could ever expect.
Julius Irving

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Overview

What an exciting men’s final to the tennis yesterday. Five sets fought to the very extreme. How does anyone win in such a game? I will tell you what I think.

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Quote

‘It was a high counsel that I once heard given to a young person, “Always do what you are afraid to do.” ‘
Ralph Waldo Emerson

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I love to learn new things and I always have several books on the go at the same time. However I could know everthing about the world and still not be a success. There are some very clever people who never ‘make it’ as well as very talented people who stay in the same job for their whole lives. Some are like this because they chose to be but there are many more who were never successful. Why is this?

One of the reasons is that they never put what they know into action.

It’s better to have a bad plan in action than a good plan in a drawer.

What I mean is that the best plans in the world won’t help you if you never put them into action. So by all means plan but make sure your focus in on action rather than planning.