When I was younger, I spent many of my days in ice rinks. All four of us in my family played ice hockey and for us not to be in an ice rink was strange back then. We practically lived there and it was ingrained in the routines we made. Many families in our area went to church on Sundays, while we threw the hockey bags into the car and trekked to the next hockey practice or game every Sunday morning. We were, and had learned from a young age, dedicated to this.
As an athlete, no matter the sport, every coach, psychologist, parent, player, and what have you always talks about one of the hardest aspects of the game: the mental game. Even if you don’t play sports, your mental attitude and your approach to things affects how you move about the world. If you keep the rose colored lenses on, pushing them up the brim of your nose to make sure you don’t lose them, you’ll see the world as a luscious oasis of beauty, opportunities, and kindness. And it is, truly, but you can’t go about the world with rose colored lenses all of your life. Sometimes, you have to take them off and see the world for what it is.
It’s a melting pot of the good and the bad. There are aspects of the rose colored lenses’ world that you see, but there are also darker shades of people, places, and feelings. You can’t appreciate the world’s beauty and joy without a little sadness and a bit of a reality check. It’s what makes us grateful, being able to see both sides of a coin. It’s important to find this balance, and that’s where the mental game comes in.
Many a times as an athlete playing ice hockey, the world tries to kick you down when you already feel lower than the ice that you skate on everyday. That’s the point of life: to test you. Life and all of its forever moving cogs want to see how much better you can become when under pressure. The most beautiful things in life are created under pressure. Just take for instance one of the most valuable gems in the world: diamonds. They don’t just magically appear out of nowhere, surrounded by beauty, shiny and unscathed. They have to be under immense pressure to become what they are at the end, when people sit fawning over them in jewelry shops. All that pressure and all that egging on that life seems to throw at us to see how we react is a test: will you come out a diamond, or just be another rock among the rubble?
It’s all a mind game, no matter what field you’re on: the ice, the football field, the street, the classrooms, or in your own house. The world’s hardest game is not one fought with literal weapons, but one that is fought within the confines of your own thoughts. All that you want is just a decision away, but it’s making that decision that’s the hardest. It’s fighting the stress, the opposing forces, the naysayers, and everything else in between. It’s easy to say “yeah, I’m going to do this” but you have to firmly believe that you’re going to do it. You have to work for it, and keep drilling the thought into your mind until it’s second nature. You have to fake it till you make it because eventually, what you’ve been faking for days, weeks, months will become your reality.
It’s hard to combat your own thoughts, but you have to remember the world how it truly is, and that you’re capable of more than your thoughts may let you see at times. We can do so much in this world if we just take what happens to us and use it as a propeller to move forward. The toughest and most damaging situations end up producing the brightest future chapters for us, but you can’t let your mind win. You can’t let the negativity make you lost in the rubble. At the end of it all, you want to be one of the diamonds in the rough, not one of the rocks that people kick to the side. And you will be, if you just believe that you are worth more than all the hurt the world throws at you.
