4 ways sports allows you to prioritize your values and live them out in your behaviour.
Where are you aiming?
Imagine an archer stepping up to the line, taking precise care in every element of preparation to let the arrow fly to the target, but then aiming in the exact opposite direction.
The example gives us a clear lesson. It doesn’t matter how much care we take in ANY activity if we aren’t aiming in the right direction. The Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle taught us to focus carefully on this important point.
One thing I loved teach my former university students and my current coaching clients is this truism from Aristotle: If your aim isn’t true your intentions aren’t going to matter to the outcome.
How do sports give us purpose?
One of the reasons the Ancient Greeks praised sports was precisely their ability to concentrate our aim into a deeper purpose.
In sports, an individual trains their mind, body, and spirit to appreciate the role of sacrifice and struggle to transcend past limitations. Sports gives us goals to aspire towards and a journey to accomplish them. When we focus solely on the journey it becomes clear how the outcome orients our lives in deep ways.
If you badly want to reach a goal you begin to remove all the things in your life that don’t help you reach it.
Reordering Priorities
One of the ways you see your purpose coming through in your actions is what you prioritise.
If you truly cared about something, you would do it. Too often in the world today we praise people who talk a great game but who never follow it through with consistent action. Action is what separates the ‘talkers’ from the ‘doers’
Here are 4 ways sports allows you to prioritize your values and live them consistently.
Way 1: Time Management
The first way is the most obvious.
If you have a competition on the calendar or a weekly game where you’re counted on to perform, you will order your time around training and performing. Late night binging on TV doens’t help you get out of bed to hit that early morning training session so you cut out that habit to get more sleep. You begin to notice how much time you waste throughout the day and week because you have real need for that time.
Playing sports allows you to clearly see what’s a good use of you time.
Way 2: Accountability
The second way is pretty straightforward.
Playing sports makes you accountable to your word and to others. There’s a pressure to perform that keeps you training, you don’t want to let yourself or your teammates down. Fear of embarrassment and shame inspire you to push harder and finish what you started.
Because of public performance, sports force us into an arena where we can’t hide from our commitments.
Way 3: External Motivation
The third way is a strong force, even if we’d rather not admit it.
External pressures such as money help orient your priorities. It costs money to sign up for races and local leagues, buy equipment and gym memberships for training, and travel for competitions. When you invest something like time and money into ANYTHING you will be hungry to make good on that investment.
It’s important to use every bit of fuel possible to keep this fire inside your burning bright.
Way 4: Internal Motivation
The final way sports help you find the right priorities is by engaging your internal motivation.
This is the promise you made to yourself. This is your WHY; the reason to you want to struggle towards a physical goal. Even if you could save face in front of everyone else, you’ll always know inside yourself that you didn’t give it everything you said you were.
When you have to keep a promise to yourself that matters to your identity, who you are, then it’s easy to get rid of the things that won’t help you become accountable to yourself.
Takeaways
When you aim properly and use sports for their correct purpose they become powerfully orienting activities.
They keep you on a dedicated path. They help you identify what matters and what can’t go. They afford you the opportunity to live your values instead of just talking about them.
Now that you understand where you should be aiming it’s up to you to determine the 4 ways for yourself.
If you struggle to keep your word and live by the values you wish, it’s time to see how sports can offer a different path to grow into the best person you can become.