Resilience
"Life is hard."
"Games and sports are a mini-lesson on life."
"How you play the game is how you play life."
There are a lot of lessons we learn from playing games and sports. I think one of the most influential for me is the ability to be resilient. The thing is I don't even think about being resilient. Most of the time I think that I am not resilient, instead I just cave under the pressure. The truth is, that is not true. Do you know why?
The reason is, I am still standing.
The struggle I was going through, though it may not have turned out like I would have liked, did not kill me.
I am still here, still breathing, and still working. That is the lesson our students can take as the biggest take away from our lessons. When things do not go their way, they are struggling to learn a new skill, they can know that if they just keep trying, just get back up, they are developing the skill of resiliency.
There are two definitions of resiliency. The first one says it is the ability to become strong, healthy, or successful again after something bad happens. Think about that, the life lesson from a tennis match could be you do not play very well, but you decide to put in the work to get better. The bad moment pulled you into getting better.
Sometimes in tennis or life we meet such circumstances that we are pulled, stretched, and bent beyond what we can bear. The second definition of resilience is the ability of something to return to its original shape after it has been pulled, stretched, pressed, bent, etc. That is what we teach our students to do. They have such poise, that no matter how much they are pressed, they always return to their original shape, the same foundation of strokes and attitude that will propel them to not necessarily winning, but living a life of victory.
