A few quick questions to all soccer parents…
How real are you? How much of your life do you pretend or make up? Are you living your life to express your authentic self?
Are you chasing your own dreams and trying to reach your own potential?
Have you ever stopped and wondered why your energy levels are always zapped and diminished?
Version 2.0
As soccer parents we need to create the best possible version of ourselves so we can contribute and make a difference to our family and inevitably the soccer world.
If you deny your best version…if you deny your dreams and goals…you are doomed. You will become unhappy for the rest of your life. Your life will lack the vitality and energy your children desperately seek in you.
Vitality
The ancient Greeks made this point of wisdom a long time ago…
“Know Thyself”
Vitality and energy is received through discovering yourself…your real SELF.
Today…psychology has come a long way. Psychologists like Maslow have changed the way we think about humans. We’ve moved away from the “empty canvass” idea and have realised that genetics give rise to our uniqueness and to some extent…our potential. Big emphasis on “some”.
We do not enter the world with instincts. We cannot run, jump or even hope like some animals…we develop.
We learn how to become human…
How to become ourselves…
How does this relate to kids soccer and you- the soccer parent?
All this relates to the energy and vitality you bring to an environment or a situation. It relates to your sense of vitality.
If you want to sap your energy levels and reduce the vitality in your life here’s a quick solution…try become someone else!
Try and fit in and conform to the mold that someone else has given you. School, main stream media, culture, religion, Hollywood and the television creates the mold. If you succeed in fitting the mold, you will fail at being you and you will inevitably suffer an identity crisis. You will lack the vitality needed to enjoy life.
Are you living your dreams…living with vitality or simply working 9 to 5 humping some job?
Synthetic Manufactured Life
Another great way to deplete your energy levels and reduce your vitality is to try to be what you are not.
Try to be PERFECT!
Trying to be perfect is a great way to destroy any good fallible human being…not to mention their children and family.
At first…perfectionism creates a lot of energy…
You’ll over prepare…
You’ll begin to plan, ponder and procrastinate…
You’ll start to worry and fill yourself with anxiety and stress…good times.
Another strategy that’s doomed before it even starts is trying to be positive all the time. On paper…sounds like a great strategy. If you listen to the self help guys that continue to beat the drum…positive, positive…you must be positive.
However
What happens when you have an experience that doesn’t fit into the positive box or the positive state of mind?
You have to distort the experience to fit your reality which gives birth to your “pretend” life.
The more you refuse negative emotions and experiences the greater lengths you need to go to defend yourself from reality. If you keep this up for a while, your distortions will undermine your ability to accept reality and you will start to live in fantasy land with the attached monsters.
Enter the Soccer Phantom
The soccer phantom is unlike the boogey man or that evil monster that sleeps underneath your bed.
The soccer phantom is real…lives in your mind and urges you to be motivated, positive and perfect all the time. It also whispers and gently probes you to install the same expectations in your children.
But here’s a little secret courtesy of years of research…
Your vitality and energy is magnified with more energy when you fully embrace your true nature as a weak and fallible person.
Please read it again…
Your vitality and energy is MAGNIFIED with more ENERGY when you fully embrace your true nature as a WEAK and FALLIBLE person
Look at any young child…
I’ll use one of my boys as an example…weak, fallible, vulnerable, naive but fully alive to the excitement and fascination of soccer and with life.
Full of beans…
Energy and vitality that would give the Duracell rabbit a run for its money.
Top Secret
Vitality emerges from your needs…not in spite of them.
What is it that you need?
What gets you out of bed in the morning apart from the alarm clock?
Spend enough time around kids soccer and you will meet parents and kids that are so “out of touch” with reality. Kids that cannot pass the ball through two cones have already been sold to Barcelona and Real Madrid.
This happens because parents (myself included) and children alike do not know their true self and try to live in some synthetic life that the television has created. The television gives us values, brand names, what we should think, feel and experience.
We have to learn how to be human again…
We need to stop the brainwashing…
The media, television and all the photo shopped magazines continue to sell the perfect life that doesn’t exist. We need to wake up and we desperately need to change.
The Perfect Ending
If you find yourself watching television late at night because you’re too tired to go to sleep chances are,
- You have lost your vitality
- You’re exhausted from pretending…living a lie
- You’re chasing materialistic things to try and fill the void of perfectionism
- You’re reflecting on missed opportunities and wondering how your life ended up like this
- You’re looking for happiness in the wrong places.
Today…
We have been conditioned into thoughts that are not our own…people don’t even know their own minds. And when people don’t know their own minds –but think they do- they are liable to be influenced and swept away by blind moral passion which has been manufactured by the television.
We do not come with instincts and because we need to learn how to be human we are vulnerable to information outside of ourselves. This is our glory and our agony…that is why we need to discover ourselves or as the Greeks said it along time ago, “know thyself”.
If you’re tired of feeling diminished, devitalised and living like a zombie then I strongly recommend you switch off the television and view your life through a different lens. View your life through a lens of weakness, love and compassion. The paradox is that your vitality for life comes to life with more energy when you embrace your true nature that is weak and fallible.
What would happen to our children if we discarded perfectionism?
What would happen to our children if we lived life with vitality and on our terms?
What would happen to our children if they accepted that they are weak and fallible?
What would happen to our children if we taught them how to think as opposed to what to think?
What would happen to our children if we switched off the television and started living in the present?
What would happen to their soccer performance if we showered them with love and allowed them to be weak?
Sometimes the biggest soccer improvements do not come from kicking a ball.
“May the winds of destiny blow you to the stars”
Really refreshing post!
From a new-ish dad this really strikes a chord. It’s so easy to get bogged down in the general 9-5, and you forget that your kid just wants to have a bit of fun.
I play football with my 3 yo regularly, but sometimes I’m guilty of attempting to ‘train’ him, when half the time he just wants to pick the ball up and pretend that he’s Batman (yeah, you try explaining that!)
It’s nice to be reminded that you just need to go along with the flow and enjoy the time together, being the best parent just by not trying too hard.