mental toughness

Last saturday, a friend who is working in the accounting field invited me to join her to cheer for her company team competiting in an inter-accountants basketball tournament.

She doesn't know much about basketball but she was there to cheer and support her team and not to forget to check out the cute and macho guys there.

Through out the tournament i was explaining to her whats going and why the whistle was blown and some technical stuff. I told her that part of winning a game is your mental state during the game. If you use trash talk or use dirty tactics you can demoralize the mental state of your opponents.

Once you have weakened the mental state of individual key players, the job is pretty much done. If you lose your mood in the game you cant perform to your maximum level. I watched her team use their toughness both mentally and physically to beat a top seeded team. They were aggressive both on offense and defense. Once the opponents key player lost his mood, it was all down hill for the team. Anyway, her team has an ex- state coach or someone with those coaching credentials.

So as i was saying you have to be strong mentally and not just physically. Yesterday evening while i was playing football, i lost my mood and my mental state was down coz of what my teammate said to me and that just thrown my whole game down. My friend has a very bad temper and a short fuse, if you're not playing according to his rhythm or tempo and its not his happy day, he will unleash all hell(in terms of his mouth) at you. That pretty much spoilt my mood and game.

Luckily midway through i managed to ignore what he said and continued playing on. I did not manage to even have an attempt on goal or even try to torment the defence but instead i just played a supporting role and trying to win the ball and just pass it on. It wasn't a really good game for me although we won by a huge margin. He did say sorry to me after the game, so it was all good in the end.

"Be strong, livestrong and impossible is nothing."