Right attitude when misfortune is on its way!
Often we find situations that don’t turn out to be in our favour. With that, most of the time we tend to complain and whine about the situation. ‘Why am I in this situation?’ Rather than thinking of the next thing to do, ‘Why why and only why’ revolves around our mind.
Being a sports player and having great hard-working players in my close circle, I have realized that the best sportspeople do not understand defeat. They don’t accept it at the initial stage itself. If they are thrown an obstacle in the way, they say ‘Okay right. This is an obstacle. How am I going to overcome it?’
Source: ivyexec.com
In the recent French Open finals between Novak Djokovic and Stefanos Tsitsipas, Djokovic beat Tsitsipas to win the 19th grand slam of his career. For anyone who has not seen the match would have a feeling that this was expected as Novak Djokovic is ranked World №1 in Men’s tennis.
However, people who spent watching the finals that lasted for more than 4 hours would know the situation of Novak Djokovic till the beginning of 3rd set. Battling with fatigue after the 4 plus hours semifinal match with Rafal Nadal the previous day, Djokovic was down by 2 sets in the best of 5 sets finale.
Tsitsipas was dominating the match till the beginning of the 3rd set [7(6)-6, 6–2]. At that point in time, Djokovic’s frame of mind wouldn’t be complaining and pondering ‘Why am I in this situation?’. The match started at 6.30 PM IST and around 8 PM like everyone else I was expecting the match to wrap up in the next 30 minutes and head-on with my next work. But, to my dismay, the situation slowly began to turn upside down.
Given that situation after losing the first two sets to the World №5 who is 14 years younger than him, Djokovic staged an exceptional comeback to triumph over the Greek player winning the next 3 sets [6–7(6–8), 2–6, 6–3, 6–2, 6–4].
Even the best can falter at times but the right attitude to tackle the situation can certainly make a change.
Likewise, this is true for so many of us in life. With any tough situation, if we are going to react just by complaining and whining about it we can never get over that situation and win. One can just hang in there and think what best can be done now to make the situation better and even win over it.
To share another instance, I happened to see a basketball match in my college days and my friend was a part of the team. She has faced the worst situations during most matches. Well, I could say this confidently as I was one of the spectators for most of her basketball matches. In a game that demands 5 players on the court, in her team, she just had 3 professional basketball players (including her) and the remaining 2 were substitutes who hardly knew the game.
Before the match, when I had a word with her, she told me that ‘We are just 3 main players and they are 5. That’s okay. I think we can handle it and win. In movies, one person beats 25 people then why can’t 3 of us beat the 5 :P’.
Having been put in that situation, they could have easily given up considering that the other team had 6 professional players. I guess such an attitude only helps players to pull out matches and win them that they are not supposed to win.
This attitude is a part of excellence. It is always better to give your best even in the worst of the worst situation either to win or to learn something new that you never mastered before or were aware of in the past.
Think about it. It just demands a slight change in attitude!
