We are in the midst of football season and everyone seems to have World Cup fever! This is one Season where loyalties shift and new allegiances are formed. It is that time when fans will insult a player who they usually adore in domestic leagues of their respective countries. This is the season where raw emotions come to the fore. A season in which you witness grown men crying when their teams lose, while others throw caution to the wind and start jumping up and down, shouting and hugging their fellow fans when their team wins. That’s all in a name of football.
So this is what it is like for the fans but for those on the field, it becomes a different ball game all together. As a player on the pitch, your work is to stop the opposing team from scoring and 2) to score against your opponents. Some stadiums hold up to seventy thousand spectators and so you can imagine the amount of noise in that stadium and yet through out this all, you have to communicate with your fellow players as well as the coach. It is difficult enough trying to speak to a person a few feet away from you in a noisy place so imagine trying to communicate with someone twenty meters away amidst this deafening noise inside a stadium? This calls for total concentration from the players because a slight loss of concentration can cost your team.
I equate our daily life to the above scenario. We are all players in the game of life and there are so many spectators, some supporting us while others are trying to distract us. If there is one thing that a player is supposed to be wary of, then it is the spectator – be they on your side or on the opposing side.
In life, we will always have people giving us all sorts of advice; be it good or otherwise and many of them will want us to follow their advice to the letter. They don’t care about your opinion let alone your rights. This unsolicited advice can be very dangerous if one is not careful. Spectators happen to sound the most informed and yet have nothing, not a single achievement they can use to base their argument on. These “spectators” in life can be the media, friends, colleagues, neighbours or even close family members. As such, we need to train and teach our minds and hearts to focus only on that which is important to us. Learn to close your ears to anything that distracts you from making progress in your life. To read more posts by Mwangi, click HERE
