Tackle Life As A Game You Need To Win

Your perception towards anything shapes your attitude and behaviors towards that
very thing. If you perceive a certain activity as boring, you will never take interest in
it or make a conscious effort to enjoy it. Similarly, if you feel your life is a bed of
thorns, you will nurture a negative approach towards life, and because of it, you will
not think about how you could make your life better than it is right now.

What’s the point of all this, you might think?

Well, your approach towards life is the first thing you need to correct. Instead of
perceiving life as a huge ordeal or a never-ending series of struggles, tackle it as a
game you need to learn to play and then win. Yes, it really is that simple and if you
modify your approach accordingly, you will notice massive decreases in your anxiety
levels too.

How tackling life as a game eases your struggles

While in high school, how did you approach learning how to play a game such as
racket ball or baseball? In our high school, we approached these as sports you had to
learn the basics of, practice how to play, and then keep practicing until we got better.
If you remember the first few days of learning how to play baseball, you would recall
the anxiety and fear associated with not playing well or making a fool of yourself.
However, if you kept practicing regularly, it’s highly likely you improved with time
and even hit a home run in a game. Well, this is exactly how you need to treat life.

Your life is a series of ups and downs, good times and bad times, booms and slums,
and challenges and accomplishments. While the bad times are inevitable, the good
times are in your control. You may not be able to stop an obstacle from coming your
way, but you can control how you handle it. Wrap your head around the fact that there
will be troubles, but you need never allow them to get the better of you; stay on top of
them because only by doing so can you emerge victorious. This happens when you
treat these obstacles as the challenges in a sport.

If you have a social anxiety problem or do not know how to communicate effectively
with others or how to lead, perceive it as learning how to hold the baseball bat and
striking the ball. You need to learn the right way to approach your problem,
understand it, devise a tailor made coping mechanism, and then practice it repeatedly
until it resolves the problem successfully. If you implement this very strategy with all
your problems and keep experimenting with different coping mechanisms, you will
eventually find one that fits the problem and at that point, you will be on the path to
emerging victorious.

Bruce Lee’s quote comes to mind at this point on the importance of practicing:

“I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has
practiced one kick 10,000 times”.

Put in another way: you need not have 10,000 different solutions to your problems but
mastering just one strategy (through practice) on how to solve your life’s problems
can make all the difference.