Figure 1 Sports lessons learned at a young age can be used in later life
If you were not a sporty kid you may be forgiven for thinking that there is no need to have to take any notice of that world any more. As an adult you have more choices about what you can do and like so bad memories of school sports might be enough to shut out sports entirely.
But one of the other things you learn as you get older is that not everything is black and white. Many of the issues and challenges we face in life will force us to use the knowledge gained from a variety of settings. So, even though you may have disliked sports when you were young, there are elements that you can use in everyday life.
You may not ever want to run around a track again or even explore how to understand spread betting. But some of the skills you will have picked up from sports can be translated into essential skills for life itself.
Social Bonding
Sports are a great social bonding tool. There are many times when being able to talk about last night’s game or the latest big trades will help break the ice in a situation where you don’t know the people around you. But even just having some kind of background in sports helps with this too.
There are usually big global sports events that even the most sports-averse person can have a conversation about. But if you participated in any kind of sports at all when you were younger, you would have been forced to communicate with people you didn’t know. That skill is now essential for living in an open society.
Keeping Your Mind Sharp
This is where learning about sports from apps and media is just as important as actually playing sports to gain essential skills. If you are a sports fan it is likely that you will be able to retain all kinds of facts and figures from the past. It might seem strange that you can remember nominally useless information but that’s just the way humans are.
But what that act of memory is doing is keeping your brain ticking over and staying sharp. Keeping your brain active is encouraged as you get older and if there are things that you enjoy remembering and recalling, that is a good way of keeping mentally agile.
Teaches Self-Confidence
We talked earlier about the way sports can help you bond with strangers. But we can take that idea further and note how sports can build confidence in a variety of ways. Many elite athletes believe in the power of confidence resulting in success. If a positive outcome can be visualized, there is more chance that it will happen for real.
If you are unwilling to take risks there is a good chance that you will miss out on more chances of success and happiness. The confidence that sports instill – in players and fans – automatically makes people believe in themselves a little more and that can make all the difference.
Helps Self-Discipline
Although taking risks and going for it can ultimately bring success – in sports and everyday life – there is also the need to be disciplined in what you do. Evaluating situations is something that we all have to do continually and being able to use the experience of sports can help with that.
Sports are able to give us an immediate answer to pressing questions. But by using our experience of those situations we can make a more informed decision about how to deal with similar situations in the future. The self-discipline that we learn from sports enables us to adjust and improve if we need to.
Conflict Management
Although many of the essential skills that we are looking at here can be learned from watching and enjoying sports as well as playing, the ability to manage conflict – and potential conflict situations – is one more aimed at players only. From participating in sports we get to learn how we should deal with high-pressure situations.
Sports can be very emotional and that heightened level of emotion can lead to confrontation. Learning the boundaries of what is acceptable on a sports field is a skill that can easily be translated into a non-sports environment. We can evaluate quickly what is acceptable in any kind of situation.
Mental Endurance and Patience
These are skills that can definitely be developed by using technology that has been designed to aid sports athletes and fans alike. Staying focused is a requirement in just about every sport there is and is also that can be learned from using apps and other online aids.
Part of that mental endurance is shown in being able to be patient – especially under pressure. Sports players and fans may sometimes struggle with this but learning how to be patient will invariably pay off in the end. Obviously, this is just as true away from the field or court.
Figure 2 Even non-sports people can learn essential skills thanks to technology
Technology as Well as Talent
It may be difficult to think about using sports skills in everyday life if you have not come from a sporting background. But we hope that through going through some of these examples, you will have realized that there is enough tech that can help even the most unsporty gain those skills.
Sports talent can sometimes be manipulated to mask the essential life skills it teaches us. But by studying closely the positives surrounding sports – from whichever level of expertise you are approaching it at – there is a lot of knowledge that can be used in everyday life.