“Mooooooooooooom I’m bored”
“Ok. Wash the dishes, clean the house, fold laundry…”
Every kid has this conversation. Most quickly learn not to complain about being bored. However, they usually don’t solve the problem.
Even in college I hear about the plague known as boredom. Sometimes people ask me what I do when I’m bored and the answer is always the same: I’m never bored.
I genuinely mean that. I always have something to do and here’s why:
I have ambitions so there is always something to work on.
When you have an outcome you’re trying to achieve, no matter where you are or what you're doing, there is always something you can do to get better, take advantage of the situation, or learn something. Consider this your first line of defense against boredom.
The second line of defense is a schedule. You literally plan out what you are going to do with your time. This should eliminate all your boredom problems, but it still happens sometimes.
As an athlete, you should never be bored.
If you're sitting in class with nothing to do, you can go over plays or do homework. At home you can lift weights (body weight if nothing else), meal prep, or watch film.
In the car you can listen to a podcast or audiobook.
“But what if you literally have nothing at your disposal?”
This is a good question. Sometimes you will not have the tools required to do these things or it would be inappropriate to do them.
This is still not an excuse to not get better.
With no tools, you can still visualize, repeat positive affirmations, think, or meditate.
All of these only involve your mind, so you can do them anytime and anywhere. Consider them your third line of defense.
Visualization is when you imagine your success in your mind. It has a variety of different uses. You can increase your skill set by getting mental repetitions. You can prepare yourself for different situations, and it can give you motivation to work harder.
Positive affirmations are saying empowering statements in your mind. I’m unstoppable. No one can guard me. I am the best player on the team. The goal of these is to effectively rewire the way you think.
Changing the way you think changes the actions you take, which changes the results you get.
As you think, you shall become.
Thinking is something that most people don’t do. They don’t think for themselves, they don’t try to think of new ideas, and they don’t have their minds stimulated with new material because they don’t read.
It is said that ideas commonly pop into your mind when you're doing mundane tasks and that’s true, but another way you can think of ideas is by taking time to actually think of ideas. Novel idea isn’t it?
Finally, meditation is probably the most complicated and the most simple out of all of these. In its most basic form, it is just relaxing your mind and body. If you look it up, you’ll find that the benefits of meditation go on forever, which means it is a high ROI task, especially for “doing nothing.”
Meditation is by far the most useful out of all of these, and something I would highly recommend starting if you don’t already. I personally use it as a way of training myself to get into the zone when I’m playing.
I know that for a lot of people these last four things may sound weird, silly, or a little out there. That's normal and a common way of thinking when it comes to these activities. All of them have to do with the mind, and the mind is intangible so many people neglect it. That's why when these things come up, they are foreign to most people.
However, if you embrace them, research them yourself, and implement them, then you will have a massive advantage over your competition, and solve the problem of being bored once and for all.
Athlete-Student
BucketsoverBooks
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