By Gautam Rai
In a fast-paced world coupled with unpredictable challenges and rapid technological shifts, there’s an increasing demand for professionals who are domain experts and display human values like respect, empathy, leadership, teamwork and more. In this context, schools and higher educational institutions are leading the way in preparing the young learners for an evolving world and ensuring their brighter future. One of the best ways to do so is via sports as this not only teaches the students the value of healthy competition but also makes them learn to embrace challenges, failures and unforeseen situations with equanimity.
Sports inculcates life skills among young leaners. It also leads to the following:
Emotional Control: Learning to balance all types of emotions and maintaining a calm mind
Teamwork: Working and collaborating with others to achieve a goal
Perseverance: Persisting towards the goal with patience and determination
Respect: Valuing other people and oneself by showing consideration and kindness
Honesty: Being truthful to oneself and the others
Some of the key benefits of inculcating the habits of sports include:
Goal Setting and body language: Breaking down the goal into achievable steps is the key to achieve the same. While learning this philosophy, students also learn to work together with their team, have a multi-disciplinary outlook, be more innovative, creative and adaptable. Body language reflects what a person is really thinking and a positive body language is the mark of a good leader and team person as he reflects trust, reliance and values.
Knowing strengths and weaknesses: Self-evaluation is the key to holistic growth and an open mindset. Understanding the strengths and weakness of oneself and the others helps create a strong bond and the team can work together to address anything based on this understanding and even work towards creating positive changes while working on turning around the shortcomings.
The value of discipline and hard work: Achieving growth and success, inside and outside requires a commitment to hard work and unwavering discipline. It is a good idea to maintain a schedule and follow it through. A team that collaborates, plans meticulously, and executes tasks with discipline can overcome any challenge while learning from it. In a situation when facing obstacles, it’s important to understand that there are no shortcuts. Also, it’s important to listen to everyone and be open to multiple solutions.
Balancing success and failure: Balancing success and failure are part of the same coin. Of course, failure can lead to a lot of emotions like anxiety, stress, negativity and even depression, but on the positive side, it can bring people closer, where they take ownership jointly—as a team—to every decision and outcome. To balance both these sets of emotions and face anything with an unwavering attitude is the best approach to anything in life. Through sports, students also learn to view failures as learning opportunities on the road to success rather than a setback in their journey or even the end of the road.
Therefore, sports not only lead to character building and creating a strong emotional and physical well- being, but it also sets habits for life which are based on social skills and life skills.
The author is the head of Sports, Genesis Global School, Noida.