Sport At Its Best

There was a book I picked up at a little magazine shop at the airport once called The Power of Kindness by Piero Ferrucci.  It looked interesting and was along the lines of some of the books that I had been reading at the time.  The book turned out to be really easy to read and made it’s point very clearly.  The point was there is a great advantage to being a positive person.

The chapters are all positive human qualities such as humility, trust, respect, gratitude and so on.  What I found most compelling is how the author made references to research that shows positive people lead healthier and happier lives.  For example,

“…empathy does not only resolve problems; it helps us feel better.  Studies have shown that people who are more capable of empathy are also more satisfied in life, healthier, less dogmatic, and more creative.”

Or, more to the crux of the argument,

“It has been shown that our thoughts influence each cell in our body.  Thought affects blood pressure and therefore the blood flow to every part of the body.  The quality of our thoughts is felt throughout our organism.  Will we make them thoughts of hatred and revenge, or love and happiness?

“In a famous experiment, subjects were asked to remember two experiences of betrayal, one in which they were betrayed by a parent, another by a partner.  Meanwhile, they were hooked up to various stress-detector machines that checked their blood pressure, heartbeat, muscle tension in the forehead, and galvanic skin response.  The findings were revealing.  It was immediately evident that the people fell into two distinct categories: high and low forgivers.  Not only did the low forgivers show higher measurements of stress, the high forgivers had fewer health problems and had seen their doctors less frequently.  In another study, it was shown that those who forgive, besides enjoying better physical health, suffer less from anxiety and depression.  Forgiveness promotes physical and mental health.”

And it goes on describing actual measurable relationships between various forms of positivity (kindness, loyalty, honesty, generosity, patience, etc.) and not just physical and mental health, but physical and mental strength.

“It has been shown that our thoughts influence each cell in our body.  Will we make them thoughts of hatred and revenge, or love and happiness?”

Dr. Wayne Dyer, a renowned teacher of enlightened thought, in one of his PBS specials summarized the relationship very succinctly with, “positive makes you stronger; negative makes you weaker.” He paused in his presentation and repeated himself because it’s a very key concept that for some reason we don’t totally buy into.  Think about that – we totally accept as a scientific fact that negative makes you weaker.  We know that tension and stress and negative emotion can cause high blood pressure, ulcers and a myriad of other health issues that can easily manifest themselves into life threatening illnesses like heart attach and stroke over a period of time.  And yet we don’t totally buy into the fact that the opposite would be true as well – that positivity makes you stronger.  In fact, kindness and other very positive attributes are even seen as weaknesses at certain times in certain venues as it is occasionally in business and sport.

“Positive makes you stronger; negative makes you weaker.”

What I’ve noticed personally, as I wrote under the Origins section of this blog, is that really successful athletes in the vast majority of cases are also really positive people.  A skeptic would say that a positive person is positive because they are successful, but from what I’ve seen personally in the cases where I’ve actually known the athlete since before they achieved their Olympic successes, they had always been positive.  In fact, they had always been essentially the same person – very positive and therefore having an attitude that made them a stronger person.  The bottom line is that if you want to emulate successful athletes (if not successful people) positivity is what you should strive for.