Who gives you confidence?

I love reading and learning inspirational stories from the world of sports. They usually contain most of the elements of a good story: a heroine or a hero, a challenge, overcoming the challenge and enjoying the rewards at the end.

Sometimes I also learn about other sports stories in which the hero turns into a villain. Here is one:

Once upon a time, there was a very skillful football player (soccer for those of you reading from America), he was capable of the most wonderful things on the pitch, delivering the pinpoint accurate pass, dribbling past opponents and scoring beautiful goals, all these things were done with grace and ease. However, despite his obvious gifts, he wasn't a regular in the team. He decided to move to a different team in a different country (for a huge transfer fee). Things started to work really well for him again and it appeared that his previous team had made a mistake letting him go. The player certainly made public comments indicating that he wasn't understood by his previous employer.

Shortly after the wonderful start, things turned again and he began to play a reduced number of games or get substituted often. There was some instability in the new team and a change of manager brought back the lost spark. A new beginning with the return of glittering form for the player and success for the team... for a while. By now you may have guessed that the situation repeated itself, we can see there is a pattern in this person's life. He decided to move again, this time returning to his own country. Yet again, he started off playing wonderfully. After six games and 4 goals scored (that's a lot of goals per game) he was able to explain what had gone wrong with his previous team:

He said: "At City, when I was playing, I knew that at some point the substitution board would go up and I was going to come off because the manager didn't have trust in me. Then, you start to lose your confidence on the pitch."

So there it is, very clearly put: it was somebody else's fault if he was not performing to his full potential. He was the victim of someone else's inability to do their job well. he was undervalued and someone had taken away his confidence.

Some of us may feel sympathy for this player and agree with him that SOMEONE ELSE is making big mistakes. That may be so. The questions are:

Who are we allowing to dictate if we are confident or not?

Whose responsibility is it to learn from the patterns that show up in our lives?

How many times are we going to run away from what we don't like before we realize that we carry it with us?

If a pattern keeps showing up in your life, maybe, just maybe, there is a lesson to be learnt and certainly, the resources are within you to learn the lesson. The Universe sends us teachers and lessons for our own benefit, it may uncomfortable or even painful. The more we avoid the lessons the greater the discomfort becomes until there comes a point when the pain of the lessons is less than the pain of learning it. Why wait to take action? This is the time to do something new and embrace who you really are.

This is the time to welcome the teachers and the lessons with gratitude.

This is the time to stop taking it personally.

This is the time to create a meaningful life.

This is the time to release your full potential.