The practice of sport helps to define our lifestyle and in particular our professional behavior.
There are many factors that lead to devote oneself to sports: the maintenance and improvement of the state of health, the need to disconnect from the hectic daily life, the desire to keep in good physical shape, the spirit of competition, the desire for leisure, passion, fun, are just some of the reasons that push people towards sport.
Sport is above all a model of values, that is, in a broad sense, of those very deep and strong convictions that determine our actions, but which also affect our friendships and relationships. It is well known, in fact, that values are transmitted both from the context that surrounds us (family, school, work) and from the relationships we establish (friendships) and from sports.
Sport conceived in a healthy way has the ability to teach us and make us learn useful conducts for personal growth.
Anyone I believe is able to glimpse how these values of sport are indispensable in life as well as in an efficient business organization.
Let’s examine some aspects that characterize sports: I’m sure that anyone who lives their professional responsibilities intensely will have no difficulty in seeing almost the symbiosis with sports practice and, ultimately, with their own life.
Respect, which is one of the fundamental values at the base of sport, is one of the foundations of a civil life and an attitude that favors interpersonal relationships. Respecting ourselves is perhaps the first form of respect to consider and sport helps us understand our needs and accept our limits. Proper sports practice also teaches us respect for our teammates and the coach and last but not least, respect for our opponents.
Collaboration: belonging to a group allows, especially for adolescents, to share the rules of the game, emotions, and frustrations, and helps to create a single subject, precisely the “team” in which the “self” learns to leave space to the “us”. Being part of a group develops emotional, character, and relational aspects.
The result: victory and defeat are an integral part of sport, they are two fundamental moments for personal growth. Learning to know how to lose means accepting and understanding one’s limits, one’s mistakes, developing the ability to question oneself and improve oneself without giving up. Victory, on the other hand, generates self-esteem, the desire to continue, greater determination and repays the effort and commitment of training.
Integration and belonging: sport spreads the principle of equality and equal opportunities by addressing everyone without distinction, regardless of ethnicity, culture, religion, origin, and color. Sports practice has the ability to involve the group in a natural way and without prejudice, stimulating the growth of the individual, thus becoming a vehicle for socialization, mainly in group sports, it facilitates integration and stimulates intercultural dialogue, giving rise to sports brotherhood, that often it is also of life. For this reason, it can be said that sport is also a social elevator for those who want to commit themselves to achieve important goals in their lives and are useful for the community.
A healthy spirit of competition: competition is healthy when it is carried out with the aim of improving one’s performance, respecting, not demonizing, the competitor.
Emotion: Emotions are the basis of human behavior. The practice of sport and the emotions it generates such as joy, happiness, anger, sadness, and fear can make anyone who practices it feel alive. Emotions play a fundamental role in the motivation and outcome of the competition, influencing performance and the achievement of the desired result. Sport helps to manage them and to know them, going to control them so that they do not influence our performance both in the game and in life.
Discipline and perseverance: Discipline teaches the value of hard work, the athlete must work hard to improve and reach their full potential.
Commitment and Sacrifice: Commitment to sports means using all your strength to achieve a goal. Achieving a result such as crossing a finish line, scoring the most points in a competition, being the fastest is achieved only with perseverance and dedication.
Sports practice teaches the value of sacrifice and renunciation for the passion of sport.
Motivation: the drive to act, by implementing behavior oriented towards a purpose, one needs to know how to identify your goal and define the steps necessary to achieve it. Once you have identified the goal towards which to direct the action, one will have to decide its intensity, that is, the effort and commitment that you will want to use. Motivation can be increased by the athlete’s need for self-fulfillment, that is, the need to challenge their limits, to engage in difficult tasks, and to achieve excellence.
Self-esteem is an aspect closely related to personality, it is a key factor in sport that allows you to transform the potential of each athlete into better performance towards increasingly ambitious goals.
Self-confidence is defined as the awareness of one’s abilities, the conviction of being up to the task to be performed or the goal to be achieved.
When the athlete has a strong perception of himself, the will to reach new and more ambitious goals will become much stronger, focusing on his strengths having an optimistic outlook.
Ethics relates to mental attitudes and personal behaviors. The ethics of sport is a concept that is based on behaviors of fairness and respect even if not established by written rules. The referee, present in many sports, has the task, as any leader, of supervising and verifying that the sporting activity is carried out correctly, in order to ensure healthy competition achieving the final objective.
The coach plays a fundamental role as he must know how to motivate his “pupils”, enforce training programs, ensure punctuality of the matches, encourage compliance with the rules of the game, instill a positive and fruitful spirit and make them acquire the ability to focus on goals. He acts also on the boy’s personality, allowing him to acquire organizational skills, by defining time priorities in life, the ability to respect social norms, control his impulses and the consequences that derive from them. A true sports coach must teach a student the techniques and tactics to win a race, but above all he must educate him to be loyal, instilling the concept that the opponent is not the enemy, but an athlete who is striving to achieve a result.
Fair Play is not a written rule, but an ethically correct behavior to be adopted in the practice of the various sports disciplines.
Fair play means respecting the rules and the opponent, accepting and recognizing one’s limits, knowing that the sporting results obtained are connected to the commitment employed, promoting values as important in life as in sport, such as friendship, team spirit, and respect for others. And it means to be an example for others, as it always should be in life and work.
Sport is nothing more than a way to unite and teach group values, suitable for mobilizing and strengthening bonds, and it also plays a fundamental role in the workplace. All those who have a sporting past or continue to be part of a team have in their DNA those distinctive characteristics that can make a difference even at work.
Personally believe that there is no doubt about the link between sport and the world of work. It would be enough to remember only that both these two aspects of life are bearers of rules and values which the main actors, the people, must interpret.
Sport is too big a phenomenon not to affect even the civil level of a nation, as a factor of education, health, and social growth.
Sport is a metaphor for life: to cite fairly common examples, the idea of leader and team applies to sport as well as to companies, associations, and families.
Those who study the companies and organizations that operate and perform any kind of active change of the same often use the metaphor of sport to induce in people changes in beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors. Because the sport is the representation and the perfect mirror of the society that works: competition, speed, conflict, struggle, challenge, tension, change, stress, results, are all conceptual paradigms that result not only in business but also in competitions.
Sports activity is based on the ability to merge pride and prejudice, heart and intellect, organization and creativity, talent and programming, to become a national figure able to grow and transform an entire nation from spectator to player!!
All young people, from an early age, should be encouraged to love and have the opportunity to practice sport. Not only for the physical benefits but above all for the enthusiasm that derives from it, the possibility of discovering one’s abilities and limits, for the joyful acceptance of the rules of discipline that accompanies the first contact with sport. I think of the joy that comes from participating in any type of sport, the belief that a possible failure, a physical or mental imperfection, will not prevent us from continuing to play, the acceptance that a friend can be better than us. In a sports environment, you can breathe that atmosphere of brotherhood and mutual support, material and moral, which is called “solidarity”! A climate that perhaps does not allow us to always and necessarily make samples, but certainly not even frustrated and marginalized.
Having said that, I must also underline that racist attitudes and insults towards players are unfortunately still frequent.
Whistling the national anthem is contempt for a country’s institutions.
Blatantly showing that you reject defeat in a sports competition is not only a demonstration of the absolute lack of any sports education, but it is also an unpleasant behavior towards opponents and the organization. It is the gesture of those who do not know how to lose. And gestures have value!
Perhaps, in these situations, a firm signal of disapproval by the competent authorities should be given.
Excellent is a country where the culture of sport has spread everywhere and at every level.
