What we often don't talk about is our journey as ex-athletes. It is a subject that we need to bring out into the open.
Ex-athletes often feel like they have been swept under the carpet or put out to pasture in some way, but this projection lacks a basic truth, in that most of the discomfort in retiring from sport, or anything else for that matter, is in fact self driven in the way that the individual has defined who they were in sport and the way they define themselves now in the return journey.
Everything in life has an outward and return journey, the issue is that we are accepting of the outward journey, regardless of how difficult it is, and then we resist the return journey without considering it's value.
So we look at our experience in sport and life in terms of likes and dislikes. We resist our retirements and our return journeys because we try to make a solid out of a liquid.
A sporting career or indeed anything else is not solid, it is transient, temporary and completely unstable. Finding happiness in life post sport is about finding happiness in the pure experience of what you do and finding out why you are doing it. Instead of looking outwards as we have been taught to do, to do the opposite and look inwards for clues to what we would actually love to be doing for an experience instead of an outcome.
To take a closer look at all those goals and outcomes and to realise that none of it is solid, and then to feel and realise the freedom in that, man what a relief. From there to work not on what appears to be valuable from the outside, but to work on what is valuable to you as a human, right here and now, for the ultimate benefit of your future.
Grants Website-
https://www.inconvenientminds.com.au/