Success vs. Joy
- VIII -
Use Stress to Calm
All those mentioned here have one trait in common – the ability to remain calm in the most stressful situations. They welcome stress, embrace it, and have over the years learnt to convert it into serenity.
I met Rahul Dravid a few weeks after he was first dropped from the Indian cricket team. I was training at the Kanteerva Stadium in Bangalore as part of our preparation for the Asian Games to be held in Bangkok in 1998. I saw him push himself to the limit. He was working on his physical fitness. His trainer Bidu was throwing a heavy sand-filled ball the size of a football at him. Rahul himself was lying on his stomach and was catching the ball above his head. This is a difficult enough exercise to do with a cricket ball, but with a heavy ball it becomes almost impossible. Just imagine the impact on his shoulders.
I saw Rahul punish himself like this for almost an hour. He later said that he felt the need to work on his upper body fitness. Every morning he was there, earlier than all the other state-level athletes who trained in that stadium. He had no regrets about being dropped from the team at the time.
I could only see fine lines of determination etched on his sweat-laden face – lines that were carved by a burning obsession to improve his own benchmarks of excellence.
He was actually enjoying the hard work, relishing the monotony, and the pain. He sensed there had been a drop in his peak performance and in order to get that back he concentrated on leading a highly disciplined life. Self-discipline led to calmness, which is always evident in his visage. The calmness we see on his face is now part of his being and his self. Much like a ‘wall’, his mind is still.