“Easy-out!” I hear snickers from the opposing team, while my own team holds their breath. The pitcher rolls the ball towards my eight-year-old self, pity in their eyes. It skids towards me, and I kick it away, pathetically slowly. Just as they predicted, I am out. For the rest of the summer camp, I avoided all the kickball games in shame.
For years afterward, I tried to avoid competition and conflict of any sort. I stayed away from card and board games, and when my classmates shrieked with delight whenever any contest was introduced, I only felt a sense of foreboding anxiety. What I enjoyed instead was learning to work together with others. Instead of trying to win at everything, I only tried to push myself to improve.
At the same time that I was developing my collaboration skills, I was building up more technical math and computer science skills too. However, early on in high school, I struggled to overcome my fear of competition, despite the knowledge that I had the potential to succeed. I wanted greatly to excel in Math Team, but it was based off of attending competitions (and winning them). During practice I performed well, but during competitions I suffered blunder after blunder. I knew I was holding myself back, and was disappointed at my perceived failures. …show more content…
I began to appreciate everyone’s individual strengths, and stopped comparing myself to others. In math team, I realized that I was riling myself up too much before each competition, and tried adjusting my mental state. Instead of stressing out, I approached each contest with a calm, controlled mindset, focusing only on the fact that I needed to keep a clear mind to do the best I could. Finally, I began to perform up to my standards. I also began to realize that activities I thought focused solely on competing involved a lot of collaborating too: explaining problems to my teammates or collaborating during multi-person team
For years afterward, I tried to avoid competition and conflict of any sort. I stayed away from card and board games, and when my classmates shrieked with delight whenever any contest was introduced, I only felt a sense of foreboding anxiety. What I enjoyed instead was learning to work together with others. Instead of trying to win at everything, I only tried to push myself to improve.
At the same time that I was developing my collaboration skills, I was building up more technical math and computer science skills too. However, early on in high school, I struggled to overcome my fear of competition, despite the knowledge that I had the potential to succeed. I wanted greatly to excel in Math Team, but it was based off of attending competitions (and winning them). During practice I performed well, but during competitions I suffered blunder after blunder. I knew I was holding myself back, and was disappointed at my perceived failures. …show more content…
I began to appreciate everyone’s individual strengths, and stopped comparing myself to others. In math team, I realized that I was riling myself up too much before each competition, and tried adjusting my mental state. Instead of stressing out, I approached each contest with a calm, controlled mindset, focusing only on the fact that I needed to keep a clear mind to do the best I could. Finally, I began to perform up to my standards. I also began to realize that activities I thought focused solely on competing involved a lot of collaborating too: explaining problems to my teammates or collaborating during multi-person team