Exchanging ideas to create the well-being advantage

So, we near the end of another World Cup and how do we feel? Needless to say, England supporters remain disappointed by the lack-lustre display that was served up by their ‘heroes’. All that hope, all that excitement and expectation that we invested in the team’s performance – and what did we get back? If it was a financial investment there’s no way on earth that you’d go for it, but sport is different.

Uniquely, sport offers a release, a (mostly) safe place where our emotions, hopes and dreams can be expressed wholeheartedly and without fear of reproach. It enables us to put the doom and gloom of the economic situation and all the grim news stories to one side by directing our emotions towards both national pride and the thrill of winning. Well, that’s the idea! But where does it leave us when the people nominated to deliver the dream don’t turn up or just weren’t good enough in the first place? Should we now be expecting a period of national emotional deflation caused by the huge gap between what we hoped would happen and what actually did happen?

I think the fact that for most of us football, indeed all sport, is not ‘real life’ is our insurance against national depression when things go wrong. It’s precisely because we see sport as an escape from real life in the first place that the huge, tear-inducing disappointment when our country gets knocked out of the World Cup is actually quite ‘disposable’. Even the day after the Germany game people in offices and shops all over the country began to joke about England’s demise and carry on with their lives as the disappointment gradually receded into the background.

So sport, unlike so often in life, offers us a win-win: as fans it lifts us sky high and provides lifelong memories when we get the result we want, but when our teams fail we can move on from and rationalise the disappointment relatively easily. I’m not sure that this is exactly what he meant back in 1981, but when re-read in this light the famous words of the great Liverpool manager Bill Shankly still ring true…

“Some people believe football is a matter of life and death, I am very disappointed with that attitude. I can assure you it is much, much more important than that.”

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 8th, 2010 at 3:01 pm and is filed under Community, economy, emotion, Personal Resilience, Productivity, Well-being. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.