Modern-day footballers are often criticised – rightly, in my view – for making too much fuss when they are even slightly hurt. Partly they do it to cheat – fooling the referee into thinking that the challenge was heavier – and partly it’s now just football culture. Similarly, there is a current social fad, particularly in the US, for finding, or inventing, reasons to be offended or upset. Luckily, a focus on Wellbeing can stop both of these.
Teaching Wellbeing is not like creating a Harry Potter magic spell to prevent problems. It is about learning how to cope when difficulties do happen. Footballers who have studied Wellbeing are still going to get fouled – but they are more likely to get up more quickly, complain less and (therefore) be less annoying to everyone else! (We know this is possible – look at the sport of Rugby: it hurts a lot more and players complain far less.) In our daily lives, annoying, frustrating, upsetting things do happen. We can’t necessarily control our emotional responses to such things, but we can control how we deal with those emotions. As we learn to understand ourselves better, ‘I’m upset so I hit you’ evolves into ‘I’m upset but I can deal with it’, or ‘I’m upset so I’ll talk about it’ – or even ‘it doesn’t really matter’.
Always looking for someone to blame for our negative feelings is an outcome of poor wellbeing!
