21/12/2021

Welcome to another episode of what I have learnt today this is episode no17. In today's episode, I want to talk about how being late can be dangerous.

On Mondays, I usually have a football training session and on this particular Monday, evening at about 5 pm I made sure I had saved 1 full hour dedicated to preparing to get to training on time because I was regularly late, I needed to be there by 6.30. I massaged, changed got my boots, did a few tasks here and there and before I knew it's 6:08 pm. Now I have To leave the house and be there in 22 minutes I'm not sure if I should take the bus, but If I take the bike (which will get me there in 16 minutes) I would be tired to train. The bus will take 8 minutes and a further 7-minute walk to the pitch. I decided to get the bus so I ran to the bus stop. When I got to the pedestrian stop, I clicked the pedestrian stop switch at the crossing multiple times. Then I saw the bus coming. And another one behind it. But there were so many cars I decided to wait and let them go. But then when I saw the third and last bus that goes to my stop I could not resist if I miss this one I am guaranteed to be late. I saw a gap between the cars and decided to cross even though the lights were still green, underestimating the speed of the cars. By the time I get to the middle lane, the cars suddenly got so close and the driver had no intention of slowing down that I rushed to get to the other side and almost got hit. After getting to the other side, I took a deep breath and thought about what am I doing- I'm trying to be on time because I'm late by putting my life at risk and at that moment I realised how unconscious I became of my surrounding, my emotions and my judgement. I was late to the training session anyways but I decided from then on that I don't ever want to be late again, in fact, I made sure I got to training an hour early, just to prove to myself that it's possible! This instance and other instances proved to be the consequences of being late.

Because of regularly lateness, not knowingly you are enforcing the same message and belief about yourself- not being reliable, unprepared and that can be aggravated by the poor performance in my case the training session. That can reduce your self-esteem and confidence- It can feel stressful, strain relations with other people because you're unreliable and it affects your performance- you are often not focused and become apologetic about things. The reason I want to perform my best in training Is that it reflects in the game, as a result, it helps- When you are good at something you enjoy it and constantly want to improve so this was helping me physiologically.

This happens because we cannot predict what happens before the meeting or session. You might do an urgent and immediate task here and there and find out later how time-consuming that action was. Or might underestimate how long a journey can take. So being early is part of preparation because then you are focused, you perform the task at hand better, less stressed, safer, confident and it will help you in the future when you need to be somewhere important.

And so that's it for this episode, You can follow me on Instagram at @whiltpod and also you can visit my blogs on Whilt.blog. Thank you for reading and see you on to the next one!

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