I can’t tell you how many times on my evaluations as a youth soccer player, I would be told that I needed to “play with more passion.”
I truly wish when I was coming up in the game that there was more awareness on the mental side of performance and mental health in general. I can only imagine what my body language was like at times on the field, and I know that coaches were trying to help me, but what they wanted from me was surely not actually more passion.
In fact, I think I maybe had too much passion. But the way it was translating into my performance was most often misunderstood. Instead of having more passion, I needed to relax, be in the moment, and play free. I needed to let go of caring so much and care less.
What stereotypical passion looks like:
An outwardly emotive player, galvanizing at teammates or yelling at the ref.
Physical urgency or “hustling” on the field.
Showing visibly that you love playing and using the field as an avenue of self expression.
Celebrating goals.
I would see my teammates doing these things but it just wasn’t me. I was never going to be that way, and still to this day, very rarely am.
Every player has a different way of handling their strengths and insecurities. I was always a bit resentful of the players who didn’t seem to care much or take soccer very seriously but were still successful. Looking back, I realize now that that was their way of protecting themselves. My way of protecting myself was to never truly show how much I cared and how much each play, each touch, actually meant to me.
What passion looked like for me:
Taking what I did so seriously that I was nervous and tense.
Being fatigued - mentally and physically - from the constant hustle of trying to improve.
Constantly analyzing my own performance and everyone else’s.
A love of the game so deep and personal that I rarely talked about it.
Only now do I fully realize how misunderstood I was, but more importantly, how I wasn’t able to properly interpret the feedback I had gotten in order to make it useful to me. Sometimes passion is tangible or visible, but sometimes it manifests in other ways. What are you passionate about and how does that come through in your life’s work?