Learning from the beautiful game

The lionesses were 90 minutes away from immortality. Then Olga Carmona worked her magic and Spain pipped them to the post in the FIFA Women's World Cup™ final

Back in Madrid the streets started to fill with joyful celebrations

Talk about bouncing back - over the course of the month-long world cup event, Spain played through the shock of last year’s player rebellion and the recovery from injury of two-time Ballon d’Or winner Alexia Putellas

“We fought hard, that’s the truth, until we felt like we had nothing left. But when we go to the airport and see a girl with a football or with a football jersey and the desire to play it fills us with energy again and makes us keep fighting for what we’re still missing,” Putellas said

The 19 year old superstar Salma Paralluelo exclaimed, “You have to dream big to achieve things and, when the opportunity arrives, take advantage of it” 

Wow was it tense - a single goal separated the two sides as Spain made history and lifted their first-ever trophy. Meaning heartbreak for the Lionesses, who themselves had the chance of winning the competition for the first ever time

The thing is, from the record breaking high speed penalty of Chloe Kelly against Nigeria to the razor sharp reactions and athletic dives of Mary Earps -  it’s clear that the biggest take away from Australia and New Zealand 2023 is that this team of Lionesses is just getting started. Coach Sarina Wiegman is only two years into her tenure of perfecting tactics and giving team talks, and just look at what they have achieved together!

What’s so inspiring about these two teams – is that they see a challenge and they look it in the eye, they go for it, they dive – win or lose – and if they lose – they bounce back

Let’s imagine the beautiful game, football, is a metaphor for life. Are you missing the ball by diving or are you missing the ball by simply standing still, and as a result missing out on what your life could be?

Have you learned to wink at a challenge?

‘Dive’ is one of Progressfull’s resilient mind-sets. It enables us to wink at a challenge – to give it a go and as importantly learn to enjoy doing so!

Like playing football, it feels better to miss the ball by diving than by simply standing still. If we don’t dive then we are passive, standing, simply watching the ball, as someone dribbles past us or, even worse, fly into the back of the net behind us if we are the goalkeeper

Learning how to enjoy challenges is how we grow

What stops a lot of people from choosing to Dive is thinking that they will fail and it will all go horribly wrong … and yet even if we fail, when we challenge ourselves and choose to Dive, we will never be pulled so far out of shape that we can’t bounce back and resume our natural nature, our true character. Just like an elastic band we can stretch far more than most of us think possible. Give it a go, wink at the challenge and Dive!

Remember you will always bounce back and resume your original shape when you learn the Progressfull mind-set of Dive. You’ll also have had a great experience by winking at the challenge

Think about your life and consider whether you are really giving yourself the best advantage by learning how to wink at a challenge

We are not talking about becoming great divers like Nani, Rivaldo, Ronaldo or Klinsmann - theirs are different types of dive altogether!

How about today you consider where and when you can Dive – take the challenge and go for it!

If you would like to discover more about how you can dive and Show Up we have an Upskill (our name for a course) to help you do just that – you can learn more about it here