Are you doing it wrong?

In high school gym class, we played Badminton.  If you ask me to this day if I enjoyed it, you’ll hear a very emphatic, “No!”  I hated Badminton because I was awful at it.  Over the years the sport came up in conversation and I would share my thoughts and the conversation would move on.  It hasn’t really come up all that recently, but something I read recently about a completely different topic brought me back to why I hated Badminton (plus things in my life that I was not good at).

Thinking about it, I went into the game thinking it would be like other sports with racquets and you could treat the birdie like a racquetball or tennis ball.  Every time that birdie would come to me, I would bat at it with everything I had because I thought that was how it was supposed to be.  Turns out, I was doing it wrong.  You can’t slam that little guy with everything you’ve got because it’s not a solid object.  There are holes all over it, which means air flow will definitely play a part in where it goes.  Plus, the little ball tip basically guarantees it will waver and wobble in the air and will not follow a straight trajectory.  You have to be careful and hit it with enough energy to get it back over the net, but not so much that it doesn’t go anywhere.  

So now that I’ve had that epiphany about Badminton, I’ve started thinking about other things I didn’t like because I was not good at them.  It’s like a whole new door has been opened.  I have this new lens on life to retry things through having a better understanding of how they’re supposed to work.  I want to learn more and get to the root of how I was doing it wrong.  It’s exciting, this new way of thinking, and I kind of want the same for other people because their lives could change from this knowledge!  Just a simple tweak or two or a gathering of more information about something could propel you into a new level where you’re really good at something and could possibly even make a living at it.  

At the end of the day, I’m not saying I want to be a professional Badminton player; just that the simple act of realizing I was doing it wrong opened up the possibility that other things I was bad at and hated to do are probably in that same category.  I have to say, it’s kind of fun to come back to and re-evaluate something from your past to give it a second chance because you’ve changed the way you think about it and have learned a new and different way of going about it.  Next time I have the option, I’m actually going to try to play Badminton with this new understanding and epiphany about the sport and myself.