Low Motivation

Sometimes it's hard to drag your ass to practice. I'm not going to sugar coat it; practice can be a real drain on your real life. Many of leagues have late practices, or the practice space is inconvenient, or traffic is a complete nightmare. It's not easy to drag your butt to practice day after day, but most of us end up doing it; we go to practice day in and day out, but sometimes we lose our focus.

I'd go to practice, but this couch is too awesome.

Because I'm the Training Director for our league this year, I get to monitor lovely things like the league's attendance. It waxes and wanes like the moon; when we're getting close to a bout, suddenly people come out of the woodwork. It happens, and I hate being an attendance tyrant, but sometimes people need to be reminded that practice isn't just because we have a box to tick off to be bout eligible; practice is there to make us all better derby players, and when the individual skaters in your league improve, so does your team.

Here are a few things to keep in mind the next time you find yourself debating whether or not you should go to practice tonight if you're feeling kind of "enh."

Take pride and ownership of your practice time. You should be proud of yourself for going to practice; you're doing something that not a lot of other people have the opportunity or the testicular fortitude to try. Be proud of yourself for strapping those skates on.

Remember why you're there. Why are you there? Practice is there to give you an opportunity to be a better player. Everyone's definition of better is different, but you know that when you spend time at practice, your skills improve. Who doesn't want to hit better on the track, or skate faster, or have an awesome hockey stop?

Stop waiting to feel motivated. I think a lot of people are waiting to feel motivated, when motivation has to come from within. Get your butt to practice, and you'll see that it was worth it. Inspiration isn't going to just strike you in the brain like a lighting bolt, sometimes it's just a habit. Get your butt to practice! Go!

Stop listening to that voice that's telling you not to go. An object at rest tends to stay at rest, and I'm pretty sure we evolved as humans to expel as little energy as possible. It's a survival method and it helped us make it through food shortages and such, but in modern society, we don't have to chase down our food anymore. You like exercise, otherwise you wouldn't have done derby in the first place, so get up and get your butt to practice.

Rewrite your inner voice's script. When we feel down, we talk down to ourselves. We get negative about everything under the sun, including practice, derby, work, our lives. Give yourself a break with the internal doomalogue. Try to say positive things to yourself; be kind to yourself. I know it's hard sometimes, but try it. It will help.

Clarify your goals. When you have a clear goal in mind, you are motivated to meet them. When you have an unclear goal, being motivated to work for it is much much harder. If you are conflicted about why you keep playing derby, your motivation to go to practice will probably stay low until you figure out what you want to do with your derby future.

If you're feeling burnt out, please read this carefully. I've researched this one a lot because I've felt it, my friends have felt it, and through the years most of my teammates have felt it at one point or another. The best thing you can do is get some rest and sleep. According to the experts, you need to rest and sleep...not party, not take a day off and goof off; get a good night's sleep! Evidently, our quality of sleep has a lot to do with our emotional barometer, and when we're lacking sleep, we tend to dive into the negative end of the spectrum. Seriously. Get. Some. Sleep.

Maybe some of these tips will help you regain your motivation when you find it lacking. Some days it's a struggle, and some days it's easy. Let's hope that most of your days are easy ones.