January Volleyball Newsletter- Patience

“Patience is not your ability to wait, but how you act while waiting.” Joyce Meyers

In volleyball, patience is necessary to become great. Not only the patience to endure painful situations like defensive wave drills, workouts, and weightlifting but also the patience to wait for change to occur.

Patience is a key quality of people who have grit and tenacity. They don’t give up one dream to pursue another dream when things get challenging. Valuable players stick with it rain or shine with patience to know challenging work does eventually pay off.

But patience is difficult. In our staff training, the most selected trait for improvement is patience. It is a quality most of us would like to have more of. The word comes directly from the Latin meaning to endure suffering. People who are impatient cannot manage pain and are described by the tendency to blow up, snap, lose it, or people who are easily angered and annoyed.

Therapy performed to help improve people’s level of patience involves helping increase a person’s tolerance of pain. People working to improve their level of patience are placed in a room and subjected to mild shocks growing in intensity to the pain level of a bee sting. They gain greater patience the more they can manage themselves in pain.

This month, consider how patient you are in difficulty. How well do you handle irritation and frustration? Let’s work together this month to become better at the virtue of patience.

TEST YOUR PATIENCE

Check out this survey to see how patient you are.

• When working on a new skill, I keep going until I have mastered it.
• I remain calm under pressure.
• I am rarely irritated or annoyed.
• I respond in heated situations with dignity and clarity.
• I follow through on long term goals and projects. I see them all the way to the end.
• I manage frustration well.
• I don’t stress out or am easily agitated.
• I rise above difficulty and make other better in a crisis.

My friends and family would list patience as one of my virtues.

Improve Your Volleyball Vertical with Patience

Testing thousands of high school athletes, a researcher on athletic talent, found five significant indicators of athletic talent.

1. Strength
2. Foot speed
3. Lateral movement speed
4. Quick start speed
5. Vertical jump.

Of these five tests, there is one that is a predictor of all other skills, and athletes who score high in this category scores high in all others.

The answer is the vertical jump. A good female volleyball college athlete will have an average vertical of twenty-three inches. The highest recorded female athlete's vertical is thirty-four inches.

What is great news about this finding is that vertical jump can be significantly improved. A daily commitment to working on vertical will produce meaningful results. But here is the catcher! It will take about 12-16 months for the work to reveal itself. Most people quit too early. Vertical requires patience to build.

Key: 10-15 minutes of vertical work four days a week is crucial. Stick with a reliable and reputable program you can do at home.

If you want to be a talented volleyball player, invest time into working on your vertical jump—it will help you improve all other aspects of your athleticism. Time invested in this skill is time well spent.

Patience Under Pressure: 4 Ways to Become More Patient

1. Manage your pain. We blow up when we “can’t take any more.” Pay attention to how full your frustration tank is getting. Work hard to find ways to decompress. Breathing, prayer, mindfulness, taking a walk or run, laughing all help you manage your pain.

2. Get rid of bitterness. Bitterness is the pain you haven’t dealt with that lives in your spirit like a plaque in your arteries. The more bitterness you have, the more likely you will have a serious meltdown.

3. Improve your ability to delay gratification. Pick something that is tempting for you that you have a tough time resisting such as sugar, caffeine, watching TV, playing video games, shopping, or other pleasurable but addicting behaviors. Remove this from your life for two to three weeks while you work on self-control. How does your character change? How irritable do you get? This is a good indication of your character and dependence on pleasure to soothe yourself.

4. Focus on the journey, not on the external results. Vertical jump training takes at least 18 months to start seeing remarkable results. Most people quit because it takes so long. Be patient, you will reap what you sow.