A puritanical pleasure of working for each and every point

This post is going to be one of my shortest and yet one of the most important ones. Sometimes it makes sense to look outside of the ABR and even outside of the domain of "therapies" to re-learn and internalize the most essential lessons.

US Open 2013 tennis  championship ended last  Monday and was won by Rafael Nadal – the hardest working man in pro tennis.

I am not a real tennis aficionado but I am fascinated by it as the most vivid and obvious display of the human work ethics.  Sure, all high level sports are about the work ethics too – but In many other sports there is either too much of the background grinding and sweat with too many tiny details that are not visible to the untrained eye.

For me tennis exposes the qualities of consistency and work ethics in the most elegant and easy-to-observe form. The rallies are visible and the points accumulate in clusters (games & sets) that are grouped in such a way that reward the effort over the sporadic  flashes of brilliance and lucky shots. What I find fascinating is exactly  this duality – on the one hand, the game of tennis looks "light" – like "one doesn't have to" keep the intense work rate all the time; but on the other hand – it is the consistency and tenacity that defines the winning ways rather than a pure talent & skill…

That was a pre-amble – but my message itself today is very brief. A couple of days ago I picked up a newspaper in the plane where the sports section reported about Nadal's US Open triumph and these are the quotes I really want to share with:

"[Nadal] plays by his own confession, not just to win titles but for the puritanical pleasure of working for each and every point " It is a process rather than a  destination for Nadal. "I am a positive player, not a negative player" Nadal said.

We all have heard this "journey above destination" cliché so many times that it lost its meaning. Intellectually everyone knows that – but especially when it comes to the home therapy for your child affected by Cerebral Palsy – it is extremely difficult to really deeply and meaningfully embrace this principle.

However, cliché or not – that's exactly the truth. You need to find your pleasure and passion in doing ABR – not in waiting for the daily session to be over and not in building the expectations on what the next assessment is going to show as the overall progress of your child.

So every time I see an opportunity to help you in internalizing this truth – I try my best to share it:  " the puritanical pleasure of working for each and every point "

I just want you to pause a bit and feel the wisdom behind this statement: it is not about "doing it well" – it is about LIVING it.

That's the key to success in any marathon journey – live it, don't just "do it"… And then the titles will come – a bit sooner or a bit later – but they surely will…

Well, that's very much it:

Live your ABR sessions – don't just 'do', or 'deliver' them. Try to find this winning attitude inside: the puritanical pleasure of working for each and every point "

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Repeating those questions at my last post brought quite a bit of new responses – so I will continue to repost them… and please, some of you have only left the requests here in the blog comments or even in the Facebook ones – please, copy your requests to <[email protected]>

Question 1.

Over the recent years I have accumulated a lot of videos teaching the techniques and going into the specific details and nuances of positioning, setups, technical refinements etc.

We've been using those for the internal training of ABR team but the constraints of the ABR training sessions that we have today only allow to share a fraction of those with you during the trainings at the ABR Centers and Satellites.

However, at the same time – I often here the remarks both from many parents and from the Trainers giving feedback after the sessions – that "parents are 'at full learning capacity' with the technical training that we already  give" assuming that any further dive into the details is going to be an overload and overwhelm.

I believe that this is true for some parents but I hope that some of you do have some ''spare learning capacity'.

Such trainings will need to undergo some editing and setting up a membership site for accessing these video – so it is quite a lot of extra work & expense on our part. So I'd want to hear what's the level of interest towards it among the active ABR families.

Question 2.

Whilst my own style of training is very technical and detail oriented – after working closely with Alex for the last year – I can see that his training brings an entirely different perspective and dimension that I find very valuable:

His largest focus is on your 'inner  game' – on your ABR Mindset and on the Philosophy of expressing your relationship and deep personal connection with your child via your exercise. One of his favorite sayings is: "You have to make your ABR ball ALIVE… With every 'roll' you want to bring some extra life into your child's body through this ball – can you achieve that if your ball is dead in your hands?"..

Again, I am unlikely to come up with this perspective myself because my entire language and the worldview is shaped differently  but I am fully behind it and I think that there is a tremendous value to it for those who are ready to hear the deeper meaning…

So my question is quite straightforward – if I see enough enthusiasm from you – we'll then try to make these trainings available during the coming year, either via the membership site or some other video sharing form. 

I am  asking these questions for a very simple reason – we have plenty more to give but I want to see the volunteers who'd deliberately step up and say: "Yes, I am ready to do this extra learning work."

These levels of trainings is not something that I am going to simply dump on YouTube or Vimeo for the curiosity of the passing strangers..

You are welcome to leave you responses in the comments here but otherwise please write to me <s[email protected]>