Impatience
Impatience, a state of wanting to get to the next moment in time/stage immediately or as soon as possible.
Recently, a friend of mine talked about impatience being the reason why singers get injured. Competence in using your voice and your body to produce the sounds you wish to takes many hours of quality practice to achieve (as with any skill). Many singers rush through that process, wanting to get to the "end" (a voice they wish to get, a song they want to perform etc.) and they injure their vocal cords.
I told my friend that impatience is often the cause of many injuries, other than accidents caused by external circumstances (e.g. someone punches you in the face, durian hits your head as it falls from the tree).
Impatience creates an environment where the demands you place on your body will be far greater than your current capacity and adaptive ability. That is where the risk of injury lives. What does this mean?
Say you want to run a marathon. The marathon is 20km long. You've only ever ran till 2.4km in your life and you've not run since your physical test days in school. Your current capacity might be to only run 1km and, if you gave your body enough rest to recover after challenging it with an extra 500m, it might be able to adapt to 1.5km - . 20km though, that's way out of your adaptive range and your current running distance capacity.
You decide not to train for the marathon. Come marathon day, you end up finishing it anyway, dragging yourself through it.
After the marathon, you notice pain in your knee, your hip and the bottom of your foot. It hurts to walk and it doesn't go away for a long time. This is your body telling you that you did something that it deemed as not so good for you. It is your body saying,"maybe train for the marathon next time. We weren't ready for that. Now we need to rest and change what we do."
This is happens a lot. An athlete wants to reach their next goal or break a record faster, a person fired up by their wedding/the the new year/whatever significant event wants to look a certain way, a musician wants to play the difficult song they always dreamed of playing, a singer wants to sing the way they envision themselves to sooner. However, they forget that getting injured only brings them further from their goals.
Adaptation takes time and consistent high quality input and practice. This takes being patient and it is those who can sit with the "boredom" of doing what is necessary and the curiosity to explore the moments in the journey are the ones who actually reach their "goals".
