Overcoming Adversity

This is from the Philip­pine Daily Inquirer. Very inter­est­ing points and some­thing to think about, spe­cially after our deba­cle in the last Olympics. In fact there is a new mea­sure for peo­ple nowa­days. Before, we talked about IQ (Intel­li­gence), and EQ (Emo­tional Quo­tient); right now, there is such a thing as AQ (Adver­sity Quo­tient). More on that in upcom­ing arti­cles. I am reprint­ing an excerpt of the arti­cle here; please click on the link below to read the rest of the arti­cle.

To over­come adver­sity is com­mon trait of cham­pi­ons
By Bev­erly T. Nativi­dad
Philip­pine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 01:10:00 08/17/2008

THE WORLD’S EYES ARE FIXED on the Bei­jing Olympics to wit­ness the feats of world cham­pi­ons. But the Olympics really serve to remind us that cham­pi­ons are not only found in the sports arena, they are also found in other areas of life.

The state­ment is taken very seri­ously by the Inter­na­tional Olympics Com­mit­tee (IOC). It had con­vened a con­gress to gather world cham­pi­ons in the field of pol­i­tics, sci­ence, the arts, busi­ness and sports to answer the ques­tion: “What makes a champion?”

Marissa Adviento, a sports psy­chol­o­gist from the Ate­neo de Manila Uni­ver­sity, was the lone Fil­ipino del­e­gate to this pre-Olympic con­gress held a few days before the open­ing of the Bei­jing Olympics.

“The idea was to search for the com­mon traits in the lives of cham­pi­ons and find out what makes a cham­pion,” she explains.

Accord­ing to Adviento, cham­pi­ons are made out of adversity.

“All the speak­ers in the con­gress said the one thing that made them cham­pi­ons was adver­sity, the expe­ri­ence of tremen­dous pain and tri­als. It’s like you can’t be a cham­pion with­out adver­sity,” she says.

Read the rest of the arti­cle here…

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