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Hope you all are having a wonderful summer and enjoying the sunshine and time with friends and family. Here are three things I'm learning that might be helpful to you.
1. You cannot microwave mastery
The other night as I told one of my sons to head upstairs to brush his teeth, he replied, "I wish I could teleport, Dad don't you wish you could teleport?" How many times in life do we wish we could just jump from point A to point B without having to deal with the hurdles and entanglements?
Yet anyone truly seeking to achieve mastery knows there is no Easy-Mac version of it out there. We do better by taking the slow cooker approach where all the bits of wisdom, muscle memory and osmosis of being around experts starts to soak in. Only then will the true journey to mastery begin.
2. Embrace the suck
Life will throw some crud your way at some point. How you respond to it will say a lot about your character. We can embrace the suck and grow in endurance or we can complain through it and get worse. The choice remains ours and ours alone.
As Victor Frankl shared:
"Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation."
My Jiu Jitsu gym's approach to training is for the top level students to train with the lower level ones. This means as a bottom of the totem poll white belt I am often live training with black, brown and purple belts with 8-20 years more experience than me.
Sometimes a sense of dread comes when I first get paired up but hours later I'll think back to something I learned or even just smile at the fact that I survived a six minute round with them. Without intense pressure you will never have a diamond.
3. Find joy in the struggle
My kids' favorite song right now is called "Jiggle Jiggle." If you haven't heard it yet, be prepared for one minute and thirty seven seconds of ear drum pain. Or at least that's how I first felt about it. My kids love to sing along and smile to it so I recently decided to join in rather than grit my teeth through it.
It's important to find some joy even in the midst of our struggles. As the Apostle Paul reminds us:
"Rejoice always, pray continually, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus." (1 Thessalonians 5:16-18, NIV)
One of our head coaches at Jiu Jitsu shared his approach to this. As a smaller fighter he often ends up with a heavier partner mounted on top of his chest with their full body weight pinning him down. When it's hard to breath and panic ensues he calms himself down by singing "Sitting on the Dock of the Bay" in his head. Eventually the time passes or an opportunity to escape presents itself.
Where can you find the joy in something hard in your life right now? Maybe it starts with not taking yourself too seriously and acknowledging that you are still learning and growing. And if you fail? So what! Not many people are willing to take the same risk, so laugh it off and jump back in for another round with a smile on your face.
 | Brian Catanella is passionate about sharing Christian leadership principles through his writing, coaching, volunteering and professional life. While professionally a consultant through UBS Institutional Consulting Group with a finance background, he is fueled daily by sharing God's love and wisdom to help contribute to the future development of coaches, teachers, parents and leaders. He is active in serving his local church in Moorestown, New Jersey where he attends with his wife and two sons. Learn More » |
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