challenges

Who Are You?

/ Jillcoach / 1 Comment

Don’t let other people answer that question for you.

I was a really curious and enthusiastic little kid. One of the very few TV shows I was allowed to watch was Star Trek. I looooooooved Star Trek and decided at age 4 that William Shatner was my boyfriend. (Side note: when I got a chance to meet him at age 50, I told him that, and he was wonderfully and perfectly sketchy and flirtatious about it.)

I also have the moon landing as one of my earliest memories, so it is no surprise that I ended up wanting to be an astronaut. Because of Star Trek and the women I saw there, it never crossed my mind that girls couldn’t do that, so that was my dream. I would become a pilot then get a job at NASA being an astronaut, and go into space and maybe the moon. It was a want and certainty as deep and vibrant as Van Gogh’s Starry Night. I had that absolute confidence that comes with being pre-pubescent and not having much experience with the crappiness of the world yet. Or frankly, the crappiness of people who should love you the most.

I was about 11 years old, in the car with my mom, and she asked, “So what do you want to be when you grow up?” It seemed like such a normal question at the time, but looking back I wonder how she didn’t already know. I made no secret of it. I wonder now if she didn’t ask just so she could say the NEXT thing: “An astronaut? You’re not good enough at math to do that!” It was so dismissive, so unfeeling, it felt like she had slapped me. At the time, I was in advanced classes for both language and math, and was at least a year ahead of most of my peers in both. I didn’t have a great algebra teacher, and was struggling a little with concepts, but I was still AHEAD of where I should have been. But I was 11 years old, and this was my mom, so “I’m not good at math” became a part of my story about myself, and I gave up on the idea of being an astronaut. I still wanted to, but that want had become a faded watercolor, a wish for the impossible.

Fast forward 5 years: I’m a junior in high school, starting to think about what was next, and considering the Air Force academy. I still wanted to be a pilot, you see, and maybe maybe that would teach me something I could do at NASA, even if I couldn’t be an astronaut because “I’m not good at math”. My swim coach who I’d been with for all those years asked me what I was thinking about, and I told him…and his response was to laugh and say, “The Air Force Academy? You’ll never make it! You don’t like being told what to do!” Again, I felt slapped. Another trusted adult, another evaluation of WHO I AM that was different than what I thought I was. But I was 16, and this was my coach, so “I don’t like being told what to do” became part of my story about myself, and I gave up on the idea of being a pilot.

Both of those interactions were pivotal moments in my life, and represent one of the few things I have regrets about: allowing other people’s opinions of who I am become who I accepted myself to be. I let other people define me for a LONG time, not trusting what I knew about myself but swallowing their off-hand remarks or criticisms as truth. I was in my 40’s before it struck me what I had done, and it was while I was juggling 4 jobs to keep things together after my divorce, that I said, “Wait a damn minute! I’m not LAZY like my family told me! What else were they wrong about?!”

The more I thought about it, the more annoyed I got. The very people who should have been supportive and encouraging were the source of my greatest angst and insecurity. What I finally realized is that everyone is going to have some kind of opinion about me, about who I am, based on their own baggage, perceptions, and insecurities, and that it is up to me to accept or reject it. Some people (like my coach) will do it thoughtlessly, like a joke, not understanding that it can take root in someone’s heart because they trust you. Some people (like my parents) think that saying negative things to you will motivate you to do better in order to prove them wrong. Some people (like my mom in particular) do it to manipulate your behavior into something that makes them feel more comfortable. Some people do it to bring you down, or because you don’t fit in a box they understand, or because they can only feel big if they make someone else feel small.

At the end of the day, you don’t have to understand their motivation. All you need to do is quickly weigh it against your own heart, “Does that feel right? Does that fit who I know myself to be?”, and if not, yeet that judgment into the universe and move on.

The other thing I learned and really want you to hear is to be suspicious of someone telling you who someone else is, especially if what they’re saying upsets you. (for example: “Democrats just want open borders” or “that kid is just saying he’s trans to win at sports”, etc) In this situation, their motivation DOES matter. Ask yourself why is this person telling me this? Do they have an axe to grind? Are they seeking attention/clicks? What do they get out of upsetting me? Do I have direct personal experience that supports or refutes this? Do they say nice things about other people or groups, or are they consistently negative? Why should I believe it? Why do I WANT to believe it?

Most of the time, people are absolutely full of shit about other people’s characters and motivation; we all judge each other through our own lens—”if I acted like that, it would be because I intended _____, or because I felt like ________, or because I wanted ______”. None of that tells you what is in someone else’s heart.

The bottom line is that I can’t control what other people think of me or others, but I absolutely can gatekeep what I choose to internalize. I don’t have to let their garbage attitudes direct the course of my life or my dreams and aspirations. I don’t have to fall for the clickbait. I don’t have to trust someone else’s analysis of a third party. And I absolutely do NOT have to allow other people to define who I am or what I “should” be.

I realized recently that my mom probably killed my astronaut dream out of fear that I actually could end up doing something so dangerous. Her choice to hurt me probably came from wanting to make herself feel better. It tracks with all the rest of her parenting. It was not in my personality, especially at that age, to push back with the single-minded “I’ll show you!”. My response for decades was to feel bad about myself and nurse hurt feelings. I don’t recommend this approach.

Participation Trophies

/ Jillcoach / 1 Comment

I loved working with teenagers. Even with all the challenges of navigating hormones and high school, they are wonderful, raw, unfiltered humans, still filled with passion and humor and alive-ness that gets bludgeoned out of adults by work and bills and obligations. Teenagers do NOT tolerate bullshit and can smell it a mile away.

Participation trophies: the toxic brainchild of someone, either Boomer or GenX, to smooth the ruffled feathers of a 4 year old who shouldn’t have been in organized sports yet. This pacifier might work OK (I won’t say well) for little tiny kids, to reinforce that showing up and trying deserve acknowledgment, but they need to be phased out by the time kids hit about 8 years old. They catch on pretty quickly that participation ribbons and trophies mean nothing, and by the time they’re teenagers, those expensive little trinkets are being thrown in the trash as soon as Mommy’s back is turned. The “reward for breathing” is bullshit, and every teenager knows it. With teens, giving them praise when they know they don’t deserve it earns you a healthy amount of disrespect and a reputation as a liar. Period.

I’m not going to lie: I was a tough coach. (Or, as the misogynistic moms used to say “mean”. Eyeroll.) I had high expectations, pushed my swimmers to do their best, and absolutely would NOT tell someone they were doing great if I didn’t mean it. As a result, the kids knew when they got praise, it was real and truly meant something. I was honest about the hard work they needed to do to reach their goals and didn’t sugar coat it. There were days when they hated my honesty, and me, but even on those days, they trusted me. They trusted I was telling the truth. They trusted that no matter what, they could count on me. They trusted that even when they were hating me, I was still in their corner.

I think often of those teenagers and what coaching them taught me, and I’ve tried to translate it to what we’re going through right now as adults in this country. Adults still want “no bullshit” people in their lives, and as vile as I personally find our former-soon-to-be-again president, I do see how some equate his constant hateful, tactless, shit-talking to being “no bullshit”. He is awful, but he doesn’t hide it or pretend otherwise. He lies constantly but doesn’t excuse it. He may drown you in an avalanche of manure, but you know where you stand while he’s doing it. For a LOT of people, that’s enough to be able to hang adjectives on him like “honest” or “real”. There’s an old adage: don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining—I’m guessing part of the attraction of DJT is that he just tells people he’s pissing on them and doesn’t care.

Democrats, on the other hand, are so busy trying to please everyone that no one trusts them, even when they have good policies. The truth is that most people DO like their policies, when you remove a reference to what party proposes it; the dislike and distrust come in when people know who is behind it. Even the people they’re trying to help don’t trust them. The people pleasing looks like pandering and ends up meaning as much as those participation trophies. They talk big about fighting, but then roll over and show a soft belly in the face of election results that at minimum deserved calls for a recount. They now seem unreliable as well as dishonest, which has undercut every good idea they have.

Here’s the thing: you can have a big tent and a big heart and try to do what’s right for all of America without abandoning being “real”. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and Jasmine Crockett are doing it daily, and there are people that voted for them while also voting for DJT…for the same reason! They found them to be genuine, and that means a hell of a lot to people.

Those of us who oppose the direction this country is about to go have a very hard row to hoe ahead, and the first thing that needs to happen is a rebuilding of trust. We have to go back to basics of being genuine and straightforward, and our word meaning something that is true and that people can rely on. Honestly, I think it’s going to come from those of us who have never run for office and tend to be disgusted with the status quo of politics; we will need to step up and change this mess. It is easy to sit in the bleachers and watch and second guess. If we want to achieve a different end than oligarchy and wage slavery, we need to step off the bleachers and suit up.

Just showing up is not enough. If we want the trophy, we absolutely have got to do the hard work and swim the race to win.

Walls Redux

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Revisiting and updating…seemed timely

The wall is a physical barrier that must be dealt with in our sport, but it is also a mental/emotional one.

It is in our nature to slow at a wall, to look up at it, to ponder how to get past it. Our tendency is to assume our path continues on past the wall, following the track we have been on, and that the wall stands in our way. In swim training, we must overcome this mindset:  our path does not continue on, but resumes in another direction. The wall becomes a chance to speed up, to readjust, to jump off and speed away on our new path. The wall is not obstacle, but opportunity.

My other experience with walls is The Wall exercise in team building. After working through a series of smaller challenges with a group where you have (hopefully) ironed out differences, insecurities, communication issues, and trust, you are faced with a final challenge. A huge and intimidating wall that the whole team has to get over. There are no handholds or ways to boost yourself, and it is too tall for even your tallest group member to jump to catch the edge. You MUST work together, using the gifts and talents of the group, to find a way over. It is one of the most initially disheartening things to face, and it is easy to fall into “this is impossible”.

I don’t know how others have experienced this, but our group struggled a bit at first. Several people (myself included) balked because of physical limitations like weight or bad back. Some people balked out of fear, or body image issues, or lack of confidence in their physical abilities. I say we struggled “a bit”, but the truth is that we hemmed and hawed and bickered for probably 15 minutes before we made any attempts to get over. FINALLY, a woman who had been a gymnast as a kid and was all of 5 feet tall, told a couple of the guys to give her a boost. Even pushing her as high as they could, she could only get hands to the top of the wall…but then, using her knowledge of gymnastics and flexibility, she tossed one leg straight up and hooked her foot on the top of the wall and pulled herself over. (To this day, it is one of the most impressive things I’ve ever seen someone do.)

Once that happened, we were re-energized. Seeing it was believing it, and working together we got everyone over that wall…boosting from the bottom, reaching from the top to catch hands and help pull, shouting encouragement. When the last person came over, we were EUPHORIC. We all felt the lesson in our bones: we had accomplished something that seemed impossible because we worked together. None of us, no matter how talented or accomplished or naturally gifted, could have gotten over that wall alone; success was only possible as a team.

So how does all this philosophical rambling about walls matter in broader context? In preparation for writing this, I looked up the definition for the word wall, and was interested to find this:  an extreme or desperate position or a state of defeat, failure, or ruin. Those of us who supported a different vision of America’s future than the one we’re facing are feeling this deeply right now. We hung our hopes on joy and progress only to run face first into the wall of other people’s fear, prejudice, and apathy. What now, what next? This wall looms over us, and I now stand in front of it, feeling a bit desperate. I cannot see past it to where we go from here.

We can take lessons from both swimming and team building. We can speed toward this wall, and see it for the opportunity it is. We can have the confidence to race at this wall, lower our heads, hold our breath, flip and jump as hard as we can in our new direction. We can remember that we are not alone in this endeavor, and that our way to deal with the wall is in community. Our “team” can succeed where we as individuals will struggle. Our path is on a different course, one that we cannot yet see, but it will be there, and this wall that seems so daunting is our best chance at finding it. The alternative is letting the wall stop us, leaving us stuck in a place we don’t want to be and weren’t trying to get to. Screw that—let’s push off this wall together and see where our new direction takes us.

Fighting my Imposter Syndrome

/ Jillcoach / 2 Comments

The first time my head coach had me run practice for his elite senior group was nerve wracking. The kids didn’t know me well at all, and my mouth went completely dry facing this group of about 25 teenagers, with looks on their faces ranging from uncertainty to skepticism to hostility. Who was I to tell them what to do? Why would anyone want to hear what I had to say? My imposter syndrome raging, I resisted the urge to recite my resume at them and plowed forward.

I’m telling this story mainly because I’m back there again, only this time with venturing into writing and trying to figure out publishing in a social media environment. At the age of nearly 60, learning how to reach people and establish a following is more challenging than that first practice with a new group. NO ONE WANTS TO HEAR WHAT YOU HAVE TO SAY keeps pounding in my head, trying to get me to quit as I have before with my writing.

The thing is: I’m a big believer in paying attention to what the universe puts in your path, and over the last couple weeks I have encountered several blogs, podcasts, and posts where people are talking about everyone needing to use the gifts they have to get us through the next few years. It felt like something was calling me to step up and try again. So here I am, in the face of all my insecurity and imposter syndrome, putting myself out there just in case there is a nugget of something I’ve learned that would help another person navigate their challenges.

Insecurity is debilitating. It drags you back before you even start, constantly whispering to you that it doesn’t matter, no one cares, who would pay attention to you, it’s better to not even try than to try and fail. I saw it so much in the athletes I worked with—why work hard and put myself on the line when I might not win or reach my goal? There is vulnerability in caring and reaching wholeheartedly for what you want, and coming up short can feel awful and devastating. Our insecurity makes us back away from the consequences of trying and failing, but blinds us to the consequences of not trying at all. It makes us defensive and cynical, telling ourselves that our choice or non-choice simply doesn’t matter, that caring is for chumps.

But what is the alternative?

At a macro level, I think we saw the alternative in our last election. Millions of people told themselves “my vote/voice doesn’t matter, why even try, nobody cares anyway, no one wants to hear what I have to say, I’ll just bury my head and protect myself.” The consequences of this choice remain to be seen, but certainly seem to be rolling toward very negative for most Americans.

I don’t know how this journey will go for me, but I do know that I need to try. If what I write helps one person, then throwing myself out here and being vulnerable was worth it. What do I have to lose really? If I never get beyond a follower or two, that will feel embarrassing, but if I give up after two weeks because my insecurity is dragging me back, I will feel worse about myself as a person.

I don’t want to be click-baity…not my style. I want to be authentic and sincere, but maybe that’s not a thing that gets followers. Gotta try anyway, right? Maybe I should put a cat picture on my post to at least get someone to open it.

?????????????

Empty Lanes

/ Jillcoach / 2 Comments
Empty lanes of a swimming pool

You can’t win if you don’t show up.

When I started coaching my high school team, the existing habit was to allow the swimmers to pick their events. Being teenagers, they only picked what they liked or felt 100% comfortable with or knew they could win, with the end result being that we left lanes empty in some of the more challenging events. Why choose to swim the 100 butterfly when you could choose the 50 freestyle? Why pick an event you knew you were going to lose? It took doing some math on a whiteboard to show them that those empty lanes were why they kept losing.

In our high school swim league, the competition pools had 8 lanes, so each team could put up to 4 swimmers in each event. Points were awarded down through 7th place, so it was mathematically possible to nullify the other team’s first place by capturing enough of those other points. By not filling every lane, we were ceding points. By not filling every event, we weren’t getting swimmers into the big championship meets.

Once they bought into the math, the next step was their confidence. Building their technique, setting smaller challenges, setting expectations that everyone would try those “harder” events at least once—those were the things that slowly developed their belief that they could succeed. And practice, practice, practice. They became proud of those 6th and 7th place finishes, knowing their small contribution of points moved the team ahead. By swimming a variety of events, they learned they improved their chances of qualifying for regional championships.

I think there is a lesson for Democrats and Independents in this.

Living in a reddish-purple state for many years, I saw SO MANY state and local races where Republicans were running unopposed. Like my teenaged swimmers, the opposition had decided to focus on areas where they were comfortable running and knew they could probably win. They left empty lanes in election after election, and again, I think those empty lanes are why they keep losing. The win (first place) of a Democrat in an urban area gets nullified quickly by the votes (points) of the team that didn’t leave those lanes empty in multiple rural areas. Is it challenging to run in those areas where it’s going to be an uphill battle? Absolutely! Is it worth it in the bigger scheme of things? Absolutely! Because when you leave those lanes empty, you are not only ceding the win to the other team, you are demoralizing your own team. You are creating a situation where even the people who agree with you end up feeling abandoned.

It’s going to take time—finding people willing to take on the challenge, helping them build their skills in communicating their vision, setting expectations that it may take a few cycles to see real progress, understanding that coming in 2nd doesn’t mean you didn’t succeed in making some points with people. It will take practice, practice, practice. It takes the will to try, knowing you might not win.

My swimmers learned that I truly did celebrate those single points of 7th place. They learned that their effort MATTERED. They learned to have pride and confidence in their contribution, and to feel connected to their team. Ultimately, they learned that the only real failure is not trying at all.

The Level Playing Field

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I think part of why we all love sport so much is that every game, match, or meet starts off even, with everyone having an equal chance to win. Teams of equal size, equal opportunity, the scores all at zero, the playing surface identical…a tableau of possibility and hope that we spectators can pour our emotions into, rejoice or mourn the outcome, then start fresh the next time.

As a coach, the absolute essence of competition was based around the idea that both teams were operating from the same basic framework of rules, events, and number of available lanes, with the only differences being who was on our team and how we chose to use our entries to maximize our chance of doing well. NEVER ONE TIME did any coach try to alter the rules in their favor, eliminate members of my team to gain an advantage, take away my assigned lanes, or outright cheat to win. Imagine your favorite sport:  your team shows up to play, and part of your team is barred from entering. Your scoring area has been reduced while the other team’s is larger. You’d be pissed, right? You’d scream, “NOT FAIR!!!”

That is exactly what is and has been going on in American politics for years. Gerrymandering has reduced the scoring area for Democrats across the country, which to my mind is just flat cheating, despite how “legal” it may be and no matter who is doing it. Writing cheating into law doesn’t make it right, and the concept of the winners getting to draw the districting map for voting was a BAD idea from the start. Gerrymandering has given a huge advantage to Republicans, who are now using that power to further abuse the rules of fair play.

Let’s think about this in terms of the NFL. All of the coaches get together to pass a rule that whoever wins the Superbowl gets to make a rule change that the rest of the league will live under. At the time, the coaches (all being confident in their ability to win the Superbowl) would think this was a great idea, and imagine some minor tweaks they would make. For a few years, the NFC and AFC trade wins, and the changes are relatively benign; then AFC teams win three or four years in a row, and the NFC coaches are disgruntled. A few of them get together, and decide next time one of them wins, they’re going to take advantage of the rule change ability to really make it hard for the AFC to win again. An NFC teams wins, and the rule change that year is that AFC players must play with their ankles tied together during the playoffs and Superbowl. It would be in the rules, but it would make it so no AFC team could ever win the Superbowl again. The level playing field would be gone.

Just this week, Republicans in Tennessee used a violation of a procedural rule (not a LAW, just a rule of behavior in their workplace) as an excuse to expel (not reprimand, EXPEL) members of the House who represent a large, mostly Democratic, portion of Nashville. They used their power to tilt the playing field in their favor and remove their competition and silence their “fans”. This idea offends me to my core. It goes against every single thing I operated under as an athlete and believed in as a coach.

I have to wonder sometimes if any of these Republicans ever played sports. If they did, they’ve certainly forgotten the lessons, and the concept of the level playing field.

If you have to cheat to win, is it really winning? If you have to bully to get your way, are you really strong? I have never understood how the people who do these things can possibly feel as though they’ve achieved something.

Where to Start?

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I haven’t written in a while, and with everything going on, am struggling with where to start. To steal shamelessly from Julie Andrews:

“Let’s start at the very beginning
A very good place to start
When you read, you begin with A-B-C…”

When I started this blog, it was intended to bring forward some life lessons I’d learned from coaching and apply them to life more broadly, and perhaps if I was lucky, be a bit inspirational now and then. I need to depart from that format for a while in an effort to try to make sense of what is going on in our world, and perhaps through talking it out, find a way to move forward in a way that feels positive and productive.

I read recently that Kansas has passed a law banning transgender girls from participating in girls’ sports…a law that apparently affects ONE person in the state. One. In a state of nearly three million people, THIS was the issue that rose to the top of the priority list for the time and attention of the elected officials of the state. THIS was the most important need to be addressed. Not the educational system (ranked 27th in the nation, with over 497,000 students in public school), or improving state-maintained roads and infrastructure (over 10,000 miles worth), but something that affects a vanishingly small percentage of the population. Really?

When I look at this, and at how legislators across the nation are spending their time and political power, I can’t help but wonder “why?” Why is so much effort being expended to stop people from expressing themselves freely, exploring new and different ideas, or taking care of themselves and their families in the ways they see fit? Why is this level of control being exerted?

When I was coaching, the teenagers always wanted to wear “technical suits” for their championship meets. These are suits that provide some degree of compression and water resistance, and the kids believed passionately that they wouldn’t be fast without them. No matter how much I assured them that it was the work they had done to prepare their bodies to race, and not the suit, they believed otherwise. Why? The suit was something tangible they could put their hands on, and it gave them a sense of confidence and control they didn’t have in themselves. The suit pacified their fear.

Coaching gives you the opportunity to observe people in a lot of different emotional states, and fear was one I saw regularly. I think humanity as a whole is particularly gripped by fear these days: fear of changes in our climate, fear of dwindling resources in an ever-expanding human population, fear of disease, fear of each other. These fears are real and valid and overwhelming, and hit at our deepest fear, which is our inability to fix any of them. When everything feels out of control, you seek to control anything you can.

I think leaders in churches and governments very sharply feel this fear of not being able to fix these things; they know they don’t have answers or solutions, and they share the fears we all have. Unfortunately, some are responding by inventing issues and targets that we can aim our fears at, that they can then “solve”. Like the technical suit, it provides a sense of confidence and control, as long as they can get us to believe that fixing these invented issues will pacify our fear.

Their solutions are lies because their problems are lies. Like the Wizard of Oz, they’re trying to distract us from the truth, and the real problems only get worse while they waste time driving us apart over who people love, how they dress, whether they choose to have a child, and what words are in books. They could 100% get their way in all of these things, and we would still be facing climate change, dwindling resources, possible pandemics, and even more fear of each other.

I find myself getting angry with the people who believe these lies and latch onto these invented issues as though they are the real problem and what is “destroying” America. When I feel that anger and frustration (and my own fear), I have to remind myself that they’re scared and overwhelmed too…they’re just more comfortable believing the comfortable lie with the easy answer than I am.

I believe we need to work harder to connect with each other directly and not fall into believing lies and easy answers. We need to not listen when a newscaster or preacher or legislator tells us how someone else feels, or what someone else is trying to do to us. It is not gay marriage or men in dresses or books about racism that are making our daily lives feel hard or the future feel hopeless. I have been trying to train myself, every time something elicits an emotional response, to ask “Why do I feel this way? What does the person telling me this gain from me being upset?” For me, it’s been a step in the right direction, and I’ve realized that most of the time the people telling me the bad things want my money or my clicks or my attention.

My other small step has been to try to listen and calmly respond when someone speaks out of their fear or ignorance or judgmentalism. I tell a story from my life that has shaped why I feel differently about what they said. If they don’t listen, or persist, or get hostile, I tell them we have to change the subject or I’ll need to walk away. It’s worked surprisingly well with some people, but full disclosure: it’s a work in progress for me to not just avoid the conversation to begin with. Introvert here.

I’m considering volunteering as a way to reconnect with community and do something tangible toward fixing the real problems we face. I’m not sure yet what that looks like, and am having a hard time figuring out what to do. More to come.

Whatever you can do to manage your own fear, find some peace, take a positive step, or rebuild community helps in this world. At a minimum, it helps your own stress go down. If you have good ideas, please share in the comments! Hopefully, I will be writing more soon.

In This Moment

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When you’re facing a three hour long practice, or a long race, or the beginning of a grueling season, looking forward can be daunting. Trying to consider all of the possibilities, work to be done, and “what if”s can quickly short circuit your emotional reserve.

I have a series of photos, taken by a team mom, that show me waiting alongside a nervous 7-year-old in the lineup behind the starting blocks for her race. She had worked herself into a frenzy at idea of standing there waiting by herself, worrying over the race, how she would do, what it would feel like. I stayed with her and did my best to keep her just in the moment, talking, joking around, showing her she could talk to the other girls to pass the time.

When the things to worry about get too big or too challenging, the trick I learned (during my divorce) is to shrink things down into manageable bites. That old saying “take it a day at a time” is very true, but sometimes even a day is too big of a bite. Sometimes the mantra is “take it an hour at a time” or even just “this moment”.

It is a meditative practice to be in the moment; to realize the past is locked and the future is fantasy, that the only reality is in this moment. It is the only thing you have control over, this moment and what you do with it.

So breathe, and check in with yourself. In this moment, am I OK?  In this moment, do I have a home, a job, food in the fridge? In this moment, are the people I love OK? If you have challenges in this moment, what can you do in this moment to deal with those? Try to let go of the need to look out weeks and months, and churn over what might be, what the worst could look like, and how life might be different. Do your best to make THIS moment good and peaceful, and when the moment comes that there is a challenge to deal with, your soul will be ready.

Right now, most of us are waiting in that line behind the blocks, scared at all that we have stirred up in our heads. It is not our turn to face the challenge. We can be in this moment of waiting without being scared, we can lean on each other, we can find ways to laugh.

In THIS moment, we can be OK.

Fondly,

Coach Jill

My Team

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When I was still coaching, it was vitally important with every season, every group, to create a sense of common purpose, common discipline and common goals. That is the essence of “team”–working together to overcome challenges and achieve results. Sometimes sharing a common pain (like 5am practices) is enough to bond a team together. This, folks, is our time. Our team.

We are a team. You, me, my children, your children, the person that cuts your hair, the person that packed the Amazon box sitting on your porch, the lady in China that stitched the socks you’re wearing. A team. My team. Your team. Our human team. In times like these, times that pull the rug out from under “normal”, we all feel the fear in our throats, that clenching uncertainty with every closure and new announcement. What will come next?

As adults, that fear is an awful and unwelcome companion. We have forgotten our child selves, who lived regularly with uncertainty and fear. It is the fear of the young swimmer, standing on the blocks, exposed and cold, wondering what the next moments will bring. It is the fear of “Can I do this?”, “Will I measure up?”, and “What am I made of?” We adults avoid making ourselves vulnerable like that, so when it is thrust upon us, we panic, and build ourselves a fort of TP and hand sanitizer and hot dog buns, as though the things we own will allay the fear.

I cannot make your fear go away, but I can tell you this:  you have it in you to deal with this situation, weird and unexpected as it is. You are made of all the things you always were, all the unique and beautiful things that make you YOU, and you have strengths in there that will bring you and your family through this. You do not need to worry about measuring up; coping is not a competition, and how YOU process stress and challenges will not be what your neighbor does, and that’s OK.

I will encourage you throughout to be a person you will be proud of when this is all behind us; let it bring forth the best of who you are deep down. Do your best to uplift the people in your life. Enjoy the small things, hug your family, feel the love.

And if you need some cheering on, reach out to me. After all, you’re on my team!

Fondly,

Coach Jill

Get Out of Your Own Wake

/ Jillcoach / 2 Comments

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If you’ve ever seen a heat of high level male swimmers racing a sprint freestyle event, you’ve seen the wave they pull behind them. It’s impressive to see the wake caused by a strong, powerful body propelling itself efficiently through the water. Then they come to the wall.

As the swimmers slow slightly to initiate the turn, their wake catches up with them. As they push off, what was behind them is now in front of them, a wave of churning turbulence with the potential to ruin their race. Young swimmers often push off right at the surface, and take that wave in the face. They must learn through practice to push off deep enough to avoid their own wave, and slide through the still water.

We create turbulence as we move through our lives as well, stirring up the water with our selves, our habits, our insecurities. As long as we are moving forward, this turbulence is largely unnoticed by us; it is only when we slow down, when there is a challenge facing us, that our own mess catches up with us. We flounder in the churned up water we have created, making the challenge that much more difficult.

Perhaps instead we could get out of our own wake. We could approach our challenge (wall) with determination, acknowledging that our issues and inner demons (turbulent wave) is right with us, and push away from the problem (wall), aiming for the calm place (still water), where we can once again move forward efficiently.

It is important that we not deny that the wake exists, otherwise we will run into it over and over. Rather, we should accept that it’s there, see it for what it is, and take steps to move past it.