About this time each year, I start contemplating what subjects I am going to cover with my summer articles.
I mean, you really don’t want to read about how bad the White Sox are every week, do you?
Of course not.
Coming up this summer I am planning a series on identifying things in sports that are broken and giving my thoughts on how to fix those things.
In advance of that, I thought I would prime the pump on that discussion. Think of it as whetting your appetite on this subject.
We hate ‘change’ because ‘change’ is hard.
When things are going wrong, we scream for change. We demand coaches get fired and players get benched or sent down or traded or cut because what is happening now is not acceptable to our fans’ mind.
Except, when it comes to actually making the changes that we need to make for ourselves—no matter if they are physical, mental, emotional or spiritual—we struggle to accomplish the change we acknowledge we need.
In sports, that means we have to be willing to part with our favorite player on our favorite team for the purpose of adding draft picks or prospects to build their future.
It means we have to understand that sometimes we will have to sacrifice this season to reload for next season.
In professional sports, that could be about tanking.
In college sports, that could be leading to college coaches starting to have conversations with players at other universities about whether or not a trip to the transfer portal is in their future and if there might be a fit between them.
In the old days, that would be tampering and would get a coach and basketball program in massive trouble. Now, it’s just part of the wild, wild west that is college sports (and that’s another column that’s coming this summer).
It means Cubs fans had to be willing to say goodbye to David Ross to bring in a clearly better and more established manager.
It means we had to sit and watch the 2016 Cubs be dismantled in a matter of hours to rid themselves of players who were never going to duplicate what they did in that historic season.
Outside of sports, it means giving up things for your overall good.
It means eating more chicken and less hamburgers and drinking water over Coke or Pepsi.
It means choosing to do something less often or not at all to make sure that you don’t miss your kids games or band concerts or taking them fishing.
It means walking twice a day instead of four times a week.
It means being willing to give up hanging out with your friends on Friday night to go on a date with your spouse.
It means getting up on Sunday mornings and going to church.
Bottom line is this: when change in your life is required, that change will never come unless you put in place the infrastructure to initiate and complete that change. I believe in the phrase “insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but getting the same result.”
Why are we like that? Fear.
We are afraid of what change looks like for us and what we might lose. Instead of focusing on the positive things that come from the changes we are contemplating, we hide behind what we might be leaving behind.
And that’s the problem at the core of all of this: we worry too much about looking back and not nearly enough looking forward.
We cannot be afraid of what is out in front of us to the point that we turn from the path ahead.
Please notice in what you just read that I use the word “we” in all of this. I struggle with this as much as anyone.
Yes, I have lost weight—I am down from 223 to 213 in the last year. But I still don’t eat the way I need to.
I don’t eat the way I need to because my life is so full of things that I love to do that eating can’t be a time-consuming process. That’s because my schedule is too full too often because I don’t say “no” enough. I don’t say “no” because I hate letting people down. My fear is once I say “no” to someone or something, I don’t get thought of for that thing again. It really is FOMO—Fear Of Missing Out.
You see what I am saying?
Can you relate to that?
I am guessing that you can.
We must learn to embrace change or, ultimately, it crushes us.