A few years back I was invited along with a player I was coaching to do a session in front of a group of performance coaches. Their tutor asked them to observe the drills I was going to show them and then afterwards they would be able to feedback and ask questions. Immediately when we began the drills I could tell from hearing the whispers amongst them that 99% of them immediately began to only notice and point out what they thought were the technical flaws in this players game. Only one of them took the time to stand back and observe without judging immediately what was going on.
When the time for questions came up all of them instead of asking questions began to ask what I call qugestions which are questions with suggestions within them. Towards the end the only one who had remained quiet was the one who asked some of the most brilliant and insightful questions I have ever been asked by another coach. Today as I look back on that experience I realize that the coaches that were obsessed with every small technical flaw were in fact trying to control the player and everything they did so they could hopefully manipulate them into getting the results they thought would be good, not for the player, but for their CV. This approach led them to be superficial, closed, unaware, unconscious, and plain and simply blind. They spent all their time fixing things instead of creating and discovering something new. On the other hand the other coach that looked at things as a whole showed that he understood that there was something far deeper to tennis, like life, that influenced and made the real difference when it came to performing on the outside and getting real and sustainable results.
Today take some time to take a step back and look at your life from a different perspective. Observe it and choose not to judge it. Try and see it not as a project that needs to be fixed and improved but instead as a journey where much needs to be uncovered and discovered. In case you haven’t already noticed when we try and fix our lives we only keep breaking them further and that is why we constantly find something new to fix. All our fixing does is to keep us broken instead of delivering the healing we so desperately long for.
Therefore, be easy when some things are not the way you have been told they need to be. Embrace the good, the bad, the ugly, and the supernatural all in the same way and in time you will begin to see that the happiness and peace you thought your fixing would give you, has in fact been within you all along waiting to be uncovered. Remember happiness and peace are not the by-product of an achievement or a goal reached on the outside. They are the by-product of a life that focuses from within on discovering each day a little bit more how well and how much the King within our heart loves us.
By the way that one coach went on to produce some great players and experience some amazing results…the others are still trying to control and fix theirs… 🙂
-pablo-
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