“What you most need will be found where you least want to look.”
I sure I wish I would have let that little jewel sink in sooner. Stopping to reflect might have saved me from making the biggest mistake of my coaching career—up to this point, at least.
We’ve all experienced it: the tension between purpose and the pursuit of success when both desires square off in opposition. When we’re in the sweet spot, the goal of developing a successful team can fall right in line with purpose, but sometimes pursuing purpose and chasing success collide!
For me they did.
It was my eleventh year coaching and my second year at a new campus: new team, new community, new expectation. For the first time in my career, I felt like my team HAD to win, like success would validate my ability. I’m not sure where that idea came from. I’m embarrassed to admit that I felt I, personally, had something to prove.
The self-serving idea that this pursuit was about me should have been my first red flag.
Finding a different motivation would have been harmless, but if I have to be honest, this new drive to succeed dangerously overshadowed the purpose that had been my priority for a decade.
For three seasons my true purpose contended with my drive to excel—I’m stubborn, okay?! From the outside looking in, the grass seemed green: the team was growing in number, improving in skill and speed, and athletes seemed happy. We were checking boxes left and right: team dinners, community service, big/little sister exchanges, elaborate banquets—check, check, check.
However, the virtue of my efforts was covering the compromises I knew I was making to try to win. For three seasons I placed more value on my job than on my purpose—hard to admit, but true. The energy spent in physically developing athletes far outweighed the intentional effort focused on growing young women for successfully navigating the world—red flag #2.
Funny thing is, my heart knew it! There was no peace in what I was doing, no deep sense of meaning. I had the best job in the world; I was working with wonderful families, and I was restless.
Once I finally had the courage to turn my gaze inward to “where I least want[ed] to look,” what I needed most became very clear. I had been avoiding my ultimate responsibility to chase after accolades.
I stopped DOING more of the gold-star stuff that just looked good and I started loving more. I focused on truly loving—yes, tough love included--the young women entrusted to my care. This meant more listening and teaching. It meant more disciplining, less compromising; more hard conversations, less assumptions; more authenticity, less show; more acceptance of failure and adversity, less white-knuckled grip on achievement.
Loving MY girls returned to being my most important career endeavor.
Now, before you think that pursuing purpose immediately resulted in a winning team—IT DID NOT! What a dangerous idea to hold! We gritted through two more seasons without a championship (maybe the next entry will be about patience and humility). Looking back I’m actually glad success did not come quickly, for it forced me to evaluate each element of my coaching and weigh it against what my spirit knew to be a higher pursuit.
I think that what I needed most might not have been that different from what many of us need. My search for meaning required an honest look inward, a difficult admission of failure, and a commitment to then DO something about the fact that I had fallen short.
Hopefully when life presents a red flag in the future, I will more quickly remember that “what I need most will be found where I least want to look.” And may I then have the courage to be honest about what I should do better.
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