The War Between Positive and Negative Thinking

Life is hard. We live in a negative world. It's all around us. Turn on the news and see how many positive stories are being reported. Scroll through your social media timeline and you'll see a constant stream of outrage. You have your own daily struggles in your personal life. You lost a game. A player is having behavioral issues in class. Others are failing. It's hard to be positive in such a cynical place. There are many good things happening, but we all seem to focus on the things that irritate us or bring us down. It's so easy to do. It's much easier to find a negative rather than a positive. It's easy to sit in a group of people and complain vent our job, complain about our situation. Everyone always seems to be under attack or offended. We are all guilty of it at one point or another. What is the effect of trudging through constant negativity? How does it affect others around you?

I'll be the first to admit that I have always been a glass half-full person to no one's fault but my own. If I reflect on the happiest chapters in my life, in coaching and in teaching, it's not always the times when everything was going my way, but my attitude toward what was happening around me. Often the times I found myself in a dark place was when I was a victim of my own outlook on my circumstances. As a coach, I've endured good seasons and very bad seasons in the win-loss columns. However, the wins and losses weren't necessarily indicative of the way I felt the season had gone. Usually my post-season outlook was centered around the energy that surrounded our team throughout the season, not whether we won a lot of games or lost a lot of games.

Energy is a either positive or negative. As people we exude one or the other, but there is never a time where both are absent. There is an old saying that you are either helping people up or pushing people down. I believe that if you aren't currently helping someone up, in turn, your absence of action is holding people down. There is no middle ground. Recently, I read a book by Jon Gordon titled "The Energy Bus" that has made a profound impact of me and if you haven't read it already, I would highly encourage you to do so. In the book, the author illustrates that our energy constantly affects those around us, either good or bad. Energy can be felt when a person walks into a room or begins speaking. As a teacher or coach, it's easy to see what type of energy you are exuding just gauge the engagement of your students or players. If your students or players are locked in to what you are saying, chances are it's because of the passion in which you are conveying the message.

To be honest with myself, I have a tendency to have knee-jerk reactions to certain circumstances if they negatively affect me or inconvenience me. It floods through me like a shot of morphine. I can feel it. Whether I feel it within myself or not, it is important not to let others see it affect me negatively. It's something I constantly have to work on and reflect on. It takes practice, just like anything else. As a coach, if you walk into a room with a defeated look on your face, chances are your players heads are going to drop as well. If you spend three months hung up on the outcome of the season before, chances are your team is not going to be real productive in their preparation for the upcoming season. What do you talk about during the off-season? Do you talk about how many players you have to replace due to graduation? Or do you talk about the great opportunity this season will be for young players to step up, fill a role, and develop as a player? The one you focus on will tell your players what your outlook is for the season, positive or negative.

"An old grandfather told his grandson: “My son, there is a battle between two wolves inside us all. One is evil. It is anger, jealousy, greed, and resentment. The other is good. It is joy, love, hope, humility, kindness, empathy, and bravery.”

The boy thought about it, and asked, “Grandfather, which wolf wins?”

The old man quietly replied, “The one you feed."

Nick Saban made a great statement when talking about playing a great team in an upcoming game.  My tendency is to focus on how good the team or individual player is and convey that to our players throughout the week in hopes of improving their focus in practice. Sometimes that is important if your team is looking past an opponent, but Coach Saban said that is also diminishing your team's confidence in their own abilities to perform at a high level. Instead, focus on what you need to do and instill confidence in your players in their ability to win at their position. Last summer was a bad summer in my opinion for our football team. I didn't, and still don't, feel like our team as a whole bought in and showed the commitment necessary to reach their potential for the upcoming season. My wife told me that every year I felt like we had a bad summer. When I asked her what she meant, she said that I was always focused on the guys her weren't there. She's was 100% right. It physically pains me when an athlete goes AWOL from June to the beginning of the season. My focus is not on the guys who are there working their tail off, but instead spending my energy on the guys who are comfortably sleeping in their bed, not getting better, and a situation that I have zero control over. Looking back, I was hurting my ability to properly coach up the guys who got up before the crack of dawn to come sacrifice their time and their bodies every morning in an effort to pursue competitive excellence. Worrying about the things you cannot control accomplishes nothing.

In a meeting room or a classroom, what energy do you radiate? It's either positive or negative. The outcome what your kids retain will be directly relevant to the passion the information is presented with and your attention to detail in assessing what your players of students have learned. Sure, the teaching techniques are a relevant factor. But when that class or meeting starts if you are passionate about the subject matter, that is the most important factor in engagement. I have no data to back that statement up, but the days when I lethargically blunder through an installation of a new scheme or lesson and merely "get through" the information it shows on the field or on a test. The days that I have come over to practice after a frustrating day of teaching directly affect how I perceive the performance of our players in practice. I have single handedly had a negative impact on that day's productivity, and to no fault of our players. On the contrary, the days that I have come to the field and am excited and energetic, talking with players, and encouraging have a great impact for the good. We constantly have to evaluate the energy we are giving off to others, and cannot let things that negatively impact us to affect others in the same way.

The greatest leaders focus on the positive circumstances. My oldest brother once told me when I was a Sophomore quarterback after I went on a complaining tirade "Those guys aren't going to follow you. You're always complaining about what everyone else isn't doing right and yelling at them when something doesn't go right." That was a profound statement to me, one I've always remembered. How can you empower those around you when you are always focused on negative circumstances? If as a leader we are always focused on the negative things those in our charge are doing, why would they ever see anything positive in themselves? How can they ever know how great their potential is? We must focus on and highlight the good things our players and students do without sacrificing the ability to put them in challenging situations and foster their growth. After all as Lou Holtz once said, life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you respond to it.