Small Problems vs. Big Problems
My daughter is a cheerleader for two different teams in two different towns - one as a sideline cheerleader for our town’s football teams and the other as a competition cheerleader for my wife’s hometown team. The football games are a pretty easy lift. They’re always on Sunday mornings and either at a park five minutes away or at a park in a nearby town. My wife also coaches that team, so there, I’m less involved.
The competition team is much different. They practice, sometimes, three times a week (always at least two), and they relentlessly rehearse the same routine for an entire season, all with the hopes of winning medals at their competitions. These competitions take place all over NY and sometimes in other states as well.
As a family, we’ll often drive a couple of hours, watch her team perform for five minutes, then watch twenty-five other teams, teams of all ages, perform. Then we’ll watch the medal ceremony, hug her like crazy, win or lose, and then drive two hours back.
This probably sounds exhausting and annoying, but I honestly love it. My daughter is eight-years-old, and seeing her passion for cheer, watching her and her team practice over and over again to make everything as flawless as possible, despite their young ages, is a good reminder that excellence can be cultivated. It’s a mindset. It’s an attitude, and not simply something that happens by accident. And not simply something reserved for adults.
One of my great joys, when I’m home, is driving my daughter to and from her cheer practices. I’ve written about this before, but I’ll let her sit in the front seat on the ride, and she gets to play her music (lately it’s been a constant stream of KPOP Demon Hunter songs). I’ll ask her, “Do you want to be the DJ?” She always says yes.
Two of the past three or four times I’ve picked her up from cheer practice, the sky has opened up and begun torrentially raining just as me and all the other parents arrived to gather our kiddos. With as little judgment as I can muster (there’s some in here, I’ll admit), listening to the other parents complain about the rain and watching how those complaints then became their children' s complaints, was really eye-opening.
A mom said, “Ugh. Every time. This freakin’ rain.” To which her daughter responded, “I hate the rain.”
A dad lamented, “Figures. Right as we’re leaving.” To which his daughter responded, “I don’t want to go outside in that.”
I heard Dean Graziosi say recently, that if you’re a person who gets mad when someone cuts you off on the highway, that he feels badly for you. That’s right. He feels badly for you. Because if something that small can throw you off your game, you’re really not up to much. He talked about how we should all strive to have way bigger problems than that.
I agree.
My daughter suggested a game as we exited that practice.
“Let’s see who can catch the most drops on their tongue.”
“Deal.”
So as everyone around us whined and grumbled and as the parents snapped at their kids for not moving quickly enough, my daughter and I were looking up, trying to count the drops (there were way too many to count) that hit our tongues.
She totally inflated her number by the way and beat me by thousands of drops. So she was crowned the champ and we rode off, probably a little (or a lot) more wet than everyone else, but also smiling and happy.
Remember that coaching: small problems mean we’re not doing much. Big problems mean we are.
I would say that being in the pouring rain, for literally ten seconds, while running to the car, probably falls into the bucket of a small problem.
