Mental Toughness

There’s been a lot of talk lately about mental toughness.  The Celtics have it because they are able to come back when being down by a bunch of points in a basketball game.  Or, wait, maybe they don’t, since the Lakers managed to hold them off in the last game.  Tiger Woods definitely has it.  Nike even made a commercial (video link here) about it where Tiger’s dad, Earl, describes how he used to intentionally do things to mess his son’s golf game up just to toughen up his son.  Of course, this idea of being intentionally cruel to your son just to prepare him for times later in life has a long history (See: Johnny Cash here).  And while I weep for the America’s young and soon to be born children whose fathers only saw the Nike commercial and are going to drag their kids to the public course and start terrorizing them during their backswings, there is something else about the commercial and this notion of mental toughness that bothered me even more.

Earl woods said: Tiger, I promise you, you’ll never meet another person that’s as mentally tough as you in your entire life.  And he hasn’t.  And he never will.

And see, here’s the thing, I think he’s right.  Tiger has not ever met anyone tougher mentally.  And here’s the other thing, that’s a tragedy beyond words.  People say Tiger woods is mentally tough because he’s not distracted by loud noises and shiny objects.  Last I checked, that was one of the criteria for getting out of grade school.  Tiger’s ability to stop his backswing in a million dollar tournament before he gets on his private jet and flies home to his wife and daughter at his $38 million house island is not an indication of mental toughness.  I’ve seen plenty of people who exhibit more toughness in their willingness to fight everyday for bare essentials.  There are children who spend all day foraging through landfills without shoes looking for scrap metal to sell so their family can eat.  There are single mothers here in the U.S. who face a dizzying array of obstacles in providing for their families.  When these people summon the will to get out of bed every morning and have another go at it, that’s mental toughness.  There’s no end in sight.  No private jet, no private island, nothing to fall back on.  And unfortunately, for someone with the power and influence of Tiger, someone whose father once said of him

“Tiger will do more than any other man in history to change the course of humanity,”

while in the course of comparing him to Gandhi, has largely failed to capitalize on that potential.  His biggest contribution?  He runs a series of golf academies.  He is worth nearly $1,000,000,000 (and no, I didn’t get the number wrong.).  I have long since given up being upset with athletes and other celebrities who choose to focus only on themselves when they have the ability to do so much more, but what I’m still not over at this stage in my life is when other people laud and praise them for this selfishness.  Earl was right, Tiger hasn’t ever met anyone mentally tougher than him.  But considering that he spends all his time around professional golfers (can you seriously even believe there is such a thing?), that’s not really saying much is it?

Personal Touch

Once a month, our faith community offers an opportunity to make sandwich lunches for the homeless in our city. This program has been going on for many years, and has undergone many changes (many since I have been involved).

The basic idea is that you show up on a Saturday morning and assemble sandwiches in our kitchen. The sandwiches are then bagged individually, and are then combined with fruit, cookies, etc. in brown bags, making a lunch. After the lunches are all assembled, we invite all who can go to caravan downtown and we pass them out in front of the homeless shelter in town.

I am always intrigued by the different actions (and reactions) that occur. Often, the interactions that take place downtown are ones in which I ponder, and will think about for the next month. This month, I was surprised that the thing I will think about did not occur downtown—rather I experienced something while we were assembling the meals.

As we were putting the lunch sacks into the baskets to transport downtown, I heard a sound repeatedly. “Click. Click. Click.” After a few times it dawned on me that what I was hearing was the sound of a stapler. I turned to see where it was coming from, and found that one of the participants (who was wearing a t-shirt with some sort of ‘Jesus is the Answer’ message) was picking up each bag out of the container and carefully stapling each bag shut.

I turned and said, “I don’t think that we need to staple them.” To which the man replied, “Yes. But it’s a personal touch. It shows them that personal touch.”

I didn’t want to argue so I just let it go—but I kept wondering if a staple as a ‘personal touch’ was something that would make all the difference to someone who was hungry looking for a meal.

This ministry never ceases to amaze me.

The Emperor’s Gym Shorts

Okay, can we all finally agree that Rasheed Wallace is not a good basketball player? Seriously, he’s just Derrick Coleman pt. 2. A supremely talented player who never lives up to his potential. The game comes so easily to him, so the theory goes, that he really cannot be troubled to give full effort 100 times a year, despite making 12.5 million dollars per year to play basketball. And yet, this is what people say about him:

From Kevin Garnett: “Sometimes he gets misunderstood, but he’s a great player.

From ESPN Magazine: Wallace is not a perennial All-Star because he’s a perennial pain in the eyes of NBA suits and refs. But just watch the man play. His outlet passes—arms extended overhead—are straight out of an instruction manual. His picks are perfect, feet planted wide and parallel every time. And considering one of his responsibilities is to guard the league’s best bigs, he rarely gets into foul trouble (personal foul trouble, anyway). He has always absorbed nuance quickly. “We were working on a press-breaker,” recalls Bill Ellerbee, Sheed’s coach at Philadelphia’s Simon Gratz High. “I told him to let the guards use him as a light post. I never had to tell him again.”

Chauncey Billups once told Jim Rome that Wallace “is so good he gets bored playing against some guys who aren’t up to his level.”

Dwight Howard said. “Rasheed is a great, great player.

It seems that Wallace’s great attribute is that he does things the way he is supposed to do them (when he does them at all) and that he has the potential to be a very good player when he tries. Let’s deal with the first of those right away and be done with it. Is it really that great an accomplishment that Wallace only has to be told how to execute a basketball maneuver once? Is this what the NBA has come to? Don’t get me wrong, I think that a Basketball or Sports IQ is important and different from other professions, but this is not rocket science, people. Setting a pick basically means just getting in front of another person. Sure, there’s a right and wrong way to do it, but let’s not get carried away and attribute savant status to those who manage to place their very large frames in front of another human being within a relatively small space. It’s just not that hard. So sure, Rasheed may do it right, but big freakin’ deal. For 12.5 million, I’m sure we would all do it right as well.

Second, and more importantly for this post, calling Rasheed a great player represents the pinnacle of an ongoing trend to devalue some of the most important attributes an athlete (or any other professional) can have: self-discipline and motivation. An old basketball coach at a small school once told me that he stays competitive against bigger schools by looking for talented players. When I suggested that he would always lose the more talented players to the higher profile programs he said, “Oh yeah, but I forgot to tell you that I think about talent a little differently.” He then showed me his scouting form which, in addition to the normal “talents” such as dribbling, post moves, etc. included Hustle, Work Ethic, and Determination. “Hustle,” he said, “is a talent, and I look for that as much as I look for shooters. You can win that way.”

This brings us back to Rasheed. It seems that what gets people so enamored about Rasheed is his potential. They say that the game comes easy to him and that he gets bored playing to lower competition. Well here’s the secret folks, maintaining concentration and focus for an entire season against varying challenges IS a talent (or a skill if you’re a sociologist like me). In other words, Rasheed Wallace is NOT a supremely talented player any more than a hard working small college guard who can’t shoot is a supremely talented player. In any line of work, the most successful people are nearly always those who work the smartest and hardest, and these are not necessarily those with the most skill. In sports, we often call these people underrated or unmotivated or poorly coached. In the rest of the world, we call them slackers or dead weight or, more often, fired.

Is this the same old record?

Earlier this year, our staff decided that we really needed to focus on where we needed to head as an organization. I immediately had the same feelings that I always have whenever a conversation like this takes place—one of excitement and dread.

Over the years, I’ve been in many conversations like this one. Working within the confines of a church for the past 10 years, it seems as though there comes a point where the status quo just isn’t good enough anymore. The things that used to happen with ease aren’t so effortless as before. When looking at the statistics of attendance and participation, we wonder if what we’re doing is “meeting the needs of the people”. Most often the conversation will begin because those statistics have dropped, or comments are made about how what we’re doing just isn’t challenging and exciting the congregation as much as it did x number of years ago.

Two things stand out to me every time this conversation begins to take place: 1) We want to make sure that the people who we have been reaching will still be committed and involved in our ministry and 2) We realize that there are a lot more people out there who we haven’t reached yet.

First, I’d like to tell you that those having this conversation (more often than not) are committed staff members who have great intentions. They care for this community so much that they want to see it touch the lives of all who are involved. Unfortunately, they are also directly involved, making it extremely hard to let go of the things that they themselves have helped create.

Sometimes, it seems, they don’t really want to have this conversation at all. In fact, they’d rather jump to tweaking their own programs and formats of doing things so that they can bump up the statistics and report that things are going better than before with the “changes” they’ve made. Which leads me to mention that this isn’t really “change” at all—it’s a facelift on the things that are currently in place.

In my experience, this talk of “change” upsets many people—making them more focused on keeping things one way or updating them to another. The people who weren’t happy before come back for a short time, and sensing that this is only a superficial “change” leave once again. The people who were content before either feel as though they’ve made the sacrifices to update the status quo and don’t understand why it isn’t working, or are upset because the status quo had been upset and the way things were aren’t anymore.

That’s a lot of negativity for something rather minor, and it really only focuses on the people who have been involved in our ministry—not the vast number of people who we haven’t begun to reach yet.

That’s why I often feel dread at the onset of these conversations.

On the other hand, I’m excited about these conversations! It has the potential to really bring clarity to the mission and values that the community shares. It has the potential to help us dream big and let go of the things we’ve made untouchable before—all so that we can meet people where they’re at and walk alongside them as we discover our call together. I love to dream, and the potential to do something that will let the current community meet and encounter others is exciting!

We’re pretty far along in the first step of this conversation, which has taken a different twist than all those I’ve had before (so far). I’ll be updating you as to how that conversation goes and where we’ve ended up in the posts to come.