Back in my younger days, I played soccer for a very good program. My teammates were demanding and my coach was always striving for perfection. He wanted to challenge us to reach to new heights, try new skills and perfect our techniques. This type of environment breed competition. All of the players were constantly competing with one another to be #1 on the team. We all knew where we stood because every day our rank on the team was posted for everyone to see. Sounds intimidating right…….WRONG! It made me work harder and want that spot more. Granted not everyone had the same feelings about competition as I did and it was clear in their results. As I continued to climb the chart and stay in the top 5, they continued to fall lower in the rankings. Yet, they couldn’t figure out why they weren’t able to improve.
The issue wasn’t that they couldn’t do it, the issue was that they didn’t believe they could improve. It became very clear one day when we were all running fitness one day and one of the girls that was towards the bottom of the chart started wheezing and saying in an extremely high pitched voice. “Help me….help me…..” We all turned and looked at her during our rest before the next sprint started. With amazement and to the shock of the rest of my teammates I witnessed one of the top players walk over to her, grab her by the collar of her shirt, look her straight in the eyes and say, “Help me, help yourself b^*@h!!!”. She then let go of her collar and quickly jogged back to her starting spot so she could run her next spring. Then the coached yelled go, we all took off sprinting. I was still in shock over what had just occurred, but what shocked me even more was the fact that my teammate that was just yelled at was sprinting faster than I had ever seen her run before, she was a new person you could see it in her eyes.
After we finished our fitness and headed over to grab a drink we all walked up to her and we were completely blown away by the words that came out of her mouth. She was thanking our teammate, yes, the one that just yelled at her. She was actually thanking her for screaming in her face.
Later as time passed I started to watch my teammate climb the charts, finish higher on our fitness tests and start to get more playing time. I asked her a few weeks after the incident what had changed and almost on cue she said, “Getting embarrassed in front of the whole team can make a person change. And believe it or not, I’m not talking about getting yelled at, I’m talking about my own behavior. I didn’t realize until that moment that I was wanting others to do the hard work for me, I wanted others to make my life easy. When I got yelled at it just made me aware that I have to do this, no one else is going to hand me what I want.”
BINGO! That’s it. She hit it right on the head; no one else is going to do the work for us, we must do the job’s that sometimes we don’t even want to do. We must set ourselves up for success. We must demand of ourselves more than what others demand of us. Once we do this we will astonish ourselves with everything that we accomplish. So I say to you, “help yourself”!
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