Go On A Mission -- Day #6 Week #4

 

Building a gym is both a goal and a mission. Its part of a larger mission of making our school a great place to be an athlete. 

Today's workout is to rest or cross train. So it gives me a chance to write about something I love -- GOAL Setting. Well sort of. 

I happen to love goals. The more challenging the goal the better too! 

I especially love physical goals. I have already run 25 marathons in my life and now am starting to accumulate triathlons. But I have many other goals - like posting regularly on this blog.

Coaches talk a lot about goal setting. 

Sometime in July I will have a meeting with my supervisors here at school about my goals for the year. I look forward to these meetings as we try to imagine what we want the outcomes of our athletic department this year to be. 

However, I have also begun to feel that goal setting in one way or another is not that helpful for true high performance. Here's why. 

The greatest example in my life of a high performer has a mission for her life but never seems to set goals. 

I am married to the greatest High School English teacher in America. I know. Someone will read this and just say, there goes Patrick bragging about his wife again. 

You can think that at your peril. It's a fact. She is. 

I know that because I watch her process every day, and it is truly amazing. 

Lets just start with her reading ability. She is the combination of Usain Bolt - the greatest sprinter of all time -- and Haile Gebrselassie -- the greatest distance runner of all time when it comes to reading. She can put books away like no one I have ever seen because she is such a quick reader, but also she can keep reading throughout a day if she needs to showing her incredible endurance. 

We have been out of school for 4 weeks and you would not believe how many books she has already read to improve her performance as a teacher for next year. I am not going to tell you because you won't believe the number, but its well over 20 books in just 4 weeks. And she reads continuously for pleasure as well. 

She will start her 31st year of teaching at North Shore Country Day and her 40th overall and she never teaches the same thing and the same way any of those years. She is constantly adjusting her approach based on the students she will see. True, it is fortunate that she works at a school where she gets most of the say in what she teaches every year.

Being with her every day has influenced my performance like no other person I have ever met. 

I could go on. But here's the interesting thing to me. When you ask her what her goal is as a teacher she seems uncomfortable with describing her professional performance in those terms. She is much more comfortable telling a story about her life or the lives of people she's met or read about and how she wants to make her students lives better because of those experiences. She is on a mission. 

One story she tells is that her freshman year in college was the most academically challenging of her life. The volume of reading and writing and the type of writing required she felt poorly prepared for. She had never been taught how to write that way. Although she steadily figured that out, she will tell you she never wants her students to feel unprepared in college the way she did.  

If you are an NSCD alum and had junior year English with Kathy McHugh over the last 30 years, you have been prepared to face the reading and writing challenges of your college years where ever you have attended. In fact many many alums return and tell her how they had to help other students at their colleges with their work. 

She has been on a mission her entire career to make sure that is the case. I think that is why she is so effective. I am fortunate to be around such a high performer every day. 

Recently I have been thinking about how goals may not have helped me in my life. Goals are so results and time frame oriented. Often in life we just don't have control over results and time frame. However, if we have a mission -- say to model a physically active life - then maybe the results will take care of themselves.   

My college coach Bill Iannicelli used to say a similar thing before every meet. "Just compete to your best ability and the winning will take care of itself." Amazingly the winning did take care of itself if we just learned to be mission focused. 

We are finishing our 4th week of this simple summer running plan, and I hope it is helping you accomplish or compliment your mission in life.