Fall Series: Come Alive/Stay Alive
5 Simple Practices to help you start strong and stay focused for life
When I set out to write The Monday Morning Coach, I intended to help motivate and boost athletes, teachers, and coaches like myself—people who were just trying to get Monday over with and rush towards Friday. As I've written this newsletter for the past two years, I've discovered Mondays are more than just the beginning of the week. They are an opportunity to Come ALIVE and awaken the possibilities of who we can be and who we are becoming.
Since then, I've been striving and growing to make every day like Monday—the beginning of a new opportunity to take advantage of. I hope that I've helped inspire you to do the same. Whether I have motivated you or not, I hope my upcoming series "Come ALIVE/Stay ALIVE" will help you (and me) find a new level of inspiration as we approach every day and opportunity ahead of us. Although I intend to write for coaches and athletes, I think these practices can be helpful for anyone because I believe everyone is an athlete or a coach.
We'll explore five simple practices and principles throughout the series that will help us Come ALIVE: Activation by Appreciation, Listening with Love, Internalizing our Intention, Visualizing and Validating, and Execution with Expectation. I describe them as simple, not because they're easy. In fact, some of these practices are very challenging to maintain and master. But that's what practice is for. If practice is easy, the game of life is hard. But not to fear. That's part of what a coach is here for to help simplify the game plan and coach us through the difficulties.
Therefore, the game plan to Come ALIVE is as follows: First, we must Activate our mind and body by Appreciating the realization of the moment (practice, pre-game, game time, etc.). Then, we practice listening to our mind and body with a posture of love for self and others (and if you're a person of faith, listening to God). Next, we internalize the intentions of what we hear from our mind and body by sitting with them for a brief time before trying to do something with them. Once we let our intentions marinate, we can begin visualizing who we are becoming because we are already validated by who we are. And once we accept where we are, who we are, and who we are becoming, we are poised and determined to execute our mission, expecting to follow through on our missing for greatness.
But like I mentioned before, these are simple—not easy. Once we come ALIVE, the objective is to stay ALIVE. So, with each principle, I will provide a few strategies to help you practice each element throughout the week and hopefully for a lifetime. I have adopted some of these practices from other authors, mentors, coaches, and others I've created in my coaching journey. Combining these lessons with my passion for coaching, I'm confident we can motivate each other to make the most of today and, indeed, Come ALIVE.