Power vs. Force: On Walls
Everyone says, “he has walls up.”
Everyone says, “we shouldn’t put up walls.”
On Sunday, when the pastor said walls have some (3) utility this Sunday, my ears perked up… Hit me with the countercliche stuff.
Here are the 3 things:
Walls keep people out that don’t need to be in your circle
Walls keep people in that you want in
Walls provide support to help us stand up to the pressures of life
Walls Keep People Out
His sermon again took me back to silent knowledge from last week. Intuitively, I was putting up walls with the players on my team that were ‘checked out’ of what we wanted to do.
I used to get a ton of flack from the team owner/coach mentor/assistant coach when I coached that junior team.
“Why don’t you care more about the fact X happened?”
Whether it was a player getting arrested or the fact that they wouldn’t listen to my teachings about sleep, nutrition, general care for themselves, etc… Apparently I needed to ‘care’ more.
And sometimes, I even convinced myself to ‘care’ more and that lead to misery. Because again, if people aren’t moving towards you, you’ll impact them zero. And if they weren’t moving towards me, the walls started to go up.
I get the whole Saban quote now of high achievers don’t like spending time with losers or whatever he says… I wasn’t fit to coach that group of players, because I didn’t fit what they wanted. I couldn’t be what they needed because I couldn’t meet them where they were. I refused to go that low.
So for 2 years, I pretended to ‘coach’ people who were not my people, building walls to keep the super toxic ones as far away from my internal being as possible. And it still didn’t work…
My mentor thought it was wrong at the time, and maybe I was…
But maybe I wasn’t…
If you are liking this series so far and you’d like a hard copy of the teachings, I released my 3rd book with all the teachings here: