bcg blog

Community & Inconvenience

I love watching the Olympics. 

Of course, I enjoy the mainstream sports like basketball and soccer, but they aren’t what make the Olympics so appealing. It’s all the other ones. The novelty of sports like badminton, ping-pong, and water polo are captivating. The dynamic between individuals and teams in sports like gymnastics and swimming is fascinating. The purity of track and field, mesmerizing. The physicality and athleticism of rugby, amazing.

The Olympic games offer everything great about sport.
Two areas that have stood out for me: the power of community and the inconvenience of obstacles. 

Clearly the Olympics pull the country together, unifying our support for a single athlete or team. But, they also turn a light on the support systems that have helped to elevate these athletes to an Olympic level. Clearly, they have not gotten here on their own and all parties are fully invested. 

If there’s anything more prevalent than the success of the athletes competing, it’s the quantity of their failures. From injury to foster homes, seemingly every athlete has overcome numerous challenges to be where they are. At some point in their journey, each stopped seeing obstacles and started seeing  inconveniences. That’s a significant difference.

Two very different aspects of the Olympics, but both critical in their arrival to this stage.

Why Should We Care?
Everyone wants to belong to something. Those aspiring for excellence, like the athletes at the Olympics, realize it’s not a want, but a need. Our community is our strength.

Sometimes communities lift us up and sometimes they calm us down. Sometimes they highlight our strengths and sometimes they expose our areas of weakness. But, one thing is clear about a community - they are for us. They cheer, and cry, like each moment was theirs … because it is in a real community. The community makes the athlete just as much as the athlete makes the community. The teams we lead are exactly the same. Each individual we lead wants to belong to something - something special, where they’re doing work that is important, and they’re making a difference. Everyone wants to contribute to their community.

I love a good comeback story as much as the next guy, but it seems like the media dramatizes everyone’s background into a rags to riches story now. What I’ve come to realize is that we’ve all had challenges and the degree of the challenge is secondary to our perspective on it. To an Olympic athlete, every adversity, regardless of its magnitude, has become nothing more than an inconvenience. Helping those we lead establish a resilience that thinks inconvenience rather than road block is paramount to our team’s success.

REAL TALK - Action Steps
Sure, there are hundreds of factors that play into the performance of an individual and team. The impact of each can be debated. What’s not debatable is the value of community and a grit, resilient mindset. Here are a few ideas to grow each:

• Valuing Community 
  
  • Prioritize it. Everyone is not for you. Forget those people. Spend your time with people that want you to win everytime - in checkers or the Olympics. Stop allowing your community to be a coincidence. Be intentional about it. 
    
  • Make it special. For the communities you lead, people should feel special to be a part of it. The community does hard things and they do them together. Everyone contributes and every contribution is equally valued. Being special is not about the things being done, it’s about the culture around how it’s being done.
    

• Inconvenience Over Obstacle
  
  • No excuses. No amount of justifying changes the result. Excuses are man-made obstacles. When we think of adversity as an inconvenience, we shrug it off and get back to work. So what, now what. Strong voice. 
    
  • Pump the process. When we embrace the idea of viewing obstacles as an inconvenience, we are really choosing the process over the outcome. When we don’t get the process we want, no big deal, we just tweak the process - back to work.
    

We need others. We can’t quit. Sometimes we need others so we don’t quit. 

Checkout Surrender the Outcome on Amazon and order The Score That Matters with Ryan Hawk & Brook Cupps. The latest blog from Blue Collar Grit can be found here!