The Rescue Song (RAC Remix) by Mr Little Jeans

Growing up, I played mad sports.  It helps, when you have two older brothers.  No wonder to this day I enjoy the training mindset and mentality behind everything I pursue.

But Mike and Dave, my two older brothers, were truly the best two coaches I could have had.  They did not just show me the fundamentals.  They showed me the meaning behind them and how those fundamentals relate to the bigger picture.  

There were moments of frustration of course and they did not communicate this all for me, I had to read between the lines and put my own frustrations aside to truly learn from them.  For example, it was hard for me to “mimic” their movements when I was really young because my body simply didn’t move the same way.  And at times, it was hard to endure practicing, when I had already failed at the drill we were doing about 3 to 5 times.

It was the time spent with my brothers that I truly enjoyed though.  I just liked being with them and I looked up to them with such a huge heart.  And now, whenever I work hard for something, it nostalgically brings me back to those days.

They were never mean, but they pushed me to the limit and demanded me to work harder and be better the way a good teacher does.  And though my mom would yell outside every now and then, “Come inside it’s getting dark!”  I still wanted to throw more practice pitches and see if I could strike my brother out.

Competition is healthy.

It helps you see where you want to improve or if you are truly passionate about something.  You discover why it is you do what you do and just how genuine you are about being yourself, despite what others think or want you to be.  You learn how to block all that out and just do what you love.

As a coffee professional, I see my life coming full circle and channeling all the parts of everything I’ve ever experienced in life from teaching, to sports, to writing, to presenting, to training for marathons.  What I hear and feel on most days is that all of this goes back to how my brothers (and parents, as they are athletes and very passionate people as well) instilled in me a sense of determination.

When you are determined, you are committed and passionate about your personal goals and the person you are becoming.  And chances are, we are all only determined about a few key principles in life.  For me I am determined about the following:

• To trust God completely and know He is helping me create, love, be patient, and care about community no matter what
• To improve as a daughter, sister, aunt, niece and cousin DAILY
• To be incredibly independent so that I can take care of my parents one day the way they have taken care of me
• To USE the gifts I was born with to foster community, ignite it with goodness, and pave the way for ALL YOUTH as they grow up in this world
• To travel and write so that I may share with others the beauty of this world and how to take care of it

I decided to write these goals down about 10 years ago.  I realized that if we as adults write these internal things down, then we will actually do them and live by them.  And that if you don’t, then you are more likely to make excuses for your actions.

Once I wrote these personal goals down for myself, I refined them more and more each year to hold myself accountable and keep myself on track.  It is hard to live by these simple strategies and values as adults because we want to pretend they don’t exist when we are in position to obtain instant gratification based on greediness, success, pride, love, and vanity.  But when you think like a kid, and YOU KNOW, that your actions reflect who you are, then these types of principles and values become important again.

Mike and Dave gave me a glimpse of how to stay focused on my personal goals at a young age through training for basketball and baseball, but it was my choice to go back in time and admit that I had subconsciously internalized those lessons learned and now choose to live by them.  Sometimes you need to admit these types of things to yourself, not for the sake of arrogance or glowing.  No.  It’s so that you know you have the skill to change.  To be good.  To forgive.  To learn.  To improve, as an individual.

I believe everyone in life is given the opportunity to learn such lessons.  To learn what commitment, practice, determination and dedication look like and how to use them for your own benefit.

People often make the following excuses the way students claim they didn’t learn something that the teacher already taught them:

1. But no one in my family taught me these lessons.
2. But I didn’t go to a good school.
3. But I didn’t grow up in a sheltered neighborhood.
4. But I didn’t have the things you had.
5. But no one ever told me that was wrong.

Most lessons learned in life don’t even come from the loving people in your family, and to be frank, it’s not like my brothers and I were best friends when were little while they were “teaching” me these lessons.  I call them lessons because I analyzed as an adult what I took from each person I met in life, whether I liked them or not.  Whether these relationships caused pain or were joyful.  Learning is learning, and you are the only one who can use the knowledge for yourself.

My brothers were just being themselves.  They were not going to play barbies with me and customize some sort of childhood to what I WANTED.  I didn’t know any different since I had no sisters, so I definitely had less love for dolls and girlie toys anyway.  The court or building things was where we bonded, because that’s all they  knew.  It was the natural result of being home alone while our parents worked hard to put a roof over our heads.

To add to the fact that lessons do not come in the form we think they come in, most of the time, we learn the most valuable lessons through people we don’t even like, or people we butt heads with right away.  When I trace back the lessons I’ve learned or the ones I’ve internalized, they always came from those friction-type relationships, meaning from the people I did not prefer to get along with right away.

I have my own way of dealing with people I don’t like.  And yes, my way of dealing with them involves a lot of prayer and running and thinking about others more than myself, but people don’t normally take to that kind of stuff.  So all I can say, is that if you don’t use the God route to endure difficult relationships, then you have to TRAIN YOURSELF to put others first.  You literally have to forget about the annoying things another person does, and only look at the facts.  What are they good at?  And what can I learn from them?  And then block everything else out.  When you focus on those positive elements in a person, they will reveal to you why you met them in the first place.  But you gotta get over yourself, to see this kind of light.

When you butt heads with someone, it is because on some level, you are a lot alike.  In these situations, take it as a sign that the temptations to not listen, are actually a reflection of your pride.  And pride is a major DREAM KILLER.  So knock that pride out of the park, and listen to the writing between the lines when you are interacting with someone who bothers you.  They most likely are teaching you something that you are craving to learn.

Later in life, I deterred from the sports my brothers trained me in and chose my own athletic path.  I had grown up watching Misty May play volleyball when she was in college at Long Beach and admired the person she was.  I would watch how she carried herself and how she competed with no emotion – just passion for the game.  I wanted to be like that.  I wanted to learn how to grow as a person without being “affected” by things that didn’t go my way.

My older cousin Maria, with the most Mexican name out of all of us, just happened to be blonde-haired and blue-eyed and on top of that, 5″9.  She got a scholarship to University of San Diego as an outside hitter, and that also motivated me to believe that I too could rock it at volleyball.  I figured, it must be genetic.  Haha, and by default, I also chose volleyball because my mom was a college tennis player.  Let’s just say she’s really good.  Volleyball is the same season as tennis, so I chose my own sport as a way of creating my own identity.  Something I am obviously very passionate about.

And so I took a leap of faith down the route of a sport no one in my immediate family was really familiar with yet.  Given I’m 5″7 and enjoy strategy more than striking, I chose the path of a setter at a young age.  A setter is the person who gently guides the ball in the air for the hitter to actually “strike” or “place” on the other side of the court.

Setting takes  a ton of meticulous training, composure, multi-tasking/thinking, and finesse.  I remember I had one month out of the year by my sophomore year of high school, where I had a break from sports.  No conditioning.  No practice.  No games.  Nothing.  I was SO EXCITED to have this break since my schedule was 5am basketball practice, then school, then volleyball practice for my school team then club volleyball practice from 8 – 10pm.  And somehow I had really good grades because my mom made me do all my homework and would wake me up in the middle of the night to finish an assignment if she found out I didn’t do it.

I was exhausted and starting to wish I’d just get injured or could quit one of the sports I was less into.  I was jumping on the couch and ready to hit the beach every single day or sit around and just relax.  The phone rang, and my setter coach said, “Hey, you’ve got this opportunity to go to a two week camp in Long Beach.  Misty May is coaching it and they are going to pick the top 5 setters out of the group to win season tickets to Cal State Long Beach.”

I was actually pissed.  I wanted to so badly just opt out, even though my all time athletic idol was running the show.

I went from extreme relief to the most extreme anger burst I’ve ever had.  I screamed and threw my face into the couch.  My face was burning because I knew I really wanted to go even though I was insanely tired.  I remember laying there knowing I’d feel better in a second if I just slowed it down and looked at the benefits of this opportunity.  I put aside how fatigued I was and went right back into athlete mode.  My mind could do that because I learned in that moment how to prioritize what’s important to me.  Even at that age, I was more passionate about discovering my highest potential in everything I did, no matter how much the superficial parts of me just wanted to give up.

It was a Saturday when I got the call and that Monday I went to the camp.  It was THE BEST camp I ever trained at and I learned some of the most valuable lessons for life during those two weeks that I still use today.  Ya, that year I definitely burned out and ending up dropping basketball so that I could focus on volleyball, but the camp was completely worth it.  And being pushed to that limit was actually kind of healthy because it forced me to specify where my heart was at with each sport I played.

I walked out of the camp as the number one setter.  I won the tickets to Cal State Long Beach’s games for the Fall, earned the lead setting position on both my club and high school teams and got to meet and train with Misty May and her team of colleagues.

I will never forget it.

 

 

 

Volleyball soon became this training ground for how I looked at life.  And it didn’t all piece together for me until recently.

I used to think of every single movement in volleyball as that half court shot at the end of a basketball game against your biggest rival.  You see, every movement in volleyball (unlike most sports) has to be DELIBERATE and under very crucial circumstances.  Half the time, nothing is coming to you perfectly.  The ball just got shanked.  Your hitter forgot to come to you for the set.  All these things go wrong, and it’s up to you to make a decision to keep the play going, as the setter.  You have no time to hesitate.   Once you hesitate, the other team wins.  It’s that simple.

As the setter, you run plays for 6 people on the court.  I learned to plan out three possible plays for every ball that came to me.  Depending on how the ball came to me, I then had to adjust WITHIN THAT ONE SECOND, to set to whatever plays remained possible.  The more accurate I was as a setter, the more opportunities we had to score.  Therefore, I just got really good at setting and then learned how to over-communicate with each of my teammates and keep their spirits up so that they would get me a good pass to then set to my hitters.  You’re like the quarter back, the freaking cheerleader, the actual leader, and the nugget of consistency for the team when everything feels like it’s about to crumble.  If your setter is negative, the whole team suffers.

When you set, you have to be aware of all the blockers on the other side of the net too, so that you can set the team up for the best possible attempt at out-witting a blocker.  Imagine three blockers going up on the other side of the net, and having to find the “hole” or the one spot where we can get a hit either around a blocker or on a blocker that is too slow to get up in time or even just not there yet.  As the setter you can also fake out the other team and discretely change your sets at the last second which opens up even more holes for your hitter to nail.  That’s always a crowd pleaser when it works out.

I loved it – the strategy behind every set in volleyball.  The excitement of how you knew the play would totally work, the same way you JUST KNOW a half court shot is totally going in right at the buzzer.

Life is much the same way.

Having to make quick, but accurate decisions in the nick of time for something more than yourself.  

For the team.

Being the decision maker for all of these ways for us to succeed built a bond between me, the passers, and the hitters.  As I would set the ball up, I would watch this beautiful creation flying away from my hands and watch the hitter eagerly obey the play and respond to your set, only to annihilate it with all her might.

I had to have faith in my passers, to give me a proper pass (which is hard when they are reacting to difficult hits coming straight at them), and then have faith in myself to get in position behind whatever pass came to me in order to set up the hit for the last part of the play, the hitter.  Our three positions became very close because of how much we had to work together, communicate, practice, and believe in one another.

Just like when you shoot a half court shot and you watch it all the way to the rim, believing in it as it arcs its way closer and closer, I would look up at each set and just admire the ball, knowing we had trained hard enough to get to this point.  And no matter what, no matter the practice put into it, the strategy behind every play, it still FELT like a half court shot.  It still felt like something spontaneously going up in the air that we were all just hoping would work out.  The rush.  The adrenaline.  The hope.  That’s how every decision in life should feel.

Exciting.

As if …

What’s next?

Where are we traveling to now?

Where will I be in 10 years?

Who will I meet tomorrow?

As much as we plan and work hard, life is beautifully still unpredictable.  The joys are always that much grander, and the painful parts you realize make you that much more resilient and help you grow.

WHACK!

Every point scored in volleyball is celebrated.   There’s a quick celebration for a play won, theres a specific cheer for when you block a killer hit, and there’s the patented ACE cheer for when a server has extreme accuracy to outsmart an entire court of 6 players.  Celebrations are key for when you are working so hard to work on that finesse and composure on the court, much like in life.  You must be proud of those big wins and small wins and learn from the mistakes and the pain.  That’s how we keep going.  It’s all just training when you think about it.

The energy of knowing that every second, every movement, every decision counts is amazing in Volleyball.  It’s an energy that never leaves the court, and has never left my heart.

As you spend each moment at work, or with family, think about the “half court shots” that happen in life, or that set that goes up that you know you put up for someone else to just crush.  I feel these same intentional movements today like in volleyball but now these intentional movements are with how I live my life and the person I want to be.   Every decision has had a lot of thought behind it, and the work put into it is carrying the ball that much further to the net.

But you are the only one who can throw the shot up there and learn from the outcome whether it’s good or bad.

As you gaze at each decision going out into the world, the way we watch the ball go up in the air for whatever it is we are aiming for, we see a flash of all the people in our lives who have trained or helped us think and be the way we are.  You are able to have faith in that shot BECAUSE OF THEM and because YOU BOUGHT INTO that mentality to some extent.  No one can make you get on board, you have to train yourself and believe in it.  Remember, all shots do not go in.  Only some, and only at distinct moments in life.  Trust the path, and embrace the outcome no matter what, to be a better version than you were yesterday.

 

 

Choose to Bloom,

Diane