Social Comment | Perspective

Stosh Walsh knocked this one out the park in his blog on leadership and marriage, and I think he is on to something. I am now looking to wear “potential colored glasses” all the time!

Actually, I discovered them myself, after many years of fathering and coaching my sons.

Truthfully, I only discovered them after trial and error with my older sons and learned to apply them with my 3rd and 4th sons. I believe I actually helped them to be very successful in their wrestling careers in which they attained a large portion of their potential. (And they are still attaining it.) I discovered “potential covered glasses” coaching, but that is where I left them.

What I did not fully see, and what Stosh has uncovered in his post, is that there is a way to view people and relate to people – especially people who we love and care about – all the time that will bring out the best in them. These glass are not limited to coaching; the principle can be applied to anyone over whom we may have influence: co-workers, employees, kids that we coach, girls scouts and boy scouts, anyone with whom we may some influence in our lives, even friends and neighbors.

Another way to put it is “seeing the best in people”, but I think it is more than that. It is affirming, encouraging, and sometimes challenging, people to live up to potential.

There is a difference between having unrealistic expectations and seeing the potential in others. Unrealistic expectations can be a burden. I am no psychologist, but I imagine that unrealistic expectations have more to do with how I want someone to be than what or who a person actually is. Potential is also not wishful thinking. Potential is grounded in reality.

At the same time, a person who practices seeing potential, focusing on encouragement and building others up, bring out the best in other person. I know this because I have seen it work.

When my 20 year old was a 74 pound 8th grader dreaming of a career in professional baseball, I knew better, but I did not have the heart to discourage him. Instead, I encouraged him in wrestling, where he really had potential and size did not matter.

As an 89 pound freshman, I thought he should hone his wrestling skills with off season competition, but he tried out and made the freshman baseball team. Dreams die hard, and I was not going to be the killer of his dreams, however unlikely. His coach told me he had the best arm and glove in the outfield, but he mostly “rode the pine” because the coach wanted the bigger guys in the lineup who could really drive the ball. Maybe my son had the potential to be a great baseball player, but the coach did not see the potential. My son got discouraged.

I saw a different potential in wrestling and encouraged him in that direction. He had to learn for himself that maybe he was just too small to be the baseball player he wanted to be. With new-found inspiration to focus on wrestling, and with the right doses of encouragement, he qualified for the State tournament as an underweight sophomore (even at the lowest weight class). As a Junior he soared to the State finals in a very competitive weight class crowded with talent, where he came up just short of a State championship! I did not even imagine that his potential could take him to those heights, but I saw potential, encouraged it, and he became a believer in his own potential.

During these growing up years for me (as a parent), I learned kids grow strong with the gentle water of encouragement. Unfortunately, I learned through my errors, that a different approach can have negative results. I am convinced that, if we spend more time affirming and encouraging, and less time criticizing and pointing out faults, that we will have better relationships and better results from our leading, whether we are leading sons and daughters or spouses, employees, little leaguers and whoever might be following our lead.

Sports psychologists talk about the importance of visualization. People teach athletes the technique of visualizing successful performance. In the world of wrestling, which is a sport that is part of the fabric of my life and family, visualization would be used to imagine executing a perfect move, picturing a winning match against a tough opponent, from shot to counter shot, through every move and counter move to the final tick on the clock and getting an arm raised in victory. The ability to visualize success is important to establishing confidence and achieving success.

If visualization of success for one’s self can help you with confidence and actual success, it can work for instilling confidence in others and helping others to achieve success. Maybe even more so! When someone has confidence in me, I am inspired to perform well, if for no other reason than to live up to that confidence.

Stosh focuses on marriage and spouses. I wish that I read his article years ago. It is funny how I have learned so much about being a leader to my kids (again after much trial and error), while I feel that I remain a relative novice being a good husband and leader for my wife. Stosh reminds us that we are all leaders, even if we are leaders to no one other than our spouses and children. In reality, we are all influencers of many more people, beginning with family, and extending to friends, neighbors and others in our daily lives. Our homes are the places to try on the potential colored glasses and get used to wearing them, but those glasses can be worn wherever we go, wherever we mix with people on a regular basis. Imagine a world in which potential colored glasses where the fashionable things to wear!

I met with an estate planning client today to review and finalize their estate planning documents. We made small talk as copies of the signed documents were being made about the differences between kids growing up now and when we were young.

We have all read the summaries of “the way it used to be” that are floating around social media on the Internet. They are usually nostalgic looks back with some unspoken angst about the different way kids grow up today. The topic of discussion with my clients today focused on the way we used to organize our own when we were kids, compared to the organized sports and other activities that kids experience now.

Most everything is organized for kids today by adults. There were some organized activities in years gone by, like little league and scouts, but most of the time that we spent as children involved finding ways to organize and entertain ourselves. We would wear the treads off of our bike tires seeking out friends to play with and things to do. Boys would organize impromptu baseball and football games, playing games of 500 and “smear the queer” (we were not very politically correct, and we played hard). We would build towns in sandboxes and play army on dirt mounds and find a million different adventures and things to keep ourselves busy. Girls would play hopscotch, and house and so on. We would organize neighborhood games like kick the can, and red rover, and flashlight tag. We played games that had no names that we made up, sometimes on the spot.

Kids today do not know what to do with themselves. They expect to be entertained. They expect for someone to organize them. They fill their time up with cable TV, Xbox, YouTube and other forms of entertainment.

I suggested to one of my sons one day when he said he was bored that he organize a neighborhood football game. He looked blankly at me, not knowing the first place to start. I told him how we would do that when I was young and left him to his own devices. An hour or two later, I saw him and a few of his friends standing in the front yard with their football gear on from the organized youth football league, staring just as blankly, looking awkward, not knowing what to do. They never did play a game of football that day. The attempt fizzled.

Our kids are used to having their lives organized by others and, perhaps, have less initiative to do things themselves as a result. My mother did not know where I was much of my youth, and that would have been true for most parents then. Now, we keep close tabs on our children.

I recently read that “millennials” (as I am told the current generation is called) are less likely to have a driver’s license by the time that they are 18 than past generations. The statistical image in this blog article states that over 30% of millennials still live at home. The Pew Research Center reports the percentage at 36% and a whopping 56% for 18-24 year olds! I did not know anyone who lived at home after the age of 18 when I was age 18, unless they were returning home for the summer from college. (Of course, my memory may be just a little old.)

Can we really blame though? After all, we raised them!

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