The Breakthrough

It's late September when I write this.

Today the Sun woke me up and I noticed something weird.

My knee didn't hurt.

The vast swath of humanity does not wake up with pain in their knee every morning.

But for me, for now, I am not a part of that group.

You see, in early August a very competent surgeon cut my knee open and replaced my ACL.

And for an encore he also cut through my tibia and then broke it. He then realigned it to be straight and put a plate and 8 screws in it to hold it in place.

This was done to alleviate the pain in my knee.

That knee pain was caused by a bone on bone interaction between my femur and tibia.

And by 'interaction' I mean the femur, with the help of gravity, was crushing my tibia day after day.

The surgery was on August 8th.

I haven't been to the gym in almost 2 months.

I don't go to the gym because I prefer to do my hours of physical therapy alone in my backyard.

Trying to get back range of motion is a very slow and monotonous process.

There are times when the absolutely glacial speed of progress makes me want to scream in rage and defeat.

But I am a stubborn human.

I have learned over time to summon rage and direct it to improvement rather than destruction.

And that's what I wanted to talk about today.

Rage, anger, frustration, embarrassment, disappointment, humiliation.

All of the negative emotions...

..And negative emotions are always bad, right?

Well if they are channeled into negative actions then that's true.

But I have found when channeled into positive actions these powerful emotions have created the most rapid progress I've ever seen.

Like when I was cut from the AAA hockey team when I was 15 years old.

In those days the coaches told you to your face if you made the team or not.

Then you would exit the change room and have to walk past all the other guys waiting in line to see the coaches.

I remember feeling so enraged and humiliated walking past those other boys after I got cut.

It was at that moment that I vowed someone would pay.

I felt so much rage that I refused to even play AA.

So I escaped the system for a year and ended up playing hockey for my high school team.

Away from that spotlight, in the darkness of my basement, I lifted weights like a madman.

I don't know how much muscle I put on that year.... but it was a lot.

The next September I went back to tryouts and I smashed everyone.

I wanted revenge.

Pretty dark stuff there hey?

But the reality was my physical improvement skyrocketed in that year.

I had a massive chip on my shoulder.

And I channelled that chip into progress.

Over my life I have repeated this cycle many times.

At one point in my life I competed in kickboxing.

One Sunday morning after sparring, I remember barely being able to get out of my truck due to the beating I had received.

And I can tell you that drove me to get better quickly.

The cycle was revisited again while working in China.

Memories of sitting in a meeting for 90 minutes and not understanding one word can drive someone crazy.

And that feeling drove me to learn that language.

I guess the point of this is we are all going to feel those emotions at some point in our lives...at many points in our lives.

The key question is how you handle those emotions and choose to channel them.

In the above examples those powerful feelings of rage and humiliation drove me to improve in different areas of my life that positive emotions wouldn't have.

It can work that way for our young athletes as well.

There is no sense denying that these emotions exist.

The key is finding the right outlet to channel them and make you better.

Dedicated to your Athletes Success