Yesterday my youngest son played soccer, nothing unusual for a Saturday in the Pacific Northwest. What was a little unusual was that we were playing in a constant downpour. Now living in Seattle we are used to playing soccer in the rain, in fact it is just part of the deal when you sign your kid up to play. Usually it is just a drizzle, but I felt like yesterday we might want to consider gathering lumber to start ARK construction, it felt like it was never going to let up!
Yesterday brought some new thoughts to mind as I sat watching our normally very talented team have extreme difficulty getting the ball down the field. You see the field was flooded, huge puddles scattered all over and water an inch thick lay hidden within the grass. Now, the boys thought this was great during warm-ups, they were laughing, kicking water at each other, getting muddier by the minute. But when the game started and they had to get the ball down the field into shooting range, well it provided to be more difficult than they imagined.
You see the condition the field was in made it almost impossible to kick and dribble like they would have with a dry field. They would kick the ball and it would go one foot and stop DEAD. The would end up running past it and have to back up and usually the other team would have gotten the ball and started down the other direction. This went on for nearly the entire game, they just never got the idea that they would have to change what they were doing in order to get the ball down the field to shoot a goal. The strategy needed to change, the way they dribbled needed to change all due to the conditions of the field; even kicking the ball needed to be done differently – the usual techniques just weren’t working.
It brought home a point to me that we as parents so often find ourselves in. We end up doing the same thing over and over again and expect a different result. But it never does. Even when conditions change we just do the same “discipline” or “technique” and we do not get the results we are looking for. Yet, we continue to keep doing the same thing. Why do we do this? Is it that we aren’t smart enough to try something different? No, I know parents are smart – some of the mom’s I have worked with are even smarter than me! (Don’t pass that around or I may never get another client again!!) I think we just loose our focus and our view gets to be very narrow. We tend to think there is not another way or different approach to get the result we are looking for. We get into habits that are hard to break. That is it.
It is so much easier to keep doing the same thing rather than take the time to stop and truly come up with a different plan. That takes time, thought and effort – sometimes we are so tired we cannot even begin to think to try something different. When I work with parents it is amazing how quickly we can come up with different solutions to their “same old problems”, it is great what another pair of ears can do when discussing a situation.
So as I sat watching our team keep doing the same thing, over and over again I kept yelling for them to keep at it. I wasn’t the coach – just a soccer mom on the sidelines cheering them on. I have to wonder how different a second half they would have had if the coach had tried to explain how they had to change their normal game strategy and ball handling. If maybe a little different attack on the ball would have made a difference in our ending score. I will say our team did an incredible job of persevering, they didn’t quite – they kept going and going until that whistle blew. Isn’t that how it is as parents too? We just keep going and going – persevering with hopes of a different outcome each day. Just thinking one day may be different, but I will warn you….nothing will change until you end up changing what you do. Remember the same strategy will not continue to work when conditions on the field change, and I guarantee your kids will continually be changing the field conditions! Just to keep you on your toes, it is their job.
