September 29, 2017
3 Types of People in this world – #NationalAnthemProtest
“If you can’t fly, then run,If you can’t run, then walk,If you can’t walk, then crawl,but whatever you do,you have to keep moving forward.”– Martin Luther King Jr.
I have talked to many of you asking if/how you were talking to your teams about what is going on in the NFL with the National Anthem protests.
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Here is what was discussed on the team I coach:
There are 3 types of people in this world.
These are hats we all wear at times. But getting the right balance is the key.
- The Watchers
- The Talkers
- The Doers
There is a time and place for each one. The healthiest balance I have found is:
Think about one of the best agents for social change our country has ever seen, Martin Luther King Jr. We remember his ‘I have a dream’ speech and the march on Washington. But I recently have been reading about his life, and the protests were a small percentage of what he was all about. He spent most of his time visiting struggling communities and finding ways to help them. And he struggled with dedicating 1/7 of his time to ‘watching,’ or resting, and this paid a toll on his relationship with his family.
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So the challenge I gave to our team was to spend less time debating whether one side is disrespecting minorities or the other side is disrespecting our military and police.
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Spend that time instead doing something about it.
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We all agreed we want to respect our military, and we want to respect people of all races.
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So we are going to do something about it:
- We reached out to a school in our area that has mostly minority students in a struggling economic area. They have a lacrosse team, and we asked their coach if we could partner together to help their team and do a service project together in the community.
- We are pursuing a way to support military veterans in our area. We would love to start a wheelchair lacrosse program in Nashville for veterans, although the start-up costs are very high so we are weighing all options.
I hope you have the same type of conversations with your team and your family.
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Quit debating which side is right. Less talking. More doing.
