10.17.17 Prioritize your passion!
Gymnastics skills and strength//
30 Minute EMOM: separate minutes
a. 2 Muscle Ups on rings OR 2 Rope Climbs
b. 6 Handstand Push Up on Dumbells
c. 8 Alternating Pistols
A few months ago, JD asked me to speak at the monthly Dallas Chamber of Commerce Luncheon. I think it was a probably a dirty trick to get me to go to a chamber luncheon and want to go to them regularly. It worked, but here is what I talked about on Monday. At least it's what I planned to talk about, I kind of blacked out. Luckily I came-to sitting next to my friend Jenn!
I was just entering my second year of full-time teaching at Ellensburg High School. There were 90 applicants for my job. Teachers in Washington want to teach and retire in the Ellensburg School District and jobs only come available when teacher’s retire. So here I am, teaching English at an amazing school. They can hire really good teachers! For some reason though they hired me. Terrific Colleagues, sweetheart students, and very good administrators. Summers off. Great Benefits. And about the time when I started teaching at EHS I started CrossFit as well to lose weight for my wedding. In my first year of teaching, I also lost about 100lbs through CrossFit. The whole school, my students, my football kids, my colleagues, watched me make this transformation. I enjoyed teaching, but I really became passionate about fitness.
I can recall one day when I was trying to start a lecture about Lord of the Flies to my sophomore English class when one of my football players raised his hand, and I’m kind of excited, like this kid is a jock and he’s about to ask a question about Lord of the Flies, what’s he going to ask? So I call on him, “Donny” That’s his real name, not a made-up-story-name. “Jonsey, what was your workout yesterday?” Donny didn’t really care about my workout. Kids just know that if they want to talk about what the teacher is into, the teacher might talk about that rather than school. He Got me. We didn’t talk about Lord of the Flies. I went on and on about how the workout was so hard and why, and how one lady even barfed, and how I was sore. And then we probably talked about what the work out was for the next day even.
All of my colleagues were really into teaching and literature and writing. And actually I was a little jealous. We would have department meetings and they would go on and on and super excited the way I was about CrossFit. They had no problem finding ways to get their kids to learn or how to become better at their craft. I distinctly remember one lunch break, I was looking at Rogue Fitness at some obscure piece of equipment and reading about this stupid little fitness thing, and glancing over at this stack of papers to grade. It was only yay high, but it seemed like a mile high and I had this moment of like… 30 more years of these? The teachers I admired where on the back half of those 30 years and still excited about teaching, and here I’m two years in, scraping by in the classroom, but killing it in the gym.
So as a teacher, I really had no hope to move past mediocrity. My colleagues loved it, and I loved CrossFit. I don’t care what it is or how much training or resources you have, if you don’t fully love, like, and enjoy what you’re doing, it’s really hard to move past mediocrity. I was certainly stuck while my colleagues kept getting better and better.
You know how that story ends, I got out of teaching to open a gym with my wife 5 hours away from our home in a neat little town, Dallas, not The Dalles, Oregon. We opened Harvest CrossFit, we’re passionate about fitness, we really love people. We wake up excited to work with our athletes, it’s really easy to move past mediocrity because we love it! For us at Harvest CrossFit, we spend a lot of time training our athletes, we spend a lot of time learning about and planning out how we’re going to make them fitter, and then we spend a lot of time developing our community, all of those are fun and enjoyable to us, we’ve never been stuck in a rut like I was as a teacher. I don’t know what that looks like for you, or even what it should look like, but if you are doing something you love, moving past mediocrity is easy.
That’s really the answer for moving past mediocrity. Doing what you love and enjoy. But you already know that. You might need to remind yourself what you love or at least re-examine what you’re into. But once you figure that out, then what?
The next step is prioritizing your passion. You can do that through systems, programs, and outsourcing. Do you have a system that helps you get through the necessary but menial tasks so that you can spend your time developing your Craft? What program could you implement to free up your time? And is there something you don’t like doing that someone else likes doing? It may sound like a financial burden to pay someone to do a job you are capable of but hate doing. That price might very likely be worth it.