Reach Higher

As I begin blogging again, I found inspiration for this blog’s topic from Michigan State University’s football team.  The team’s motto for the 2015 season is ‘Reach Higher’.  The statement very easily lends itself to a visceral interpretation of doing better and going further.  A motto that is fitting for a team that over the years has had increasingly great success in its regular seasons, bowl game appearances, and is sitting at the cusp of yet another banner year this year.  Without bragging about a team that I’m very proud of from my alma mater, let’s look into why this is a motto that is extremely pertinent to all of us whether you love or loathe football.

Let’s start with a simple experiment for illustrative purposes.  This will cause you to leave the screen you’re reading this on, so please come back to finish.  Don’t leave me behind in awe of the results.  Ready?  Here is the first instruction: stand against a wall and reach as high as you can.  Make sure that when you do this, you have a way to mark how high you were able to reach.  Return to a resting position, and come back to the screen for the second set of instructions.  Part 2: Do the exact same thing again, and you will probably be surprised that you can reach higher the second time.  Interesting right?

This type of phenomenon happens to us in our personal and professional lives quite often.  We work hard and give 100% of our effort to achieve a goal that we’ve been working towards.  The goal is attainable, but really expends a lot of energy as we’ve tried as hard as we can to accomplish it.  There’s a lot of pride that comes with reaching it, but we must remember not to get lost in the celebration.  Instead, if we focused our energy, concentrated and kept on pushing just a little harder we would be reaching higher and could achieve even more than we thought we could.

The biggest trap that we can fall into is being mesmerized by our initial success.  The intoxicating joy of achievement can easily lull us into a safe place of satisfaction.  Satisfaction is the worst enemy you can have when greatness in your personal or professional life is what you want.  Satisfaction means we’re too comfortable and settling for mediocrity.  The reality is, no one great was ever mediocre, and they were always pushing for the next goal to achieve, the next precipice to climb, the next business venture to embark on, and on and on.

Just when we thought we couldn’t get any better we aim to push a little more and reach higher and we can get an even better result.  Michigan State’s football team is illustrating their motto right now and we are watching it unfold before us.  Their head coach Mark Dantonio in his job acceptance press conference stated “My vision here is to win championships.  That’s my vision.”  He’s held true to this vision winning Bowl Games, Big Ten Division Championships, and Big Ten League Championships.  The success, and rate at which the program has achieved it, could be dizzying and very easy to be comfortable with.  But instead of being satisfied with their success, this year they are reaching higher and aiming for a National Championship.

This is the type of mindset that we need to carry with us.  It’s a hunger to keep achieving, to keep reaching higher just when we thought we reached high enough.

I’ve already proved to you that you can do it physically through the experiment that we started with.  So why not prove it to yourself through your accomplishments to reach the greatness that you desire and push a little further to surprise yourself with even more success.

 

 

Learning from Lacey's Legacy

The morning of April 9, 2014 many people awoke to the news that Lacey Holsworth, an 8 year old little girl in Michigan had died of cancer around 1:00am that morning.  People who have never met Lacey were saddened by her passing and felt that they themselves had lost a loved one.  While it is always sad when someone dies, especially a child, many felt connected to her touching story because it unfolded very publicly after an encounter in 2012 at Sparrow Hospital with Michigan State basketball star Adreian Payne.  The two formed an immediate bond which strengthened and grew over time.  As many learned of her battle with cancer, there was an outpouring of love and support showed to her and her family from total strangers.  You didn’t have to be a Spartan fan, to be a fan of Lacey cheering her on through her battle with Neuroblastoma.  Princess Lacey (a nickname she affectionately took on) was such a young spirit, but there are so many great lessons that we can learn from her. 

All too often, we get caught up in the hype and bravado that we have to be a well-known, wealthy or highly influential person to make a difference or be important.  Lacey taught us that significance comes in all sizes and ages.  As an 8 year old little girl she lived her life with courage, and had a tremendous positive influence on others.  A pebble can be dropped in a pond and even though it’s not the biggest rock there will be a ripple effect created.  This can positively influence the lives of others, so it’s not always necessary to be the biggest, loudest voice in the room, just the most genuine. 

When Lacey was sitting in Sparrow Hospital in 2012 recovering from surgery, she had no specific laid out plans to cut down a net at the Big Ten Championship game, watch Adreian Payne in the dunk contest in Dallas, TX, or go on the Today Show and Good Morning America.  Would it be cool?  Of course.  But Lacey was living her life, determined to smile through her discomfort and the life altering difficulties that cancer presented.  That determination lead to her building a bond with Adreian Payne, which lead to inspiring a whole basketball team, and eventually others across the nation.  Lacey was creating her own ripple effect by being herself.

Lacey’s determination and courage to keep smiling and make the most out of her days is something else that we all can learn from.  It’s easy to get caught up in the complaints of our daily lives because something isn’t going right, or it’s not going the way we planned it.  This isn’t to mitigate the serious nature of what’s happening, but it’s too easy for that negativity to consume us and dictate how we interact with those we love and others.  I’ve been guilty of it on certain occasions myself, so you won’t find any finger pointing here.  But what if we shifted our perspective a bit and took the time to be thankful for what we have in our lives?  What if we approached each day being thankful for being able to see the sun rise, thankful for having people in our lives who love us, and looking for the silver lining of different moments? 

Lacey was grateful for each day she had, because she never knew what day would be her last.  She always had a smile on her face whenever the camera would show her in the stands at a game, or when strangers would ask for pictures with her, even though she had so much going on in her life.  If we approached life with a little more gratefulness would our interactions with others change, would we enjoy the little moments a bit more, and not take so much for granted?

The legacy that Lacey has left behind will be impossible to measure.  She touched the lives of so many people and will continue to remain in the hearts of many.  A vigil at MSU in her memory brought out droves of people in and outside of the community many of whom signed a famous landmark rock on Michigan State University’s campus.  The rock usually gets repainted with something new every 24 hours, from student group names, to events, to proposals, etc., but that same message in her memory (pictured below) has been there since April 9^th with more and more people making the journey to sign it with prayers, words of encouragement for the family, and messages of love.  Her story has inspired ESPN sports analyst Dick Vitale a long-time advocate for cancer research to set up a research fund in her name (click here). 

Lacey was just a child, but the way she lived embodied the words of a former famous basketball coach Jim Valvano who died of cancer as well, “Cancer can take away all my physical abilities. It cannot touch my mind, it cannot touch my heart and it cannot touch my soul. And those three things are going to carry on forever.”

While you or I may not have cancer, if we live like Lacey with courage genuineness and determination, and love like Lacey (like it says at the bottom of the rock), while staying true to ourselves, we can leave our lasting impression on the world, and fully enjoy each and every day.

Homecoming and Heroes

You’ll have to excuse me during this week’s blog for slightly deviating from my usual messages of motivation and insight gained from an experience.  You see this week is homecoming week at Michigan State University (MSU) which is my beloved alma mater.  The theme for homecoming this year is creating Spartan heroes which caused me to have some reflection on who are the heroes in my life.  The resounding automatic answer was first and foremost my parents.  So I figured why not take the time to write this week about just a few great memories of my most prominent heroes (Mom and Dad) and how through our time together as a family MSU became so special in my life.  In the spirit of the “hero homecoming” theme, and this week’s blog, I would encourage you to take some time to reflect on the heroes in your life, and take a moment to enjoy some reminiscent conversations with them.

In order to know where my affiliation with MSU starts you can literally go back to the day I was born.  When my parents brought me home from the hospital, it was to a cozy 2 bedroom apartment where they lived in University Housing known as Spartan Village.  That means when I was learning my address as a small child, my parents were helping me to learn how to spell and write Spartan.  It was a great neighborhood where the best sledding hill was tucked away just behind the Spartan Village School (now the community center).  Dad and I would go out there bundled up head to toe, and return with cold noses to mom’s tomato soup and hot chocolate to thaw out.  My mom helped me earn a bike through selling M&Ms for a school fundraiser, and I learned how to ride that bike on the sidewalks of Spartan Village with my dad’s help.  Even on laundry day I would kick around the soccer ball and toss a football with my parents in the grassy area by the Laundromat.

As you can imagine, football game days were very special to me as well, but not just because of the game.  While my dad was getting his PhD at MSU, he formed a close friendship with a professor named Dr. Walter Adams.  I remember frequent fall Saturdays as a child we would fight the traffic through the streets of East Lansing, some days we went to a game but a majority were to watch the band warm up and march to the stadium (I’ve included a link of this tradition below).  Dr. Adams with his signature cigar, and green and white feather tucked firmly in his hat, used to welcome my parents and I to stand with him and chat.  I would do my best with my short childish arms to help him hold the Big Ten flags the band used, while members of the band stretched and warmed up.  To this day, watching the band march to the stadium (from what is now named Adams Field, in memory of Dr. Adams), and hearing them play the fight song still reminds me of those great fall Saturdays. 

We went to University United Methodist Church on Harrison Road and afterwards through much of my prompting my parents would drive me past the university farms to see the farm animals.  Having attended many Small Animal Days in spring on campus, the cows and horses were my favorite to see grazing in the fields.  Some Sundays after the drive we would take some bread down to the banks of the Red Cedar by Wells Hall to feed the ducks.  On the way, my dad would help me collect acorns for the squirrels.  As an adult I now know the squirrels were abundant enough on campus that what few acorns I collected weren’t helping much, but he helped me do it anyway and that makes it special to me.

When I received my acceptance letters to attend MSU for undergrad and then later graduate school, I remember how happy I was to share those moments with my parents.  Through all my experiences as a child, and the academic programs I wanted to go into, MSU was always my primary choice.  When I was hired to work on campus as a Resident Director in Emmons Hall immediately out of graduate school, it was as if everything had come full circle.  I was born in University Housing, and then I had my first full time job working in Residence Life managing a residence hall on MSU’s campus.  It was unique how it worked out for me, but simply it solidified my love and appreciation for the campus.

As you can probably imagine I could easily fill a book with all of the experiences I’ve had at MSU.  I’ve often joked with friends that I have a memory for almost every part of campus from celebrating a basketball national championship, to Dairy Store Ice Cream, to watching the Breslin Center being built, and then living on 6 East in Holmes Hall.  But in the spirit of homecoming I just wanted to share a few fond memories with you here.  It was fun to go down memory lane and jot down notes deciding on what experiences I would include in this post.  I’m sure my parents and I will have some good laughs remembering what I’ve written here as well as the moments that didn’t make the cut.  It was easy and fun to do as I reflected on my parents, my most influential heroes.  I’d encourage you to take the time to think of some of your most favorite moments with one or more of your heroes and take the time to make a phone call, or set up a lunch this week to share and chat with them.  It’s a great feel good moment, and you never know what happiness you might bring to yourself, as well as them.  Spread happiness every day friends.

 

 

Here's the link to the video of the MSU Marching Band that I referred to earlier in the post.  You can fast forward to the 2:36 mark to avoid a slow intro.  It isn't my video, but one I found.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-E1neD_otNs