Mindset
“Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.”
-George Bernard Shaw
I think, or maybe I wonder sometimes, that people think I am a little crazy. I have never been particularly predictable, and yet, strangely enough, I think I have been remarkably steady. My dad used to refer to me as a turtle. Slow and steady wins the race. I suppose there was some truth in that, although my path through life has rarely followed the direction most people might have expected.
Each time I have found myself in a position that people in my industry might consider to be “the one,” I have eventually changed direction. It has never been a change simply for the sake of change, nor have I been particularly concerned with what the change might look like from the outside. I think I have simply been motivated by the possibility that there might be something else to see, another perspective to explore, another version of myself that I had not yet met.
That tendency has not been limited to my professional life.
I have been married three times and divorced twice. Not because I wanted change for the sake of it, but because I eventually came to understand that I did not want to remain in a relationship that was no longer right, either for my partner or for me. I found the right person, finally, although I have also come to understand that finding the right person is hardly the end of the story. Jaime wants to grow as much as I do, and perhaps that has been one of the secrets of our life together. We have made a deliberate effort to keep becoming, and somehow to do that together rather than slowly growing apart.
That is not easy. Relationships are not easy, because at some point you have to stop thinking only about what you want and begin thinking about what the two of you need. When children enter the picture, that equation becomes exponentially more complicated. You cannot simply do what you want anymore. You try to understand what everyone needs, including yourself, and then somehow make decisions that allow all of those people to continue becoming who they are. That is a difficult thing to do well.
Perhaps that same instinct has followed me throughout my professional life.
I left Concordia University because I had reached a ceiling of possibility. It was a nice job, filled with good people, and there were plenty of reasons to stay. But I could no longer create the experience I wanted to create there. The environment had become stagnant for me, and I was not.
I left the New York Islanders because the environment was messy and disjointed, and I could not find a meaningful way to serve within it. It was an organization with an incredibly rich history that, at the time, seemed to have lost its direction. I could feel myself becoming part of the dysfunction rather than someone capable of changing it, and eventually I knew I needed to move.
I did not have a choice about leaving the New York Rangers. That decision was made for me. Truthfully, though, in the middle of my second divorce and another period of significant personal change, I suspect I would eventually have found my way toward the door anyway. I could not build what I wanted to build there either. Professional sport can be a remarkably stimulating environment, but it can also be constrained by narrow thinking, fear of failure, politics and the understandable desire to protect what already exists.
Montreal was different. In Montreal, I discovered that I could build something. Perhaps not everything I imagined, but enough to begin creating a different way of working. We built something unique and, for a while, something powerful. I was challenged, stimulated, and surrounded by problems worth solving. Eventually, though, I began to feel that familiar restlessness again. When you work within a professional sport organization, your ability to continue growing often depends upon whether the people and the organization around you want to keep growing too. What many people would have considered the job of a lifetime eventually stopped allowing me to explore the person and practitioner I was trying to become.
B2ten opened that door again. It allowed me to become curious in ways I had never experienced before and to explore possibilities without many of the traditional constraints. For quite a while, it pushed me into places I did not even realize I was capable of going, and it unquestionably made me a better practitioner. Working with those incredible athletes left me professionally exposed. There was nowhere to hide. They had enormous dreams and expectations, and I had accepted the responsibility of helping them solve problems that stood between where they were and where they wanted to go. I had to find solutions. I had to become better. I had to step into the expectation that somehow I could help them move closer to the promise of an Olympic medal. That pressure squeezed growth out of me, and for a long time it satisfied that internal itch for expansion.
Eventually, where I wanted to go no longer aligned with where the organization wanted to go. Once again, I found myself standing in front of a choice. I could continue because it was comfortable. After all, it was successful, or simply because everyone expected that I would, or I could change direction again.
So Jaime and I decided to make a go of private education.
I became a teacher, mentor, business owner, content creator and, whether I was prepared for it or not, a digital entrepreneur. I dove headfirst into a universe I barely understood. I explored so many corners of that space that I am not even sure I could list them all anymore. Every time I thought I understood what I was doing, the rules changed, the software evolved, the algorithm shifted, and the thing I had finally figured out became the thing I needed to relearn. It was frustrating, fascinating, exhausting and incredibly educational. When I look back at everything we have experienced over these past twelve years, I find it difficult to believe how much we have learned, created, failed at, rebuilt and discovered along the way. It has been truly profound.
There is a cost to living this way, though, and I do not want to romanticize it. Changing direction means surrendering certainty. Sometimes it means walking away from status, financial security, familiarity, or an identity you worked very hard to create. Sometimes the people around you do not understand why you cannot simply be satisfied with what you have. There have certainly been decisions I questioned, mistakes I made and moments when I wondered whether staying put would have been easier. Almost certainly it would have been. But I am not convinced easier would have been better.
Then, almost as though the timing had been arranged for us, I looked at Jaime and told her I thought it was time to revisit our lives. The place we had once imagined ourselves living forever had gradually begun to feel like a waiting room for retirement. There was nothing wrong with it. In fact, there was almost everything right with it. But something inside me knew I was not ready to settle into the final version of my story.
I did not want to retire. I did not want to wind things down. I wanted another opportunity to revise the story, to explore another corner of myself and, in doing so, perhaps discover another corner of us.
So here we are again.
I have never been afraid of changing direction. Apparently, it is simply something I do. Not because change itself fulfills me, and certainly not because every change has worked out exactly as I imagined it would. What fulfills me is the revision. It is the possibility contained within another iteration. It is discovering that the story is not finished simply because the chapter you are currently living happens to be a good one.
Maybe my dad was right about the turtle after all. I have been slow and steady, just perhaps not in the way he imagined. The steadiness was never about staying in one place. It was about continuing to move toward whatever seemed capable of showing me something I had not yet discovered about my work, the world, the people I love, or myself.
The next iteration has almost always been the most interesting one.
And at 62, I am enormously grateful that I still want to know what happens next.
