I’m a day late writing again. We got back late last night from a Christmas vacation with our kids. Instead of buying them presents this year we decided to take them somewhere and make memories instead. We went to the Gaylord Texan in Grapevine, Texas. If you haven’t been there I highly recommend it. It is great for kids. There is so much to do at the hotel and in that area. We had a blast. We did a lot of cool activities and had a wonderful experience. Of course we ate well too. There is everything you can think of to eat right there in that area. Even if you don’t have kids it would be an awesome experience. On Christmas morning, we made them go on a scavenger hunt to find out what we were doing. They were excited to get to go somewhere. On the way down there we asked them if they would rather go on a trip or get presents. At first they said get presents. But after going they said no doubt, they would rather go there than get presents. It was a great experience and we will plan on going somewhere like that next year as well!
With the new year brings about all the new year’s resolutions. I have made them in the past, as I’m sure most of you have. I have made them before and stuck with them pretty good and then I have made some before and I didn’t get past January 2. Every year at some point around Christmas we will be in the car and I can count on my wife saying, “You have any new year’s resolutions or anything you want to do in the new year.” I can tell it’s coming usually before she ask the question because, well for one I know it’s coming at some point. But she also gets quiet and I can tell she’s in deep thought before she asks me too. For years I usually had the same answer of, “No, not really.” I gave this answer because usually at this point I hadn’t really given much thought to it. This is usually when I started thinking about it. Her question usually jump started my thinking about what I wanted to accomplish in the next 12 months. It would range anywhere from the typical lose weight, to pray more, to do a daily Bible study, among a lot of the other regular things that a lot of people use as resolutions. Like I said, sometimes I was successful at these things for the whole year, sometimes part of the year, and sometimes I might not have made it through the first day. But nevertheless, I tried!
But the last couple of years have been different. I have had a little different approach to this. First, I have thought ahead a little bit and have been ready for her question. We were driving this weekend on our trip and I had a feeling it was coming. The scene was set. It was around the holidays. We were in the car. I was driving and she was thinking. She had that look. She was in deep thought. I was just waiting for it. Then boom, she popped the question. “So do you have any new year’s resolutions or anything you want to do in the new year.” I was fully ready to answer. I had seen it coming. I should have asked her first and really thrown her off. But I didn’t. I gave her the same answer I gave her last year. She probably doesn’t remember my answer a year ago. But it was the same as this year. I responded with, “Be better.” I know it sounds simple, but I’ll explain what it means.
I try not to be a complicated person. I try to keep things simple. I feel like life is just easier this way. That is the way I’m wired. Some people aren’t wired this way and that is fine. Everyone is different. But I like to keep it simple. So to “be better” encompasses a lot of things, but they all have some common ground. I want to be better at life. I tell my players a lot to just work hard to be better. Not just at baseball, but at life. That’s not telling them they aren’t good already, but no matter how good we are at something, we can always be better. Whether it’s a specific skill or something more broad, we can always be better at it. So when I tell my players to be better that means to be better at baseball, be a better person, be a better teammate, be a better Christian, the list could go on and on. But that is the idea. Just to be better.
Here is why I have taken that approach. In the past I would choose specific things as my new year’s resolution. Those things were important to me. I really wanted to be better in those areas. In all honesty, I usually did get better at those things and was successful to a certain point with those things. But here’s the problem that I ran into. Maybe you don’t run into this problem. Maybe it is just me. But when I focused really hard on something that I made my new year’s resolution, something else suffered. That is what I didn’t like about it. For example, I would say that I wanted to be a better baseball coach. I would work hard to be better at that. I dedicated a lot of time to being better at the coaching. There are a lot of aspects of coaching, but I put a lot of time into being better at all of them. That is the way my personality is. When I decide to focus on one thing, I almost obsess about it. That’s all I think about until I accomplish whatever it is I’m working on. While this is a great goal to have, I didn’t always go about it in the right way. In the meantime I stopped focusing on other areas of my life that needed to be healthy as well. I would stop working out and taking care of my body physically and that would effect me mentally. I would lose focus on my family because I put so much time into other things. So then the next year I would make it part of my resolution to work out more and be healthy and lose weight. For that year I would do great with that, but my relationship with God would suffer. It was just a repeating cycle of something getting better and something else suffering. My priorities weren’t always in check. I didn’t like this because I felt there was a better way to go about things for myself. Like I said, other people may not be this way, but I am. So when I focused on specific things like that, something else went backwards.
So I went with “Be better”. That has helped me tremendously. I want to be better in all areas of my life. I want to grow as a Christian, dad, husband, son, friend, and every other thing that I am. I personally can’t do this though if I focus on specific things too much. I get too wrapped up in that specific area. I have worked over the course of the last couple of years at just being better at life. For me, the spiritual, physical, and mental aspects of life go hand in hand. The closer my walk with God, the better I am at working out. The better I am at working out, the happier I am with myself and the better husband and dad I am. The happier I am with myself and the better I am with the way I treat people, the better friend I am. The better friend I am the better coach I am. You can see how this is just a circle that never stops. It doesn’t have branches that go all over the place and lead away from one another. They all lead back to each other at some point. They all effect the next area of life I will run into. It goes in a circle and at some point as I keep going around that circle, I will run back into whatever aspect of life I am dealing with at the present time. So for me, being a good Christian and following God’s word is at the top of my circle. It has to be. It is the most important thing in life and everything else feeds off of that. As I start around that circle I run into all these other aspects of life. Dad, husband, son, coach, principal, friend, uncle, son-in-law, brother-in-law, nephew, cousin, grandson, and whatever else is on that list. As I go through life and at some point I am all of these things, I will always get back to the top of the circle, being a Christian. There are days when I might encounter all of these in one day. I want to be the best I can at all of them. But they all have one thing in common, the top of the circle. GOD. All of these things are in the same circle and all have a common relationship.
Along the way it helps me if I take care of myself as well. This is just a small aspect of life and does not need to be my main focus, but I need to be active and do something physical just about every day to keep my mind and body as healthy as possible as well. I need to do this for a few different reasons, and the physical benefits are not the only reason. My wife and I get up around 5:00-5:30 every morning and do whatever workout we are doing at that time. Doing this makes a huge difference in my mental state. I am a better dad and husband among other things when I do this. I am more at peace when I do this. But perhaps all of these things are better because when I work out and take care of myself in that way, I follow that up with my morning Bible study and prayer time. That is why we get up so early. That gives us time after our workout to get our alone time with God before the kids get up. That is about the only time in our day that is quiet. That is crucial for me to keep my focus where it needs to be everyday. All of the other areas of life are really important. But I can’t neglect taking care of my body and mind or my attitude gets bad and everything else goes south too. This is because when I don’t get up early and do something physical in the mornings, I sometimes don’t get a Bible study or prayer time in because I am rushed to start the day and get where I have to be that day. When that happens that starts a downward spiral I have to work hard at to get out of. But when it does happen, I just have to remember what’s at the top of that circle. If God is not at the top of that circle, then things can get out of sorts. But when he is at the top and he is the main focus, everything else in life has a way of falling into place!!!
This may sound like a crazy idea to you and that’s ok. I encourage you to find whatever it is that works for you. Find whatever it is that motivates you and helps you to be the best you that you can be. If it is individual resolutions that help you to stay motivated and be better then that is great. Go with it. If you can have specific areas of focus and still be good at everything else, then you are better at that than I am. But to me they are all intertwined and I have to work hard at all of them to make any of them successful. My challenge to you this week is find your motivation. Find what works for you. Find what you need to do to be successful and do it. If you don’t have a plan then search for ideas and find what works for you. It may be a combination of different ideas from different people that you take and make our own. It may be precisely what someone else does. You may just come up with your own plan like I did that works for you. Any of these is perfectly fine. But just don’t get complacent with how things are. Don’t fall into the trap of that’s how it’s always been done or that everything is fine the way it is. I did that for awhile and I didn’t like where that was leading so I decided to make a change. I encourage everyone to find what works for them and to simply “Be Better”!!!