What is Your Victory Today?

By Laura Dixon, PhD 

Published March 25, 2021

 

Here’s a true story.  When I was a teenager I wanted, like any teenager, to be liked and to look cool.  I suppose that hasn’t changed much.  If I’m honest I still want to be liked and to be cool. While I was in high school we had a new coach who wanted to start a basketball program.  She had played and coached basketball at the college level before moving to our town.  She somehow convinced me to be a part of this new team.  Now you have to understand something at this point.  I didn’t know how to play basketball… most of us didn’t.

We started with the basics.  How to dribble, pass, and shoot.  During this time the football boys who had practice before us didn’t go home after practice, no they all came into the gym and lined up on the stage to watch us!!! So here we all are trying to figure out how to make this stupid ball go where we wanted it to go and they were really enjoying the show.  Now coach for some unknown reason decided that I needed to be point guard. If you are unaware of what point guard is, they get the ball down the court…. they have to be really good at dribbling…… I WAS NOT GOOD AT DRIBBLING. So in order to help me learn to dribble my coach gave me some help!!! She put blinders on me so that I could not see my hands. Let me reiterate, this was not fun for me.  As you might imagine I did not look cool. But I stuck it out and I’m glad I did.

Why do I share this?  Well I don’t know if you have ever felt like you are a bumbling idiot, or have been asked to do something that you don’t think you can do. Maybe you are the first person in your family to attend college.  Maybe you feel like you have to perform as well as an older sibling or parent.  College is hard, relationships can be hard, life can be hard. It might feel like you have blinders on and there are others mocking you from the sidelines.  And so it was with my basketball experience. I had to meet myself where I was.  It was pretty sloppy and scary at first! I practiced and got better, but not quickly. I tried hard not to listen to the football players mocking me.  We won some games and lost some.  On the way to becoming a decent basketball player and really enjoying the sport, I learned some things.

There is one game in particular that stands out to me even now.   We played our hearts out and it came down to the last minutes of the game.  We fought to get the ball back in order to score the final basket that would change the game and in the last seconds of the game the other team missed a crucial foul shot and we gained possession of the ball.  We had a chance.  With seconds left on the clock Coach quickly called time out and we huddled to make a plan.  In those last few seconds we executed that plan and my team mate threw up a shot. As the buzzer went off, it went in. We scored.  Coach jumped off the bench and we all began jumping up and down.  We were ecstatic!

The final score of that game was 59 to 21.  We scored 21.  Now I’m just going to let you absorb that for a moment.  You might be wondering if I actually DO know how to play basketball.  I do, and I do know that the high score wins.  What you don’t know is what happened before that game.  Coach talked with us about what “our” victory would look like that night.  We chose to meet ourselves where we were.  Together we set the goal to keep them under 60 and score at least 20. For us, against that team, that was a very big challenge. We played hard.  That was the closest game we had played in a long time and it WAS a victory.  We were proud of what we had done that night.  In talking with my coach many years later, I asked if she remembered that game. (She’s had a lot of state championship teams since then.)  Her response was “Yes I remember that game. It’s my all-time favorite WIN!!!!!!”

While that’s a silly story about playing a game of basketball, I also think stories and metaphors can have power to help us see, think about, and feel things in new ways.

What if, just what if, you could decide to meet yourself where you are right now and really be okay with that as a starting place for you?  Jon Kabat-Zinn said “If we hope to go anywhere or develop ourselves in any way, we can only step from where we are standing. If we don't really know where we are standing... We may only go in circles...”*

What if you decided to create your own plan and take your own steps? Rather than the ones you think others want or expect.  What if you decide to celebrate your own victories? Even accepting victories that might not look like victories to others. I don’t want you to miss those wins, because they feel great!!

Often in our efforts to move forward, our biggest critics are inside our own heads.  That is where you might find the most mocking.  Yet we ultimately get to decide to learn to play or not, whether they are there mocking or not.  There is a metaphor used by ACT therapists that relates our thoughts and feelings as passengers on our bus.  We can’t necessarily choose whether passengers get on and off our bus.  What we do get to decide is where we move toward.  What our values and goals are, and what constitutes victories on the way for us.

I suppose in the end I hope you can work toward playing your own game and beginning to notice your own victories, especially the seemingly small ones, every day.  It’s work and it’s worth it!

 

*Kabat-Zinn, J. (1994). Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life. Hachette Books, NYC. isbn:1401307787