Are You a Motivator or a Well-Meaning Bully?
How to motivate people without being a jerk.
Once upon a time, I was a 7th grader on my middle school football team, and all I wanted was to play quarterback.
I’d always wanted to be a star athlete — the center of attention (yes, I’m a Leo) — and football seemed like the perfect place for me to showcase my skills. There were just two problems:
- My football coach had decided that I was going to be the team’s 5th string safety instead of the star quarterback.
- I was painfully shy and terrified of my coach.
I was terrified of my coach because he was a big, gruff man who cussed a lot, punished us with a lot of burpees, and was trying to “turn us into men” (there was lots of name-calling in his “coaching methods”, if you catch my drift). He was trying to motivate us to become better athletes, but all he did for me was make me even more anxious, even shyer, and incredibly uncomfortable on the football field.
I didn’t gel with his “motivation”, and I thought that that meant that I just wasn’t tough enough to play football.
12 years later, I’ve won a world championship in a combat sport, and I’m nearly a black belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. I’ve sparred with UFC fighters, world-class athletes, and…
