Everything Wrong

Alright, I’m at my weekly Home Depot meeting while I’m writing this right now. Earlier this morning, at 5 AM, I had my first swim lesson to prepare for the Ironman marathon. I’ve been swimming for a couple of years now. Ever since I had my third knee surgery–and I couldn’t take it as hard on my knees–I started swimming at the gym just so I could get some cardio in and not pound on my knee so much.

I went for my first lesson today. When it started off, my coach was like, “I’m just going to have you swim. Just do your thing, swim a few laps. I’m going to record you on video.” He picked up his little iPad and continued, “And show you how you did and what you did right and what you did wrong.”

At the end of it, he told me I did nothing correct–those were his words to me. He was like, “Basically, you are doing everything wrong so we’re going to have to fix everything.” I had told him before our first meeting that I was a pretty decent swimmer–or so I had thought. That really, really just drives home the point of why coaching and mentorship is so incredibly powerful.

Within the hour and a half session I had with him, my coach went through things I never knew because we can’t know what we don’t know; and we can’t know what we haven’t experienced before. I’ve never had a swim lesson before in my life. Through his coaching and mentoring, he’s giving me things to do and work on so I could improve. Just in the three or four lessons I had with him, I was able to leverage his years of experience through coaching and collapsed time to speed up results.

He has years and years–literally decades. This guy’s written books about swimming–first, second, third editions on swim lessons. The short lessons I had with him paid off immensely in a short period of time.

Anyways, my message to you guys is you should not overvalue what you know if you learned it yourself without verifying and seeking the guidance of mentorship. You can speed up the learning curve and talk to coaches who’ve been there and have done the things that you’re seeking to accomplish. Seek counsel and wisdom into areas in which you are seeking to grow and expand.

I definitely needed help with my swimming, so lessons were in order. That was a very valuable lesson, not only in swimming, but for other areas in my life about the impact of good coaching, good mentorship from someone who’s been there and has done that. He was able to look at me from a bird’s eye view and see what I was doing wrong and tell me what I needed to do. Plus, show me how to correct so I can speed up time to get the results you want to get so much quicker.

Anyways, that’s my message for today. Hope you all enjoyed it.