Remember that Jon Gordon tells us, "Feeling is much more powerful than hearing." Do our players have a special feeling about the lessons or are they just hearing them?
Events transform our lives, but our opportunity arises to transform our players' experiences. Do we choose to effect change or just watch?
There's much to be learned in analyzing her address. I'm providing "Cliff Notes" for those who can't spare twenty-five minutes to listen.
Sandberg makes it personal (family experience). She sprinkles humor into her speech. She connects with her audience emotionally through her personal suffering. She introduces the direct wisdom of Martin Seligman and indirectly references Catholic author Matthew Kelly. She shares herself.
Sandberg connects with her audience in other means, understanding failure, relationships, and cultural literacy. She conveys a critical series of message, "You will be defined not by what you achieve but by how you survive."
Personalization, the belief that we at are fault. "Not everything that happens to us happens because of us." Coach Popovich would say to find players who are "over themselves."
Pervasiveness. "There's nowhere to hide from the all-consuming sadness." We have to dissociate other aspects of our life from the tragic ones.
Permanence. This will never end. Loss and struggle feel interminable. But they will end.
She encourages students to learn these dimensions of suffering while young. She didn't introduce Viktor Frankl's messages from "Man's Search for Meaning", that however good we are at relationships and work, few of us excel at suffering.
"Finding gratitude and appreciation are the keys to resilience." She writes down three moments of joy before going to bed.
She asks students to grasp rhetorically how precious each day is when we don't know how long we have to live.
She asks students to build resilient organizations and to speak up when they see problems. As coaches, we have a chance to fix things that are broken. Why wouldn't we?
