This post is going to be less about sports and coaching and more about life in general.  But anything that applies to life in general certainly applies to sports and coaching.

Yesterday was Thanksgiving Day.  I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you took a little time to ponder all for which you are grateful.  In addition to celebrating and pausing to be thankful, I was able to watch a little bit of TV.  During the day, my sons and I watched a couple of the NFL games.  During those telecasts, I saw approximately 482 commercials encouraging me to save lots of money on Black Friday.  Of course the way for me to save all that money was to buy every cell phone, tablet, Lego set, Barbie doll, Christmas decoration, piece of clothing and automobile known to mankind.  The ads were all about me and how buying all those things and saving all that money were going to make me happy.

During the night I woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep, so I got up and put on the TV again.  I found one of the greatest movies ever, “The Shawshank Redemption”, and it had just started.  If I was going to have a crummy night’s sleep, Shawshank was about the best consolation prize I could have hoped for.  I didn’t know how much of the film I would make it through before falling asleep, but one of the last parts I remember clearly is the scene where Andy locks himself in the office and plays Mozart over the speakers for the entire prison population to hear.

The satisfied look on Andy’s face while experiencing the beauty of music from “Marriage of Figaro”, and sharing it with every other prisoner stood in sharp contrast to the noise of the Black Friday ads I’d taken in earlier in the day.  And as so often happens, it got me to thinking.  How often do I operate in Black Friday mode, in which my criteria for success are about my personal comfort, pleasure or happiness?  How often do I lead, parent or coach from that place of me-centeredness?  What would it look like to operate from a place of simply appreciating beauty or excellence, and to share that appreciation with others?   What would it look like if my definition of success had to do with helping others achieve levels of excellence and helping them create things that are beautiful, rather than what might be in it for me?

If Andy Dufresne was willing to spend 14 days in the hole for a few minutes of Mozart, simply enjoying beauty for beauty’s sake and the satisfaction of sharing it with others, what will it take for me to shake free from the me-first, materialistic, Black Friday view of the world?