Controllables

by Ryan Krzykowski

Last week was crazy.  Coming off a six-day weekend for our school district (one snow day, two days off for parent conferences, followed by President’s Day on Monday), we proceeded to have classes canceled on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday because of snow and subzero temperatures.  Most of us don’t mind an unexpected day off, but to go ten days between work days was a bit much.  Honestly, I hated it.  I enjoy my job, and kept thinking about how it was going to be a pain to make up all that lost time.  That’s when my coaching training kicked in.  This is nowhere near a new idea — you’ve heard it 100 times at least.  But I could hear the voice in my head reminding me to “control the controllables”. 

So out of curiosity, just to see if I’d find anything helpful or useful, I decided to do a search for “control the controllables”.  This post popped up, and believe it or not, I really enjoyed it.  I learned things.  There’s a story about Jim Thorpe at the 1912 Olympics that somehow I’d never heard before.  Do you know this one?  About Thorpe breaking records that would last for decades while running in mismatched shoes he found in a trash can?  The post is geared toward soccer, but built around the stories was a short list of “things you can’t control”: your size, aspects of your situation, etc., that can be applied much more broadly than soccer.  It was well developed and a good read.  The post was written in May of 2020, so there are COVID references, but if you don’t mind revisiting that difficult time, there are some cool stories (despite the misspelling of Abby Wambach’s name in her World Cup anecdote).  Give it a look if you’ve got a minute, and remember to keep focusing on controlling the controllables.

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