I remember sitting in a Nashville Starbucks on New Year’s Day writing this blog, Staff Development, after our annual friends trip. Half of my friend group is from Florida and the other half is in North Carolina. Taylor and I now live in Tennessee, so these friends trips are always exciting for us to catch up and have a great time. We planned this trip in July and we were all really looking forward to it. When we get there, something just doesn’t feel right. No one could get on the same page as what we wanted to do with our time there. Was it that we were growing apart? I don’t think so. We are all in our late 20’s and making the change to adulthood in different manners.The trip was planned with our friends from college, which made it tough to decide if we were going to spend the trip partying like we did in college, or to move on from that lifestyle and find other ways to have a good time. I was never one for New Years resolutions but after this trip, I knew I needed to put the college lifestyle behind me. This was the inspiration for the “Staff Development” blog. Little did I know what type of year 2020 would be when I wrote this. I wanted to revisit this for two reasons. I want to talk about where I succeeded and where I failed. The second reason was to talk about the one year mark of seeing one of my closest friends, Eric Kalbfleisch. 

Let’s start with a failure. This past year was a real tough one for my sleep routine. Spending so much time in the house and not being able to coach took a toll on my motivation to get out of bed. I have never been great at waking up, and that’s because everything that I do throughout my day can be done later. The second you open your eyes is the easiest time of day to start making excuses and I was really good at this during quarantine. This is where my friend Eric comes in. He told me about his new routine in which he wakes up at 4am and goes to bed around 8pm. I thought this was silly and brushed it off. When he recently came to our house, I saw a new person. I saw that this routine was more about the daily pursuit of becoming a better person rather than just saying he “grinds” at 4am. I have been trying to get up extremely early for years, but the purpose was never behind it. Eric’s purpose was inspiring and I’ve come up with a new solution. #walkandlisten. The inspiration for this comes from multiple people that I look up to. The first one is Cory Gregory. Cory does #lungeandlearn where he goes to a track and does 400 to 800 meters of lunges while listening to some educational piece. This lined up well with me, but the lunges were not attainable with my fitness level yet. Then you have Tyer Gillum who does #coffeeandthoughts. This is where Tyler takes time in the morning to drink coffee, read, and then post a thought in the morning. This lined up with my goals as well, especially getting on a regular posting schedule. The last one I will mention is from Dana Santas and she has coined #walkeverydamnday. Dana is trying to spread the word that walking is the most accessible, underrated, fat-burning, corrective and mind-body exercises available. I completely agree with this- but I add listening to podcasts and audiobooks to make it even more beneficial. The combination of seeing my friend Eric build purpose with his morning routine, and all of the people’s routines listed above, I came up with #walkandlisten. 

A success of mine was starting to run, read, use a health monitor and also a checklist. I recently wrote about the benefits of health monitors here, Fitness and Sleep Trackers for Performance. If you go back to the “staff development” blog you will see that I made a checklist and had a goal to run a mile a day. This was probably one of the biggest turning points in my adult life. When I wrote this checklist a year ago, I had no idea about the benefits of a checklist and running. I had not run distance consistently since my senior year of high school. I had stopped because long distance running was not beneficial to my baseball performance. Once done with playing, I never saw it as a viable option for working out. This became a problem as I started to add on the pounds after my playing career. I always saw running as a terrible way to keep the pounds off. It wasn’t until the middle of this summer that I found out the other benefits behind it. I was very lethargic from being in the house for months and just got up one day to go for a run. Boy, was that miserable. I then asked myself a question that got me into gear. What type of Strength & CONDITIONING coach am I if I struggled to run a mile. I got to running and started feeling the benefits in keeping my weight down and something else I didn’t expect, my mind. I also had no idea how beneficial a checklist could be. I read “The Checklist Manifesto” by Atul Gawande. It changed my life and I will never go on without using some sort of checklist. Now how did all of this become so important to me? Reading. I listened to more books than I have in my entire life. I might have flaked off from using health monitors and running but I found more reasons why I needed to do these things through reading. 

As you can see, there were more positives that came out of 2020 for me than negatives (besides that our season was cancelled) and I have quarantine to thank for that. I took advantage of the down time and loaded up on knowledge. Now 2021 will be where I can start applying this knowledge for the rest of my life. Obtaining knowledge is a big part of having a successful life but it doesn’t mean anything unless you put it into action. New years this year was different because of Covid-19 for sure, but it was different for me because it was a sign that I was growing up. I encourage you to listen to this podcast that I recorded with Eric while he was here. If this was the last new year, I don’t think we could have any conversation that would be constructive for others. To sum it all up, 2019 set me in the right direction, 2020 showed me that I know the path and 2021 and beyond will execute this path. I believe that life is too complex to worry about the small stuff. I may not get the followers or money if I were to tell you about the mechanics of the swing, but that’s not what I’m worried about. Connecting the Dots Baseball will be here for years to come to figure out how to be the best version of yourself through my journey of baseball.