Catch our weekly newsletter here. Below is my blog on pivoting for growth.

Defeating Constructs

Kevon Looney was recruited by UCLA to be the next James Harden.

He was a quick, dribbling jump-shooter who could also drive the lane and defend larger wing players.

He entered high school at 6’3” and then grew four inches over four years.

He grew another inch at some point before he got to college, and that’s when things began to change.

He got injured as soon as he got to summer league.

His hips hadn’t caught up with his growth spurt.

He was pretty dominant for his one year in college and was picked by the Warriors, who planned to use him as a wing scorer and defender.

More bad news. Double hip surgery had him sitting around for almost two years with a couple of stutter starts.

The bad news was that he was no longer the quick-point forward the Warriors thought he was going to be.

His quickness was now hampered. His game had to change somehow, some way.

The good news is that he found the weight room.

What you see on the floor now is a player who was forced to break out of the mold that had made him a professional athlete.

He would never again be a basket-facing player on offense, and he would now need to learn the craft of paint warfare.

Luckily, he had phenomenal mentors like David West and Andrew Bogut, two of the best paint-protectors the NBA had ever seen.

Looney accepted his fate quickly and did everything he could on and off the court to make himself viable and carve out a place amongst the Juggernaut of a team we have all enjoyed watching over the past eight years.

Before the pandemic, I had my own constructs.

I was a business owner.

What I was told was that an owner creates systems which remove day-to-day operations from their plate, becoming procedures employees handle.

Then everything got turned upside down.

In a blink of an eye, I was working harder than I ever had, doing every thing from learning what Zoom was to carrying Airdynes up several flights of stairs to members’ bedrooms.

Slowly but surely, things have settled down over the last two years, and there are new realities.

I have grasped my purpose: what I am good at, what I find satisfaction in, and what the market allows me to do.

I coach, teach, motivate, and inspire.

I had been bound by constructs of what I thought I was striving to do, as opposed to what I was actually able to do.

Recently, I’ve been teaching a few classes here and there, and I’ve been coaching people on different platforms like The Playbook.

This has given me the freedom to let go of the constraints and constructs I’d bought into, as well as some sort of industry standards and expectations.

The constructs of a workout, be that reps and sets, or time and volume, mean almost nothing.

What I mean by that is that there is something that is supposed to happen when you begin your workout, meditation practice, aerobic session, or meal plan.

The intent of the structure is to create a change of some kind, but the reality is that the specific change you are hoping for might very well not be possible.

It could be hormonal, structural, or meteorological.

All that matters is that you recognize that the constructs are allowed to change and that you are allowed to make the rules to ensure that your desired change happens.

Kevon did it. I did it. You do it all the time.

Make sure you are using the resources available to you to make change happen.

You and your awareness that the journey is the goal are the most important part of that change.

~TJ