“What do I have to do to get a rise out of you Shumway? Insult your parents?” That’s what my high school basketball coach yelled at me during practice my senior year. I was playing like crap, kept making mistakes, until finally he took me out of first string and put my teammate in.
I walked off the court to the sideline looking down at the floor. I was pissed but I didn’t show it. I knew I was playing badly and he thought subbing me out would get a reaction out of me. When it didn’t, he resorted to saying something absurd. I immediately burst into tears. His strategy was to jolt me back into reality, and it worked.
Now before you think this was an abusive coach, let me set the record straight. He was not. He never insulted my parents or me. Never ridiculed me for playing badly. He tried every tactic he could think of to get me out of my head and playing better. I respected him and I didn’t want to let him down.
What my coach could see but I couldn’t was that I was letting myself be less than my best. The mistakes I kept making made me seethe with anger and frustration. But you would never have known by the look on my face. I thought I was being strong and resilient by not showing any emotion, by not reacting when he took me out of first string. But I wasn’t being strong, I was being complacent. I was focusing on trying to suppress my feelings rather than use them to make a change.
What I learned from that experience was it’s ok to have an emotional reaction. Our emotions are signals that something needs to change. As long as we don’t let our emotions take over and control us, we can use them to better understand what we need – to be successful, happy, healthy.
This is a lesson I’ve had to learn many times. I have constantly battled to understand and master my emotions. And sometimes it takes being jolted out of my head to do that. The more I write and share my work online, the more I see that so many of you need this too.
When I look at how people are interacting online I am astounded by the amount of complacency. Passively liking and commenting on stuff that is utter garbage. You think you are engaging, but you’re just on autopilot. Is a post about a single use kitchen gadget really so revolutionary that it needs to be shared 50 times and liked 7500? Is that really all we are capable of? Is this how we make the world a better place?
On top of the complacency is a real fear of doing the hard work. Hard work takes time and effort. Sometimes hard work means you spend time thinking about something instead of just reacting. Some of the hardest work is disagreeing with what everyone thinks. Do you ever stop to think who is benefiting when you blindly feed the machine?
I’m guilty too. We all are. And I’m not saying there isn’t a time and place for funny, innocuous things online. But I think most of us need to be jolted out of this waking slumber that we’re trapped in. What are you suppressing in order to appear one way? Rather, what are you contributing, by not contributing your own hard work?
Maybe that’s a scary prospect to you, and it should be. Because it makes you vulnerable. You can’t hide behind emojis and reactions and platitudes. No one wants to rock the boat because it makes us feel unstable. We risk getting wet.
Every time I share something online I know that there is a chance no one will read it. That no one will care. But I do it anyway. Because I know it’s necessary to ask myself “what do I have to do to get a reaction out of you Shumway?” just like my coach did all those years ago. Because if I don’t, who will? I don’t want to be complacent. Passive consumption ends up consuming you.
Ask yourself, how do you want to live? Who do you want to be? How do you really feel? Are you riding along with whatever social media feeds you or are you jolting yourself into doing something real?
