Monday Mindset
– an uncommon approach to school, sports, and life –

To thrive in these challenging times, we all need the right mindset.

That’s why we’re starting the first of our Monday Mindset series — to help you develop the mindset of a champion in every aspect of life.

Each Monday Mindset will be applicable to you, regardless of whether you are a parent, player, or coach.

I hope you enjoy them and they help you to have an extraordinary year.

– Mano

Today’s Monday Mindset: Embrace the Struggle

Embrace the struggle, no matter your age, no matter your vocation.

Every one of us experiences struggles. Some big, some small, and it’s so easy to try and push off the struggle, to try and avoid it all together instead of embracing it.

The fact of the matter is struggle will either develop you or it’ll destroy. It’ll develop you or it’ll destroy you.

Whether it’s marriage, parenting, finances, your athletic career, your work career, your health, we all experience struggles of many kinds.

And one of the things we so often experience is we experience this sense that we’re the only person going through what we’re going through.

I remember the struggles in my basketball career of not getting as much playing time that I wanted, not feeling like I was improving as much as I thought I should, not getting the recognition that I thought I needed to be able to play college or university basketball.

There were so many different struggles I experienced throughout my career. And one of the things I had to learn to accept and to even embrace was to embrace the struggle.

No team ever wins a championship without struggle. I’ve never heard it, you’ll never hear it, you’ll never see it – a team wins the championship and says it was easy.

No. What do they say? They say, you have no idea what we had to overcome. You have no idea what we had to overcome because every championship team overcomes some level of setback, adversity, failure, or struggle, and the teams and the players that learn to embrace the struggle are the ones who come out victorious.

Your struggle will either develop you and make you better, or it’ll destroy you and break you apart. And we see that happen in marriages all the time, where the struggle. And if you do life with somebody else closely enough you’ll experience struggle. You’ll see their shortcomings, they’ll see yours. Those struggles can develop you or they can destroy you and it requires making the choice to embrace the struggle.

I think in our culture today, we try and put off or try and avoid difficult things and difficult challenges. You know, hundreds of years ago of people embraced, going to new lands with all sorts of challenges that they were going to take on. But in today’s day and age, a lot of times we avoid struggles altogether.

I think when we learn and discover that we can embrace them because they’re part of molding us, they’re part of shaping us into who we become, they give us courage, they develop our resiliency, our grit.

And in fact, Angela Duckworth, a researcher, discovered that word grit is the number one key to a young person’s success. We have to develop grit.

How do you develop grit? You don’t develop grit by progress. You don’t develop grit through successes. You develop grit through struggle, and that’s why we actually need struggle.

So I’ve learned how to see the struggles in my life as actually opportunities, opportunities to grow, opportunities, to exhibit courage, determination, resiliency.

And so my challenge to you today is to take a different look, maybe even a new look at the struggles you’re going through, whatever they may be, and to recognize that you’re not the only person going through those struggles. There’s probably thousands, maybe even millions, who’ve experienced the same set of circumstances as you’re experiencing and they found a way to make it work.

They found a way to succeed and you can too – it starts with embracing the struggle.