You can take that to the bank.
“You want a dopamine hit that will hit harder than any food, drug, alcohol, status, net worth, material item, or social media validation?
Go be a difference maker in a young persons life. An intentional difference maker.
There’s not a thing on this earth as ‘cool’’ as that.”
-Ray Zingler on X
“Mentors are not perfect, just wiser from failure and humbled by success. Look around and ask The Lord to lead you to a young person who may be drifting in the wrong direction. Reach out to that young person. By doing so, you will have returned the favor to someone who loved you.” -Boyd Bailey
I’m 33 years old and have been blessed to be able to work with young people every day of my life since I was 18. Or said differently, since I was “young people”.
At first, I was extremely hyper focused on “my” trade, “my” end of the deal.
The science. The training. The exercise selection. The set & rep schemes. The KPI’s. The data. The analytics. All my “stuff” so that I could prove to you that “my stuff” worked.
And because of the focus on myself, I missed the whole point of what I was actually doing.
As much as the aspects mentioned above are extremely important, they aren’t the point.
They are simply the base level requirements I must, and I believe anyone leading, guiding, and mentoring kids must have regardless of the field.
These should be the prerequisites to earn even the mere opportunity to influence kids, but in our current world, our standards are piss low. Just look at what is “acceptable” in our public and private arenas. Topic for a different post, though.
Eventually I came to find out that while my (developing) skillset was important, the point of what I was doing was about them, not me.
I learned my kids didn’t care about hip angles, front squats or back squats, or any of the micro “training details”.
They and their parents cared about how I made them feel. How I impacted them. How I influenced their current and future decision making.
And once I realized this, I shifted the focus from “training them from the neck down” to “mentoring them from the neck up”.
Because once you realize it’s a game of “mentoring from the neck up” you reveal the purpose of life.
I’ve been doing this a lot of years and can tell you with certainty:
There is nothing, and I mean NOTHING more gratifying than making an intentional difference in the life of a young person.
