Day 70 (No mo)…

When I got into coaching in the late ‘80s, I had one assistant and a roster of about eighty female rowers.  I worked five to seven hours a day, six days a week, nine months a year.  When I left coaching in 2020 my program had four assistant coaches, a director of operations, a full-time athletic trainer, as well as the support of two strength coaches and an academic advisor.  An average workday was between ten and fourteen hours, six to seven days a week, twelve months a year, for a roster of about eighty female rowers.

I was blessed to be engaged in a pursuit that spoke to my soul.  I felt deep purpose in my work.  I’ve seen the same thing in business leaders and entrepreneurs who are chasing their OPUS.  It’s a blessing and it can also be a curse.  As a coach in a team practice last week bemoaned while discussing the workload dilemma…”where do you draw the line?”

This is why building your strong CORE and authoring your authentic OPUS are so essential if you are going to be a master in work AND life.  It’s also why they are always works in progress.  We live in a society that values money over meaning and takes productivity as the measure of progress.  It’s easy to get caught in the “do more’” trap.  

Don’t confuse doing more with being more.  Being more is about mastery.  Mastering your craft, yourself, the life you live… that’s the “more’” you are looking for. The more you master, the more people will want from you, and that’s when you’ll have to start saying “no more”.

The beautiful thing about “no more” is that it creates the space for someone else to start to gain some mastery.  When you pass what you have attracted on to others, their practice can begin, deepen, or expand.  Now your “no more” has not only created more time for you, it has created an opportunity for more mastery for those on your team.

So the next time you look at your schedule and realize you don’t have more for the people that really matter, give yourself and a teammate a gift.  Say no more and pass it along.  You’ll have more fuel in your tank and you’ll probably be putting some into another’s as well.