Confidence

            Recently I’ve been getting plenty of chances to play basketball. I love the sport and really enjoy playing it, but my skills (or lack thereof) sometimes leave me frustrated. Not that I’m terrible, but I haven’t played a ton of competitive basketball in my life. This past week I’ve learned how important confidence is on the court.

Earlier this week, I was playing in a game with one of my friends who first saw me play during my mission. For whatever reason, he came off of the mission with the impression that I was a really good outside shooter. Consequently, he gave me the ball a lot and was always encouraging me to shoot it. Inspired by his confidence, I was confident, and I shot a lot. Incredibly, the shots went in! I played very well and had a blast the entire time.

Contrasting that experience is the chance I had to play with another group of my friends. One of these friends was an All-state basketball player, and I didn’t even make the high school JV squad, so his opinion of my game perhaps wasn’t too high. We were playing on the same team, and there were a few times when he yelled at me after I made a bad play. Consequently, I started getting fearful, and instead of being confident in my skills, I doubted my own ability to make even the most basic shots. And this spiraled into a self-fulfilling prophecy, as I did indeed end up missing a ton of really wide-open and easy shots. My play could only be described as "terrible".

What this experience taught me is that confidence impacts performance. And I don’t think that principle is limited to basketball, or even sports in general. As we are confident in ourselves, we take more risks and we experiment. We will put our full effort into important decisions and actions. On the other hand, when we are fearful, we tend to pull back and withdraw when key opportunities arise. As the saying goes, “both he who says ‘I can’ and he who says ‘I can’t’ both end up right.” Thus it is important to always try to stay confident, and help others do the same. After seeing firsthand the value of confidence, I’m determined to try to do a better job to help those around me stay confident. Both of my friends had a big impact on my performance, and I’m determined to be that friend who compliments others and puts his trust in others, so that they can achieve their full potential.

An Outsider's Take

           To preface this post, I just want to be up front and say that I’m a person that likes to be right. I always want to have the right answer for a question, and I absolutely hate being wrong. While perhaps on the outside that looks like a good trait, by implication it usually means that I am also fairly proud. I like to find my own ways of doing things and I don’t usually go ask for help.     

This week I was given the opportunity to stretch out of that pride. I was given a difficult assignment in one of my classes, and after a couple of hours of working on it, I ended up stuck. It was frustrating place for me to be, but I swallowed my pride, and for the first time in my high school or college career, I decided to go into a TA lab and ask for help. I sat the TA down and opened up by journal to start peppering him with questions, only to be surprised to hear him refer me back to the instructions on the assignment. Lo and behold, there were the answers to 95% of my questions, sitting right in front of me. All I had needed was someone simply to say “look over the instructions again” and almost all of my problems were solved.

This experience, along with many others, has taught me the value of an outside opinion. There are so many times when in the pursuit of my own excellence, I tend to de-value the advice I receive from others. That’s a terrible idea. My mind only brings but one of many important perspectives to the table. I cannot possibly think of every single possibility for a situation, and consequently I need others to point out flaws that I overlook. There is so much power in the questions “what can I do better” and “what do you think I can improve?” When I ask those questions, information flows in ways that I never would have thought of. I discover a clearer picture of the truth, as well as valuable insight and perspective that points towards a better course of action.

I’m now determined to not let my pride slow me down any more. If I truly want to function at my best, it’s time to start asking more questions and acting a little more humbly. 

Persistence

For of those new to this blog, especially those from the MCOMM class, I say welcome. I’m Aaron Wilson. 

             For the last two years, I’ve been spending my time in the urban jungles of sunny Thailand, giving my heart and soul to the cause of helping the wonderful Thai people as an authorized representative of Jesus Christ. That experience has defined me in new ways that I never imagined. I tried very hard as a missionary to really throw myself into the missionary work and forget the world I left behind. I won’t make any claims to being a consecrated, great, or even a good missionary, but I do feel that I succeeded in forgetting a lot of the world that I left behind. How do I know that? Because coming home has left me feeling like a whale in the middle of the Sahara—lost, floundering, and utterly confused.

            I’m trying not to wax too poetical here, but for two years I spent every waking moment trying to hone a skill-set and a mind-set developed around the missionary’s purpose. And in a flash, most of the direct applications of the skills that I’d learned went obsolete. The ability to drive boldly in Thailand will only get me a ticket here. The ability to walk up to complete strangers and invite them to repent and be baptized is next to useless at BYU, which is perhaps the most LDS-saturated environment on the planet outside of the Conference Center. Suddenly another skill set is being demanded of me—the ability to read and write in English. I’m expected to have small-talk conversations, when all of my impulses tell me to start searching for people’s needs and try to find ways to help them repent. Apparently I also lost the ability to read a text, memorize the key meanings in it, and then regurgitate it on demand in a test settings. That one was shown rather painfully on the few quizzes I’ve taken.     

            Now I don’t say these things in an effort to earn sympathy. I fully know that there are millions of others who have walked this path of post-mission adjustment, and that I don’t have a corner on the market. And I will not for a minute stand for anyone even thinking that I feel bad about my decision to make a mission, just because the end of it was hard: I had the greatest time of my life and learned so many valuable things in Thailand. I wouldn’t trade that mission for the world. But I explain this background simply to frame a context with which I can explain what I learned this week, and how I’m going to apply it.

            My lesson can perhaps be best illustrated from the feelings I had as I sat down after getting systematically demolished on the BYU tennis courts this past week. I love tennis, and I’ve played competitively for a number of years. That night, however, all of my practice and skills seemed useless when my brother steamrolled me for an easy 6-0 victory for him. The frustrating part for me was that I had played the best tennis since I got home. It had felt like everything was clicking for me. I was hitting the ball hard and fast, and my accuracy was good, but yet somehow I had won pitifully few points and had looked like the middle school practice squad in comparison to my opponent. I was never even in serious contention for the match, not even for a second. The easiest way of saying it would be to say that my best simply was not good enough to compete.

            And so I sat down afterwards, and at that moment I was faced with a decision. I was in a sour mood after taking such a beat-down. It wasn’t a pleasant experience. The voice inside my brain was telling me that this wasn’t worth it, that it was time to walk off the court and go do something less painful. I knew at that moment that I’d have to go back to the basics and start re-learning tennis skills that I had once mastered long ago. The thought of that painful process made me bitter, for I thought I was cheated. Hadn’t my rustiness on the court come because I was doing something better? Should not all of my hard work before my mission and on my mission combined to allow me some free-pass on going through the growing pains all over again? And at that moment, the idea of just giving up and walking away from the court seemed mighty enticing. Why come back? I’m not being forced to play tennis. It’s not fun, so why not stop?

            That thought of quitting has not been companionless in my mind for several weeks. The thing that I’m learning about the rebuilding process is that it isn’t easy. In my mind, I had assumed that previous success in tennis, school, or any field would give me a short-cut in rebuilding my new life. The fact is that a house burned down still requires the same amount of labor to build it the second time as the first time did.

            As I reflect on that moment on the tennis court, I am reminded of President Uchtdorf’s words: “Our destiny is not determined by the number of times we stumble but by the number of times we rise up, dust ourselves off, and move forward.” The truth is that it will take more effort, discipline, and practice than I was expecting in order to get my tennis game back, just as it will require the same effort, discipline, and practice to succeed again in school, social settings, and whatever else that I’m lacking. But rather than get frustrated that my progress seems slow, or that I seem to be under-achieving in compared to what I used to be able to do, I’m choosing to take the positive viewpoint. I’ve succeeded once before; why I can’t I do again? I choose to build on the hope that comes from realizing that I’ve walked this road once before and conquered it, and so I am determined to do it again.

            Now this isn’t just a post for all the returned missionaries in the audience. But for everyone reading, we all have our different times when we feel that we underperform, that we fail to reach up to our personal expectations. When that moment comes, look not to the ‘failures’ of life, but instead choose to see everything as a chance to get better. Life is longer than we think, and eternity lasts forever, so there will always be another chance. It is never too late to be better. Don’t give up, because tomorrow will be better. As a wise friend once told me “the only way to fail is to stop trying”. So keep your eyes on a brighter tomorrow and keep hope that things will get better!

            For my part, I decided in that insightful moment to keep playing for another 40 minutes, in which I continued to get trashed by my competition, but I know that in so doing I’m now just a little better at tennis than I would have been had I quit. I walk away from this experience more resolved to never quit in all of my re-adjustment activities, and to work harder than ever before, because I know that quitting makes my weaknesses part of my future, and only continuing to strive harder makes them my past.