The Hockey Player
The conference I attended a few weeks ago was called A View From The Edge. While it was sponsored by my insurance company, this event was primarily run by a guest speaker. Marc Accetta is a world-renowned network marketing expert who has spent his career helping teams grow. One of his niche training styles is a series of characters that he has designed to further illustrate his message. A View From The Edge is a weekend event packed with a bunch of these characters.
This was my first time attending this kind of event, and there were no repeated characters from when he did this event the previous year for the company. That is, except for one, which rumor has it is at every event of this type that he does. It was definitely my favorite and the one that left me with the most digging to do in my life. This character was titled The Hockey Player.
So let's set the scene: Marc Accetta comes out on stage in full hockey gear on rollerblades (it's way too complicated to make an ice rink on stage). He's skating around a bunch of hockey pucks and starts hitting them into the net on the other side of the stage. It's not a very big stage, so he doesn't have to hit far, and almost all of his shots go in.
The analogy is that we are hitting our activity to achieve our dreams. We know what steps we need to take to achieve a goal. By putting all the pieces together, we can shoot for our dreams with pretty good confidence that we'll make it. Sure, we might struggle with shooting initially, but we can be quite confident that if we keep working at it, we'll achieve our dreams. We can keep making our shots one by one until all our dreams come true.
That is until the goalie steps into the ring. At this point, the CEO's son steps out in front of the net. Now, this isn't just any old person playing the goalie. Spencer played elite-level hockey for most of his life as a goalie. He's a professional at the game and the position of blocking every pass that comes his way.
Marc tries his best to keep shooting for his dream, but the goalie blocks every shot. It's the first time he couldn't get a shot past the goalie, and if there weren't time constraints on the event, I'm pretty confident he would have kept trying throughout the night. But here's the point: we all have dreams, and we all have goalies, but the fact that there is a goalie in the net does not mean we quit trying. It means that we have to be diligent and creative.
On Friday, we talked about the border bullies that we may encounter on the path to achieving a dream. Those can certainly be the goalies that we find in our net. We can also see our self-doubt and fear standing there in uniform. Or we can have unchanging aspects of our lives that block our simple path forward.
Sometimes, we can shrink the goalie down, like by avoiding draining conversations or figuring out how to conquer our fears. We can grow our self-confidence to minimize the doubt. It doesn't mean that every shot will go in or that the goalie won't trip us up anymore. It just means we have a better shot at making it.
We can't change some of our goalies, though. What I realized through this exercise was that the military is a goalie to our dreams. And we can't move that goalie. We can't shrink it down, and we must live with the fact that sometimes it will feel bigger than the net.
So, if the goalie is unmovable, what do we do? We have to get creative with the shots we take, and we have to take more shots than ever because we know something will go in. When watching hockey games, the goalie usually overpowers the net. I look at it and think that it's impossible to get the puck past them when there is such little space to wiggle around. Compare that to a soccer goal, where it feels almost impossible to stop the ball from going in since there is so much space to cover. But we only have to watch a few minutes of hockey to realize that the puck makes it into the net all the time. Even when there are professionals in the goal, the other team scores.
Being creative with our dreams means taking a non-traditional approach, redefining what success looks like, and accepting the detours that we may have to take. And the reality is that nothing beats diligence when it comes to our dreams. If we keep showing up on the ice and taking shots, one of them will go in. It may not look the same as we thought it would when we first had this dream, but it's unlikely it would anyway.
Regardless of what goalie people are facing in their net, the dream will usually look different at realization than when it was started. My wedding didn't look anything like the Pinterest board of ideas that I created in high school. That doesn't change the fact that my dream was to get married. Vacationing with someone who is more interested in seeing the sites than lounging poolside doesn't change my dream of seeing the world. My dream house is significantly bigger than the one I live in, but that doesn't change the fact that I've achieved my dream of owning a home. The other variations of those dreams may still come true, but the reality of dream chasing is that we are pursuing the core of the dream, not necessarily the outfit it wears when we catch it.
Everyone chasing a dream is dealing with a goalie. Most of us have a bench full of goalies waiting their turn. We may defeat our self-doubt, only for a PCS to pop up. We may overcome childcare issues just in time for the next deployment to throw everything off track. And yeah, we can get mad when the goalie bats away our perfect shot, but we have to keep showing up and trying again. It's our only option because the alternative is walking away from the game. So, I would encourage us all to figure out who is sitting in the net and who we can get out of the game. We won't be able to eliminate all of our goalies, but when we know who is blocking, we can get better at taking the shots that land.