Strong Enough to Stay the Course

Have you ever been tempted to give up because improvement was occurring too slowly to see?

We are conditioned to measure progress by outcomes. Did we win? Did we reach the goal?

Did our efforts produce the results we expected?

Those questions matter, but they can cause us to overlook the growth occurring along the way. Sometimes the final result is the last evidence that progress is taking place.

I have had the pleasure of coaching more than eighty teams as my children grew up. They wanted to play with their friends, many of whom were not great athletes.

Some of those teams lost—a lot.

We had winless seasons in which we gave up plenty of goals and rarely scored any of our own. Some weeks, the brightest moment was the snack after the game.

It would have been easy for the players to become discouraged. It would have been understandable for parents to find other teams, and no one would have blamed us for lowering our expectations.

Instead, we kept working.

We practiced the fundamentals. We highlighted the improvements the players were making.

We celebrated a good pass, better positioning, a strong defensive play, or simply remaining competitive a little longer than we had the week before.

The progress did not appear all at once.

The following year, the games became closer. The year after that, we won a few. Several years later, many of those same players competed for a championship.

We did not win it, but that hardly mattered.

The team had become more than the sum of its parts. Players who had once struggled to score a goal had learned to trust one another, remain committed, and compete together. We could have given up at any point, but very few players left along the way.

None of them became world-class athletes. Yet I suspect they will remember what they accomplished together long after they have forgotten the scores.

Surely, I needed to be patient. More importantly, so did they.

They learned that progress does not always announce itself with a victory. Sometimes it appears in small improvements that are easy to overlook. Patience gave them the time to develop, but perseverance ensured that they continued doing the work.

That may be the most important lesson from Patience Week.

Patience is not the absence of action. It is the strength to act at the right time, in the right way, and for the right reasons. It allows us to slow down before making an impetuous decision, listen long enough to hear the entire story, give people time to develop, and continue working when the results have not yet arrived.

REFLECTION QUESTIONS

Where are you becoming discouraged because your progress seems too slow?
What small improvements might you be overlooking because you are focused only on the final result?

CHALLENGE

Give yourself and those you lead the time to grow. Recognize the progress, continue practicing the fundamentals, and remain strong enough to stay the course.
Time and patience are powerful warriors—but only when we continue doing the work.