The More Good Days than Bad Days Principle

There are seven days in a week, about 30 days in a month, and 365 days in a year.  

Not all of those can be good days.  No one has 7 perfectly good days.  Likewise, I've never gone through an entire year without a single bad day.  

I have two reactions to that:

• The first reaction is the whole "control what you can control" thing.  You can control your effort and your attitude.  And that's absolutely true.  But sometimes a day is so bad that no amount of effort or attitude will fix it.
• The second reaction is that, in any given week, if you have 4 good days and 3 bad days, you're still winning.  Even if you have a few "meh" days, but the good ones are still outnumbering the rough ones, I think we're in a good place.

The same goes for our practices with our little leaguers.  We've had some truly rough and awful practices.  The coach's didn't show up with patience, the kids didn't show up with their attention spans, and it was already an "off" day.  

That's ... okay.

It really is.  

Bad practices will come and go. There is no magical list of drills or speeches that can eliminate bad practices.  They'll happen, in fact, even on a day when that you're rolling out a fun, new drill.  

The key?  Acknowledge the bad days for what they are with your teams and your players.  Acknowledge that we just didn't "have it" that day.  Talk, when that attention span is back, about whether we're still on pace to meet our goals.  

And for coach's, it's a matter of not taking that rough practice personally.  Sometimes you had nothing to do with it; you just happened to be there.  Practice some patience with your teams and if a practice is going truly awful, then break up the whole practice by doing something completely unexpected.  Have a basketball court near you?  Hopefully someone has a ball and you just play basketball.  Run relays.  Do anything else that changes the context.

Good luck.