Making the decision to stop coaching didn’t only free up hours in the day for me.
When one part of your life is on autopilot, then there are other parts of your life that are also on autopilot as a result. And you don’t necessarily even realize it.
Once I became accessible to my family at night, there was a domino effect. Things we had never even considered before because there was just no way we could swing it when I was tied up every night coaching were now options that became available to us.
Impossibilities became possibilities.
And so we made another big decision, and we transferred to a new swim team.
To the non-swimmer, this may not seem like a big deal. But in the swimming community, this was definitely a very big deal. And it was a shock to the team I had been coaching for and the team the kids had been swimming on for six years.
It was not well received by many people.
There were literal What the Fucks? and You are making a huge mistake and then there are people who have stopped talking to me completely. The kids have dealt with comments from friends that are pretty brutal.
I get it. Their friends don’t understand. Adults take this decision we’ve made personally. But it’s not about other people. It’s simply about our family and what works best for us.
And I am finally reaching the stage of my life where I feel comfortable making decisions for myself and my family that may not be understood by other people.
And that’s okay.
Because as I sit here at the pool of our new team, not coaching, not feeling pressure, and not feeling unhappy, I am able to devote time to the things I really enjoy and that I think will benefit my family more that what I’ve been doing up until now. I have more time to devote to my business.
And I kind of wish I’d made this decision a long time ago.
But you know what they say about hindsight.
And I think I needed to learn a few lessons these last few years in order to see the path I am meant to take.
There are no guarantees. At some point this could end up not working for us.
Who knows!
But right now the kids are happy. Really happy.
I know because I am glancing up every once in a while and watching them swim while I write this blog post. Which is, as cheesy as it sounds, heavenly for me. I am so grateful to have this time that they are swimming now to focus on other things.
Taking a risk and moving outside your comfort zone, acknowledging the NOT THIS and then making a change is a risk. You don’t know what to expect, and you don’t know how it will work.
I coulda stayed uncomfortably comfortable.
But boy am I glad I didn’t.
Because I feel like this is just the beginning of the good stuff.
It is amazing as we age how the things we thought were most important in life begin to shift. I think the best part is that as we get older we can reach a point where we are able to make decisions for our family and not care what others think. It is kind of like we revert back to those things that were the most important when we began our marriages and families.
It is a full circle thing. Thank you for sharing.