Good job pitching.

My 12-year old son plays baseball.

His team is not good. He isn’t very skilled, and yet he really enjoys playing with the other boys on his team. Go figure. There was a game on Wednesday, and he started as pitcher. It was rough. ROUGH. I felt so badly for him, and was praying things would improve.

They didn’t.

As we left the game, one of his coaches turned to my son and said,

“Good job pitching, Tucker.”

Wow.

As we walked to the car, Tucker talked about how badly he had pitched. It was really awful. Then he told me he didn’t think he should pitch anymore. Maybe…but I told him I thought he just needed more practice. ☺️ Our conversation moved on and we drove home.

Yet I haven’t been able to forget the coach’s parting words to Tucker. Good job pitching. Truthfully, he didn’t have to say anything to him. Everyone witnessed the disastrous first inning. But those three words were much more than words—they were acknowledgment of doing something HARD, again and again. Tucker didn’t quit, although he said he wanted to run off the mound and out of the game completely. Those words offered encouragement for a young boy who had done his best and his best wasn’t very good.

Good job pitching.

I often write about being confident, and not caring about the opinions of others. What other people think or say about you is none of your business. You don’t have to take on the labels that other people give you.

I still believe that.

However, let’s be the other people for a second.

What kind of person are you?

You may be a teacher, leader, parent, coach, instructor, mentor—whatever. YOUR WORDS MATTER. Mean and ugly creates more mean and ugly. The people in your influence should not have to succeed in spite of you. Nobody has ever reached goals or improved in anything by being beaten down.

NOBODY.

A little perspective can help, I think. Most of us are just normal people trying our best. And our best is really bad, a lot of the time. Truly, Olympians are rare. So maybe calm down a bit. Stop beating the people in your circles down.

Just stop.