I started playing soccer when I was in third grade. By today’s standards I started late but I quickly grew to love the game and it became my favorite sport to play. I made tremendous improvements over the next several years, but my strengths really centered around my speed and endurance and not as much around my footwork and touch. This continued into the early stages of my high school career where I continued to lean very heavily on these specific talents which was limiting my ability to grow as a player.

After my sophomore year of high school, we got a new high school soccer coach. He really focused on the basics such as dribbling, passing and learning to move to space to create a team of well rounded players. He started every practice with juggling. For those of you not well acclimated to the sport, its not juggling like the circus. This exercise is around using your feet, knees, chest and head to control the ball in the air without it hitting the ground. At the start of every practice, all the players would keep track of how many touches they could maintain before hitting the ground. I was not very good, when we started this exercise I would hover around 5-10 touches before the ball hit the grass. It was extremely frustrating, mainly because I didn’t historically work or prioritize this area of my game. Over time as I continued to work at it, I got better and much more comfortable at developing the right touch to keep the ball in control and within my reach. I eventually set the team record for that year of well over 220 touches before hitting the ground. I put a necessary focus on developing my skills this area, but still needed to train the other areas of importance such as building endurance, being a good teammate and studying the opponents game plan. In order for me to improve to become a better all around player I needed to overinvest within an certain area, even if it meant taking time away from other areas of my game for a period of time.

Nowadays, I wrestle with the constant battle of limited time and energy to invest in all the areas of my life such as being a father, a husband, a business leader and being part of the community. I consider myself a perfectionist and highly driven to succeed. The only problem is it’s physically and mentally impossible to overperform in all areas of life every day. I have to constantly remind myself, much like the days I was a high school soccer player, that we all have areas of improvement and investing time in that weakness does not indicate you have “taken your eye off the ball.”

Leadership Takeaways:

1. You need to understand that your emotional and intellectual capital is limited. As a result, this sometimes means one area of your life may be operating at a deficit. Once I realized I had a weakness in my game, I was able to overinvest the necessary time to improve.
2. Sometimes this may come at a short term cost because of the necessary investment. Give yourself the space and the grace that what you are doing will lead to a long term benefit. While I was working on juggling I was unable to work on my endurance as much. But in the end it made me a better player and teammate because I was able to pass and distribute the ball more effectively.
3. This does not change how you should prioritize what’s important in your life. For me my faith, my family and then my career is the order of my overall priorities. But, there may be a time, for example that my family is operating in a deficit due to a short term priority at work. The key is to be open and transparent of your need to overinvest in a certain area and be disciplined to realign back to your overarching priorities.