Forty years ago, back when dinosaurs still roamed the earth and football was played with leather helmets and no facemasks, I played quarterback for Gustavus. It was then I came to learn of John Gagliardi, St. John’s legendary football coach who would - like Steve Wilkinson becoming the winningest coach in college tennis through his unorthodox teaching of the Three Crowns – become the winningest football coach in college football history through his own unorthodox coaching methods. Why hordes of coaches didn’t copy the two is still a mystery to me.
One of Gagliardi’s methods was to never let his players put on pads during the week and tackle or block each other, and to only have the pads for games. His reasoning was why would any coach beat up his own players in practice, so they are worn out and injured for the coming Saturday’s game? People said you can’t coach tackling without having the players tackle each other in practice. Gagliardi said, watch us. And they won national championships. And still no one copied him.
Another thing Gagliardi did has stuck with me all my life. At some point in practice, he would blow his whistle and yell, “Beautiful Day Drill!” All the 300-pound behemoths would drop to the grass, lie down and look up at the sky for ten minutes and appreciate the day. It almost made me want to play for St. John’s. Almost…
That unorthodox image never left me. When I became director of TLC fourteen years ago, I wanted to incorporate it, since it blended so well with Steve Wilkinson’s philosophy. But I couldn’t figure out how. No one in their right mind is going to want to lie down on asphalt courts for ten minutes in the summer sun.
So, a few years went by, and then at the annual Tucker Center For Research on Women and Girls in Sports conference, (led by Dr. Nicole LaVoi, a former Gustie tennis player and TLC board member, who credits Steve Wilkinson for being a mentor), one of the speakers said in their talk that she incorporates Mindfulness Minutes into her recommendations for individuals.
That was the moment it came together from the two very different sources. TLC has always been about gratitude. So we named it the Gratitude Minute, employed a bullhorn atop the tennis tower alerting campers to the minute, and they all dropped to the ground with instructors and laid there looking up at the sky for one minute, where they reset and reframed whatever was going on in their lives into 60 seconds of being grateful for family, tennis, friends, life, pets, challenges faced and overcome, failures and successes, the birds, the wind, the sun. And then when the horn went off again, they popped back up and reentered the drill or point they had been involved in.
I thought it might make a difference to campers and instructors, but I had no idea how much of a difference it would make in my life. Every time one of them rolls around, I am flat on the ground looking up at the sky, transported to a place where for a minute troubles melt away and life is put in perspective. Because I have never once failed to come up with something I’m grateful for.
I am a person with ADHD. I have never been able to sit still for mindfulness and meditation exercises. But one minute of pure gratitude? I can do a minute. And my internal compass is reset. What is fascinating to me is no two Gratitude Minutes are alike. Every, single, time something new comes to mind. The more I am grateful, the more there seems to be an endless supply of things to be grateful for. I don’t know how that works psychologically, but as a study of one, I can attest it does.
The beauty of it is gratitude is open to everybody. And it is always free.
I got it from a rival football coach and a speaker at a conference and who knows where they got it from? I can tell you almost certainly it was from someone else. You spread it and it catches fire in the most unexpected ways.
None of us owns anything in the end except our actions. Gratitude is an action I get to take every day if I just take one minute to remember.
And now, on Thanksgiving, it is time for me to take a Gratitude Minute and see where my mind takes me.
Try it today, you might like it better than Aunt Helen’s green bean casserole.