Good Advice from College Football

"So take what happened, learn from it and move on."  Jeremy Pruitt

Jeremy Pruitt, the new head coach of the Tennessee Volunteers, was talking about last year's rather dismal football season and less than stellar seasons before that. He stated that there is nothing he nor anyone can do anything about it. Nothing but to do much better this season.

Last year I read about the  philosophy of one college quarterback.  His philosophy was simply "Next play."  No matter what happened on the previous play-- sack, fumble, interception, completion,  or whatever, he got up, got behind the center and ran the next play.

The "real life" applications are obvious and immense. Pruitt's words and the quarterback's philosophy require little commentary.  But I'm offering some commentary just the same. What if Pruitt's advice to himself and to us was all the advice we would ever get. Was all the advice we would ever follow.   How much happier would we be?  If we practiced this, how much mental and emotional pain would we avoid?  Just imagine how we would deal with a significant breakup, the loss of a job, a traffic accident,or a stray comment that hurt someone's feelings we care about.  The opposite of following this advice is that we not only continue to think about things we can do nothing about, but we build stories around them. Instead of allowing the thoughts and accompanying feelings to go  away, they get stronger. Obviously, in the case of the hurt feelings we can apologize, we can try to make things right.  But what if we can't?  What if, in spite of our best efforts, the person is still upset and stays upset?

The college quarterback has twenty five seconds to brush himself off and get ready for the next play. Thankfully, our clocks allow us much more time. However, maybe it would be to our advantage to have a deadline on thoughts and feelings before we were forced to move on. Before we are forced to deal with something else.

I don't know about you, but I am capable of not learning from what just happened, of not moving on, of berating myself and beating myself up. I had a counselor take up for me once after I  shared such a negative outcome and how badly I felt about it.  He said, "David, you made the best decision with the information you had at the time." The generic advice Pruitt and the quarterback are offering is the time-honored "Learn from your mistakes."  To learn from our mistake, we first have to admit that it was a mistake. We have to admit that we messed up. We have to reckon that humans make mistakes and since we are human, we make mistakes.  Once we get that settled, we can move toward learning from it.

Coach Gus Malzahn of the Auburn Tigers has another take on all of this.  Regardless of what's going on with the team or with the season, he tells reporters and fans, "I like where we're at."

So putting all of this together, we would all do well to "take what happens", "learn from what happens", "move on from what happened", prepare for the "next play" and enjoy "where we're at". And if we don't  want to be where we are, we should consider going somewhere else.