Sport Psych Saturday

Hello, Cadre. Happy Saturday. My name is Garrett, and I wanted to tell you all about a time that I cried at work this past week. And just a little, I'll add some more context, but just to start off, this was from a story that was expressed from a soldier in the military during a class that I was facilitating most recently. I think this was on maybe Tuesday or Wednesday, whatever that might be. And just a little backstory, as I've mentioned a few times on here, I work for the military as a contractor doing performance psychology with them.

And what I do here at Fort Huachuca in Arizona is every few months, usually quarterly, we run this two week master resilience training course where we're training the trainer. We're basically trying to train a group of about 30 soldiers, resilience skills, life skills, so that they can go teach their units throughout just working with their units and being in leadership positions. And during this two week course, we teach them about 14 different skills. Again, just life skills that are aimed at resilience, helping their thinking, helping them be more optimistic, helping them have more self awareness and self regulation, connection with their peers, things like that.

And one of the stories that made me tear up as I was facilitating the course was, we were reviewing the skills, and I believe I asked the question, something to the lines of what skill that we've discussed thus far has impacted you the most? And I'm in a group facilitating a group of about 18 soldiers at this time, and one of them tells me that. Excuse me. That gratitude has helped them the most. We discussed gratitude day one as a skill and helped them initiate gratitude journals. That was their homework.

Every day of this two week course is to write in their gratitude journal and reflect on the why behind why that good thing was good to them. And this soldier says, gratitude has impacted me the most because I've been through a lot of s*** or a lot of stuff, excuse my language, but that's what the soldiers use, a lot of stuff the last few years. And he said specifically, he was grateful for his time with his daughter, and that's because his wife and him had lost a child when he was on his first deployment, and then his wife and him have a baby, but then he's gone on a year and a half deployment for a second time, and he can't even see the baby.

So those two things being on deployment, losing a child. Now he sees every time he gets to take his daughter to school, every time he gets to help her with homework, anytime he gets to make a meal for her, give her a snack, hug her when he gets home, have her point at his army uniform and talk about him as a soldier. All these little things that he might have felt a little bit before this course. But now, after taking this course, learning more about gratitude and how we can be intentional and deliberate with a gratitude journal and thinking about it, he said it profoundly changed his life.

This was Hun day three or four of our course, just three, four days of teaching him skills. He said it profoundly changed his life. And we still got next week of the two week course. And as he was saying that, I could look around the room and I was grateful because having the soldier express that and feel comfortable saying that and showed me that I made the environment safe for him. But I was looking around and all the soldiers are all hard faced and stoic, but I could tell it was an emotional moment for the room.

And I think that it can show a lot about what we can do. People with gratitude and trying to. We call it hunt the good stuff is the skill that we call it with the military. But hunt the good stuff, even the little things like it doesn't have to be you were on a deployment. It doesn't have to mean that you and your spouse or your partner lost a child during pregnancy. But be appreciative of those little things. If you have a healthy child, if things are good, be appreciative of that. If things aren't good, like a lot of times for us, you can still hunt the good stuff.

There's still good in that. And that doesn't mean we have to find the silver lining or have all sunshine and rainbows, right? We don't have to be overly positive. We know those annoying people that are just chippy and super positive all the time. Not saying that. What I am saying is be realistic and find what is good in your life because there's, for dang sure, good stuff going on in your life. So that that made me tear up in the moment for sure. And I talked with that soldier after and we had a good conversation about what that was like for him and how he can use this skill of gratitude with his soldiers in his unit.

It was just a great time that I'm personally super grateful for and I thought it was interesting. So I've talked about gratitude on this app before, but always thinks it's a good reminder for us all, especially on a Saturday when you still have a little bit of bed head and you just want to get up and talk about the good things that are going on in life. So thank you all for listening. The few people that have joined, the few people that are going to watch this later as it's posted. I appreciate you being on here and I'm grateful for you using this platform.

And on this Saturday, just go find something that you're grateful for. Thank you.