One Small Change

The day after the US men’s gymnastics team took bronze, I clicked on a great piece via Facebook. I am so frustrated because I can’t find the article again. I’ll try to summarize it for you.

It was about the pommel horse specialist Stephen Nedoroscik. When he was training as a kid, he realized he didn’t have what it took to compete in all areas. He could have walked away from gymnastics when he realized it wasn’t going to go as he hoped, but instead, he looked at where he was exceptional — the pommel horse — and he went all in on becoming a pommel horse specialist. Being a specialist meant unlike his other teammates, he only got one chance to shine, but he didn’t act like someone who was waiting. This article talked about how he brought his teammates water and cheered them on while they were competing, remaining part of the moment, and then went out there, rocked the one thing he does, and contributed the points needed to get them on the podium.

It’s a great story, which is why he has become one of the stars of the Olympics, but the part I kept thinking about was that he had a choice to make somewhere early on when he received feedback or understood at his core that if he kept going on the path he was going on — the path everyone in the gym was taking to get to the Olympics — he was not going to achieve his goal. Only by thinking outside the box and moving onto a Plan B could he keep moving forward.

I realized reading the article how many of us (myself included, which is why it resonated with me) hear the word “no” and move on to something else rather than finding a new route forward toward the same place. There are plenty of places in life where “no” actually means “no” (relationships, family building, etc.), but I sometimes apply that knowledge to places where “no” is more of a “Stephen Nedoroscik no,” which is a not-this-way-find-something-else “no.” I’m impressed that he thought of trying that path. And I’m going to keep that in mind the next time I hear one of those softer “no”s and look around to see if there are any other options to move forward that get me to the same place, even if the journey to get there will look different.