Friday
August 8, 2014

Life on Life's Terms

Tough and Mean

"What are you watching?" I asked my wife.

"News segment – should be called 'Coaches Gone Crazy.'  It's about two coaches and a band director with really bad attitudes."

"How bad is it?" I asked.  She pointed to the screen and we watched for ten minutes before we had to change the channel.

"Why do coaches do that?  Why do parents and kids put up with that band director?" she asked.

"Because people don't always see the difference between tough and mean.  And when mean wins games and competitions, people tell themselves it's all worth it."

"What's the difference between tough and mean?"

"One day I told the toughest coach I'd ever had that I was quitting.  I had this whole speech in my head.  I was going to tell him off, give him the finger, throw my jersey at him and quit.  I told him I was quitting because he yelled at me more than everyone else on the team combined.  Do you know what he said?"

"'Wash your jersey before you turn it in'?"

"Funny.  He said he yelled at me the most because I was the least aware of how much better I could be.  He also said he didn't want me to quit, but he planned to push me the rest of the season unless I played up to my potential.  That was tough. Mean would have been if he had called me a baby and told me to get out, which is kinda what I expected him to do."

Today I will be grateful for people who knew the difference between tough and mean.

  

Life on Life's Terms (c) 2014 by Ken Montrose

Freebie

This week's freebie is the Kindle version of Heroin, Oxycontin, & Other Opiates: Breaking Your Addiction to Them is available at  http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K8MG0S.


To read Kindle books on a PC or Mac, you can download a free app at: http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=1000426311

Upcoming

Burnout: Clinical, Ethical, & Supervisory Issues
September 12, 2014 at Greenbriar-New Kensington
9:30 a.m. to 12:45 p.m
$30 payable in advance, at the door, or by invoice after the training

This three hour training is accredited for:

• Addiction Counselors by the Pa. Certification Board
• CRCs  by the Commission on Rehabilitation Counselor Certification # 11938191652 and 11938191653 (one hour Ethics portion)
• Counselors by NAADAC #477 and NBCC #6352
• EAPs by the Employee Assistance Certification Commission
• Social Workers by the University of Pittsburgh School of Social Work.

Other Blogs

 AArdvarks, a daily messages blog about a group of young people in recovery can be found at: https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/6783800-a-man-is-known-by-the-company-he-keeps-aesop-s-fables

Smart Bears, Angry Rats

Just for the fun of it    150 years later

Sonya switched over to the only other channel available, the Military Alert Broadcast, or MAB.  The military never sugar-coated their stories.  All the news, none of the perky. 

What she liked best about the MAB was the last five minutes of the broadcast.  Completely out of character, the military used the end of each broadcast to poke a little fun at itself.

That day the Air Force ran footage of twentieth century aircraft dropping bomb after bomb on a bridge.  Other planes strafed the bridge, and helicopters fired rockets in a massive display of overkill. At the end of the broadcast the image of a single rat jumping off a bridge filled the iWall. 

"He won't try to cross that bridge again!" scrolled across the bottom of the screen. 

Today I will poke a little fun at myself.

Smart Bears, Angry Rats (c) 2014 by Ken Montrose