I get my inspiration from everywhere and last night it happened to be from the program “60 Minutes.” You can view the segment here. It was a story about the USC Trojan’s head coach, Pete Carroll, but it was more than just a story about a coach of a winning team. It was a story about hope and how we can share that hope with others. You see, Coach Carroll spends a lot of his time volunteering for the at-risk youth of Los Angeles, and he sits with young men regularly in an effort to inspire them to have hope. They have a lot of reasons not to have hope when all they see on a daily basis is death and violence, but when someone comes in and offers them hope, often they will reach for it. Coach Carroll started an organization called “A Better LA” that brings together anti-gang organizations and unites them to work together. Interestingly, I looked the word “coach” up in the dictionary, and found that it was derived as a slang term by students who viewed their tutors as a “coach carrying them through their examinations.” That visual of a teacher carrying his students in a horse-drawn coach, gives me a whole new understanding of the word.

We might think that in life we aren’t a coach, but we all are. If we’re a parent, we are a coach to our children. If we’re an aunt, uncle, or cousin, we might find ourselves coaching the loved ones in our lives. Recently, I have been training my replacement in my old position at work since I recently got promoted. I have found myself in a position to be a coach. Whether I am a good coach or a bad coach depends on me, and the jury is still out on that one. Even so, if I can remind myself with every interaction with my trainee that helping people was the number one priority in the job, then I will have made great strides and mentored a great replacement. By the way, I think that has to be the number one priority in all jobs–no matter what we do.