I’m a little late. Whatever.
Last year, I took a look back at 2017 and considered what were some of the biggest misses I had in the previous year. If you put yourself out there several times a week, you’re never going to be right 100% of the time. Still, we’ve somehow reached a point in the online take world where very few people admit when they were wrong.
The stakes for doing so seem to high. There are more people to tell you that you messed up than there ever were. That is a bit daunting. In the same vein, there is more room for personal growth than there ever has been. So here, in no certain order, are the posts I look back at over the last year with a little cringe on my face.
While this post isn’t from 2018 (it’s actually a 2017 post), the story I wrote about took a pretty dramatic turn recently. I still stand by a lot of what I wrote in the original post, about the behavior that had been attributed to coach Petra Martin by NJ.com was pretty common and not cause for a summary firing in almost all other cases.
What I didn’t understand at the time, and what several brave internet folks have educated me on since that time, including Martin herself with the judgment, is how much bias goes into the judgment that follows such charges when the accused is a female coach. Kudos to Martin for exposing that and educating the ignorant among us.
I hyped, and previewed, a podcast with Dryland coach to the best swimmer in the world (history?) Katie Ledecky. Then a surprise snowstorm disrupted our best laid plans to record and you might think that podcast is never going to happen.
I’m happy to announce that the podcast is back on and will record here shortly in the new year. Thanks to Lee for not giving up and continuing to want to make it happen. Once I’m back from my current road trip through San Diego and Houston the podcast will return with one I know a lot of people were getting excited for.
What do you do again?
2018 was a year where I still haven’t communicated to many of the people who follow this blog and podcast what it is exactly I do. I’m writing this in between doing the biggest piece of “work” that I do, working with coaches and teams to incorporate Positive Psychology into their team.
So, despite a number of attempts, like this one or the podcast I recorded with Ryan Wochomurka of Houston, there are a number of people that tell me they like what I’m doing, but don’t really know what that is.
So in 2019, one of my goals is for explaining that to be one of my biggest successes of the year, and not the biggest misses.
Gratitude
This is a great time of year for gratitude, so I want to thank everyone for their love and support of this page in the past year. Chris DeSantis Coaching is well into its third year, a time when overwhelmingly entrepreneurial ventures have failed and folded up shop. This venture is only picking up momentum and I’m very grateful because although it’s still a “solo” venture, I never could have done that without a countless group of people that have supported this.
So thanks and Happy New Year!