A New Blog Project

It's been a minute since I've written a meaningful blog.  As I've said many times, I enjoy taking time to write-out my thoughts and share some insights with others.  I'm grateful for the feedback and support that I've received about this little space on the internet.  I wish I made more time for this.

With that said, I'm taking on a Lend Me Your Imagination project since the boys are back in school (for now...).  Last September, I mustered up as much energy as I could to write a new blog each day for 30 days.  This year, I'm going to use the highlights of several non-fiction books and apply them to our lives in the athletic world, specifically the wrestling community, each day throughout the month of September.

We re-opened Victory School of Wrestling and have started our preseason training programs.  A major component to the success of our programs is the non-wrestling skills that our athletes acquire and the off-the-mat focus we place on training.  This project will allow for some of our new members to experience training as the Total Athlete - body, mind and soul - and it will give others an important look into the way we do things.

I'm going to use Blinkist to help me delve into many different books.  It's an app that summarizes non-fiction books by sharing something like the "Cliff's notes" (called "blinks").  The app includes champion authors like Brene Brown and Simon Sinek - two of my favorites.  The blinks highlight the main points and allow you to get through a book in less than 10 minutes.  Of course, they take out much of the story telling (Brene Brown's strongest quality as a writer) and get down to the nuts and bolts in an outline form.  Although very brief, they give me a lot of powerful material to implement into our training programs.  They also wet my pallet before choosing to dig into the entire book.

I've created a list of books that I'm going to review over the next month and apply each one to the scenarios of our lives/training.  You can expect something from the following titles:

• Mindset by Carol Dweck
• The Infinite Game by Simon Sinek
• The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg
• First Things First by Stephen R. Covey
• A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink
• What the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast by Laura Vanderkam
• Blink by Malcolm Gladwell
• Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert
• Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull
• Originals by Adam Grant

And several others.  If you have any suggestions, please let me know.