Today is Major League Baseball's Opening Day and for just the second time in history, every baseball team will begin their season on the exact same day. All 30 teams are on the schedule to play today. Many people look forward to this day with great anticipation as the excitement mounts for a new season. 'Hope springs eternal' in the heart of every baseball fan since, as of today, every single team is in first place. I hear people saying things like "the lineup looks good this year", "they looked great in Spring Training", "I'm so glad we signed that free agent!" However, when a baseball fan hears the expression "he dropped the ball", positive images are not conjured up. I am married to a life-long, die-hard Red Sox fan, so the phrase "dropping the ball" invokes a PTS-like response and brings him right back to Bill Buckner in Game 6 of the 1986 World Series against the New York Mets (if you don't know what I am talking about, google it). The phrase "drop the ball" is defined as "making a mistake, mishandling things" as in "I really dropped the ball on this one." So you may be surprised that my advice to you today, on this Opening Day, is to intentionally DROP THE BALL!
Many years ago, when Oprah Winfrey was hosting her nationally syndicated talk show, she famously said: "Women can have it all, just not all at the same time." We are always juggling so many balls, for so many people, all at once. How many times have you caught yourself saying "if only I had more hours in the day" or "if I want something to get done, I am going to have to do it myself"? Many talented and driven people live their lives thinking that in order to have it all, they have to do it all...all by themselves. They are over-scheduled and exhausted with mounting responsibilities at work and at home. It is so nice to finally be given permission to intentionally drop a few balls and let some things go.
I just finished reading a book that gives us the ultimate hall pass. Drop the Ball, written by Tiffany Dufu, is a personal memoir of a woman who was famous for doing it all and admittedly had HCD - 'Home Control Disease.' When she made the life-changing decision to delegate home responsibilities to her husband (she even put together an Excel spreadsheet to divide and track them all), she was forced to drop the ball and let a lot of things go. One example that she wrote about in detail was the unopened mail that began to pile up on the kitchen counter...four months' worth! When her husband finally dealt with his newly assigned responsibility and tackled the mountain of mail, Tiffany realized that although they had missed a few birthday party invitations and were past due on a few bills, the world had not come to an end. It forced Tiffany to take a long hard look at her To-Do list and realized that there are really just four things that should be on everyone's Go-To list. Her four Go-To's sound like the advice you would get from a health coach, which is probably one of the reasons that I enjoyed this book so much.
Go-To # 1 - Going to exercise (to build stamina)
Go-To # 2 - Going to lunch (to build your network)
Go-To # 3 - Going to events (to build your visibility)
Go-To # 4 - Going to sleep (to build your renewal)
Sounds like a great plan, doesn't it? Tiffany's advice to all of us is that in order to focus on the all-important Four Go-To's, we have to make peace with imperfection. We have to be okay with asking others for help and being more than okay with how our helpers complete the job. That may mean that the towels get folded differently than you would do it, the dinners don't include items from each of the four food groups, and the mail ends up piled high on the kitchen countertop. We need to know that it is perfectly acceptable to do only half of what is on our to-do lists and expect less of ourselves and more from our spouses (Tiffany refers to them as "the partners with whom we have signed up to change the world").
Remember that very popular song "Let It Go" from Disney's animated feature film Frozen?
Let it go, let it go
Can’t hold it back anymore
Let it go, let it go
Turn my back and slam the door
For an entire year, everyone was walking around singing those lyrics at the top of their lungs. It reached the top five on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, and won both the Academy Award for Best Original Song in 2014 and the Grammy Award for Best Song Written for Visual Media in 2015. The song gained international recognition and became an anthem for 'releasing the ties that bind you' since the song was sung in the movie by the fictional character Queen Elsa who had declared herself free from the restrictions she had endured since childhood and was celebrating the fact that she was going to let her past go.
How about if we all decide to start letting some things go? We might actually end up with more time and energy to do the things we really want to do. Perhaps the next time someone "dropped a ball", instead of looking at it through a negative lens, we would celebrate it..."hey, good for you...you dropped the ball!" It would be even more wonderful if we started encouraging each other to DROP THE BALL. Now that's a ball game I can really root for!