1: Both David Brooks‘s sons played baseball at a high level.
“One boy is eight years older than the other,” he writes in his book How to Know a Person,” so by the time the younger was about twelve, I’d been around youth baseball for about a decade, watching the professional coaches the league had hired to manage the older boy’s squads.”
Another dad was set to coach his younger son’s team, and David volunteered to be an assistant coach.
“It quickly became clear, at least to me, that I knew a lot more about coaching youth baseball than the coach,” he remembers, “simply because I had a lot more experience around the sport.”
What did David do?
He began “peppering” the head coach, he recalls, with his “genius ideas about how to run practice, throw batting practice, and make mid-game adjustments. . .
“Obviously, it wasn’t about any latent desire to show how much I knew, or to attract attention, or to be in control. Obviously, my behavior could have had nothing to do with the male ego in the presence of competitive sports.”
Obviously.
The other coach wasn’t impressed with David’s knowledge or his suggestions. “He rarely accepted the brilliant pointers I was offering,” he recalls.
2: David uses this story as an example of how not to be an accompanist.
One of the gifts we can give another person, David writes, is to accompany them, like the pianist accompanies the singer in the world of music.
“They are partners, making something together, but the accompanist is in the supportive role, subtly working to embellish the beauty of the song and help the singer shine,” he notes.
When we accompany another person, we sign onto their plan.
“Accompaniment is a humble way of being a helpful part of another’s journey, as they go about making their own kind of music,” he notes. “The accompanist is not controlling the journey, but neither is she a passive bystander.”
3: Reflecting on his time as an assistant coach, David writes: “If I’d been better schooled back then in the art of accompaniment, I would have understood how important it is to honor another person’s ability to make choices. . .
“I wish I had followed some advice that is rapidly becoming an adage: Let others voluntarily evolve.
“I wish I had understood then that trust is built when individual differences are appreciated, when mistakes are tolerated, and when one person says, more with facial expressions than anything else, ‘I’ll be there when you want me. I’ll be there when the time is right.'”
He quotes Pope Paul VI, who beautifully captures this idea: “Modern man listens more willingly to witnesses than teachers, and if he does listen to teachers, it’s because they are witnesses.”
More tomorrow!
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Reflection: Witness or teacher? Which is my default setting?
Action: Experiment with showing up as a witness today.
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