On a Phoenix Cardinals coach, a boy named Johnny, and the kind of gratitude that does not change your storm, it changes you.
I catch myself complaining more than I would like to admit. When I do, I think about a coach named Gene Stallings, and it snaps me right out of it.
Stallings coached the Phoenix Cardinals, won a national title at Alabama, and is in six Halls of Fame. He is also hilarious. Ask him about the time he nearly sent Arizona Governor Rose Mofford flying off the back of a stage in Yuma. But the reason I bring him up has nothing to do with football.
His son, John Mark, “Johnny,” was born with Down syndrome and a serious heart defect. Doctors told Gene and his wife to institutionalize him, said he would not live to see his first birthday. They refused. Johnny lived forty-six years.
Gene tells the story of the last night. He heard Johnny struggling to breathe over the monitor, climbed into bed with him, and checked his oxygen. The levels were dangerously low. “Johnny,” he asked, “how do you feel?” Johnny said, “I fine. I fine.” If any human being who ever lived had a reason to complain, it was that boy. He never did. He passed away the next morning, the saddest day of Gene’s life.
GENE STALLINGS
Here is what that gratitude built. Johnny could not count to ten. But there are books and songs written about him. There is a John Mark Stallings equipment room at Alabama, playgrounds and fields in his name, and a street on campus called Johnny Stallings Drive. Gene jokes that he is in six Halls of Fame and does not have a field named after him. Johnny’s gift was that he never forgot a name. At his fortieth birthday, with three hundred people there, he called every single soul by name. And every night he asked his dad the same thing: “Pop, what are me and you going to do tomorrow?” A life the world measured as less, lived fuller than most of ours.
Gene closes with a line he carries from a letter a mother once sent him: “Life is not about waiting for the storm to pass. It is learning how to dance in the rain.” Little Johnny, he says, taught him to dance in the rain. Watch Coach Stallings tell it himself. Bring tissues.
→ PLAYING TO LOSE
→ PLAY TO WIN
You do not get to pick the weather. You get to pick whether you spend the storm complaining, or learn to move through it with a grateful heart.
Dance in the rain.
- Do you want to be the Ego Storm like an energy vampire, or the Grateful Dancer who lifts everybody up, like Johnny?
- Which of those two would you choose to protect your life, family, and business dreams?
We all have both sides in us…
Three reps. Simple… Join me; I do it every single morning.
Who wants to sit at a meal with a bunch of Karen’s?!
When your mind starts to spiral, switch to one thing you are grateful for. You cannot hold gratitude and a negative thought in the same breath, one crowds the other out. It was a big part of how I got up Kilimanjaro.
What you focus on grows,
so grow the gratitude.
That is Playful Spirit: perseverance in gratitude, faith, and fun-loving energy, especially when it is pouring. If a boy who could not count to ten could say “I fine” on his hardest night, we can find our three.
And with that, we close Phase 2, Go In. We did the hard inner work: how we think, how we own our story, how we face our fear and anger, and how we choose gratitude in the storm. Next week we Level Up. Phase 3 is where we turn all of it into habits, discipline, and daily execution.
Let’s get after it in life, family, and business. AND LET’S PLAY TO WIN!!!
Lots of love,
Nate
