I’ve been affiliated with The Pacific Institute for almost three years now. I’ve been an Arizona Diamondbacks fan since their inception in 1998. But for some inexplicable reason, I have been completely ignorant of Arizona manager Kirk Gibson’s history with TPI.

I was back in Seattle last weekend, for the final “Weekend with Lou” event of the year. I had a couple of clients who wanted to experience the curriculum in person before deciding on bringing it back to their organization in Indiana. It was a fantastic trip, far exceeding my expectations. I got to reconnect with some old faces, and show them my old face as well.

As a sports fan, I wanted to catch up with some of the people involved with using TPI’s curriculum with athletes. The University of Alabama, Arizona State University, and the University of Oklahoma have all implemented programs with their football teams in recent years. Team USA swimming also took the majority of it’s swimmers through TPI’s youth oriented program, PX2.

Presently, most athletes experience the curriculum on a team, or within a group. But, there was a time back in the day where athletes would come and work with Lou Tice individually. Just yesterday, I stumbled upon a fascinating article about the man by Les Carpenter from the Yahoo! Sports blog: The Post Game. The article mostly focuses on Gibson’s maturing into the likely NL Manager of the Year in 2011. It jumps back and forth between rough patches and high points during this season, spring training, and even the winter meetings that the team conducted before the start of the season.

Sprinkled right in the middle, is a little anecdote about a talk Gibson gave to his players regarding the idea of a scotoma. Scotoma is a Greek word, and means “blindness” or “blind spot”. It’s an important concept to embrace because it highlights our own lack of perfect perception. As a leader, this acknowledgement not only says “I’m not perfect”, but also “I need your help to see my blind spots”. It’s not an admission of a personal weakness, it’s just an aspect of the human condition.

When I read the term “scotoma”, my mind immediately flashed to Lou Tice and his popularization of the term. I quickly searched the internet to find any sort of connection between Kirk Gibson and The Pacific Institute. I found out that he was referred to Lou Tice and TPI in the early eighties, to help deal with something of an anger management problem. While he was a talented baseball player, he seemed to let his emotions get the best of him in his desire to be the best.

Of course, following his time at TPI, Gibson the player would go on to hit one of the most memorable home runs in baseball history. In the video of that link, notice how Gibson describes the visualization process as “dreaming”. He visualized or “dreamed” that home run, just moments before it happened.

This is the same visualization process that he was introduced to at TPI. In fact (as I recently discovered), Lou has used Kirk Gibson’s story to illustrate the power of visualizing the ideal future. However, it’s not the story of the petulant baseball player who found his swing just in time to win the World Series. Rather, it’s a lesson of even broader impact of helping others to visualize themselves:

Click here to view the embedded video.

That’s probably what’s most exciting about Gibson’s current role as manager of the Diamondbacks. Instead of just being able to reach and inspire others with his own individual efforts, he now has the listening ears of entire baseball team, and a growing fan base that has been sharing the love for “Gibby” for quite some time now.

If you’ve been following the D-Backs this year, you’ll know that their calling card has been mental toughness, grinding out close games, and managing to come from behind to win many of them late. Gibson has been credited with coaching and mentoring these men to visualize success so vividly, that any “reality” that might argue with that “dream” begins to just fade away.

Finding out that my favorite manager on my favorite baseball team is a TPI guy has blown me away. Although I shouldn’t be surprised.

As of this writing, the Diamondbacks are just a couple of wins away from clinching a spot in the playoffs. Soon enough, we’ll find out if Gibson has any magic left on the baseball diamond. But we should know by now, it’s not really magic at all. He has a process for success, and he works it diligently.

If things don’t pan out for Kirk Gibson the manager, maybe there’s more work waiting for him in the advertising world.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Let’s hope that baseball always has room for Gibby. I have have a feeling that it will.

It’s been over a week since I wrapped up my fast for the month of Ramadan. Perhaps the sudden onset of autumn weather has something to do with it, but I’ve been regularly pondering the fact that I might be experiencing some post-Ramadan blues. I’m not waking up before dawn, I’m not meditating as much, and I’m not being especially mindful of anything.

Actually, that’s not really true. Lately, I’ve been quite mindful of my own negativity and sullenness. I wouldn’t argue a diagnosis of depression right now. It’s just been a difficult transition back to “normal” life. It turns out that “normal” is not good enough anymore.

This really shouldn’t surprise me, this whole process of changing my mindset towards not eating and drinking during sunlight hours occurred much as I would have expected it to, based on the TPI curriculum that I train others on. All of the early rising, meditating, abstaining, focusing, and learning really became habitualized in my life.

Once the goal of Ramadan was finished, I didn’t replace it with a new one.

I knew that I was really enjoying and appreciating the fast, but I didn’t realize how potently I had been affected by it all. While the past week or so hasn’t been a complete bust, let’s just say that I’ve spent more time that I would like to admit in full sweats, with my hoodie firmly in the “on” position. It’s the uniform of the mildly depressed, and I’ve been wearing it at home quite a bit this week.

My wife and I were discussing my fast recently, and we agreed that it was the most dedicated that I have ever been to a daily discipline in my entire life. At 31 years old, with 3 kids, that’s sort of embarrassing.

Discipline has always been a sort of four-letter word for me. Dictionary.com assures me that there are indeed more than four letters, and provides the following definitions, to boot:

2) To bring to a state of order and obedience by training and control.

Typically, I associate discipline with the 3rd definition. It has a strong correlation with punishment and penalty for me. At various points in my life, I have tried to shed any and all disciplines, due to a fear that they were preventing me from being truly “free”.

Some of this perspective towards discipline was from my own experience, while a great deal of it was from watching others languish and suffer for the sake of some sort of discipline. It all seemed very foolish to me; to enslave yourself to something, without any options for changing or casting it aside once it was no longer useful.

I’m now rethinking and reexamining all of this. During my fast, my commitment to not drinking is what gave me the strength to overcome my urges to drink each day. This commitment did not weaken me or reduce my “freedom”. It simply reminded me of what I had already decided what was most valuable.

In the days since the fast ended, I’ve just been allowing myself to be driven by my base cravings and desires. I’m pretty sure that the discipline of these desires is what separates us from the animal kingdom, so why is it so difficult for me to put a new discipline into place?

Well, I’m trying to find an answer to that. I’ve got some ideas in my head for developing a new process for adding disciplines to my life. As they become habits, I’ll need to include a way to examine all of them as well, but I’ll just focus on disciplines for now.

More on all of this later. Thanks for reading.

In the meantime, I’ll be continue to jam to this weird-ass video from some dude named Nathan Barnatt:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Seriously. If the end of the discipline of fasting has brought me down, that video has buoyed me as much as anything else over the past week (especially the reverse low 10 at the 3:17 mark). I hope that it makes you happy too.

Without my experience at TPI, I doubt that I would have found my current position as a teacher at Evansville Day School. While it is difficult to support a family solely with my wages as a teacher, and  because I still held a goal and a desire to become a successful Project Director, I have maintained my status as a Project Director for the past year of teaching. My lack of successes did not discourage me and cause me to quit, but they highlighted my lack of experience and formal education in the field of Psychology. With this, I have begun a Master’s Degree program in Industrial and Organizational Psychology with Grand Canyon University. I should walk across the stage in Phoenix in December of next year.

Recently, TPI made the wise decision to reorganize it’s relationship with it’s Project Directors. With this reorganization comes a new requirement: Project Directors must earn considerably more commissionable sales than previously required. While this will surely encourage and galvanize many of the full time PDs and teams, it also has the effect of eliminating struggling PDs. Whether it is my own self-efficacy, the economy, or something else entirely, I find myself in this latter category.

With this transition, I keep a lot of friends, and many business contracts as well. My associations with the team from TPI is still in tact, and I hope that my relationship with TPI will continue still, long into the future.

For now, I will vacillate between teacher and student (with more time being spent as one than the other ). Now that I put it in writing, perhaps that is the best place for me to be.

Click here to view the embedded video.

If you are a coach, athletic director, or even an athlete looking for a every ethical edge you can get, maybe you should check out our PX2 program and see if The Pacific Institute can help you and your team to do more of the things you know you are capable of.

Congratulations again coach.  You definitely deserve it.

Since that day, Brad has persevered from the life-altering accident to become a man more focused than ever on having a positive impact on this world and a high quality of life.  He also happens to be a VJ for The Pacific Institute‘s “Discovering the Power in Me“.  Brad has an incredible sense of self-efficacy.  He continues to be an avid outdoorsman and has hiked the physically and mentally exhausting Pacific Trail.  He is producing a documentary of the journey he and nine friends took on the trail.  Check out the preview below.  If you would like to be a part of financially supporting the completion of his movie, you can contact Brad at poobala@hotmail.com.

Click here to view the embedded video.

His body may be seated, but his spirit is standing.

There is an entire section of this website dedicated to the implementation of TPI’s program for youth “PX2″.  There is also a subsection for the implementation of this program in sports, featuring an video introduction by Pete Carroll.  Within that, there is a page dedicated to our clients on the football field.  Alabama’s participation in the PX2 program is chronicled there, with some links to outside news and sports agencies regarding our partnership.

Former NFL players Antowaine Richardson and Nesby Glasgow, who are trained as PX2 facilitators, took the players through each of the 12 units during training camp for the last two years.  Tailoring the program for application on the football field, the players identified areas in their own skill sets and roles on the team where their were underperforming to their potential.

One of the first questions asked of PX2 participants is “Who’s in control?”.  Basically, the question is trying to discover whether it is external or internal forces that drive our behaviors.  Truly, it is a mix of both.  But, in order for us to be responsible for our behavior, we have to acknowledge that we are in control of our lives.  If this is true, then as a result, we ourselves are the biggest limiters of our effectiveness and performance.

If at times you feel like a victim, then you may be able to alter this belief with a greater understanding of how much control you really have.  While we can’t control everything that happens to us, we can often control how we respond and react.  By removing the victim-mentality, we can see outside influence in a different light.  Either it is imagined, or we cannot change it.  Either way, our focus should remain on that which we can effect.

Alabama set a goal to win the SEC championship this year.  Why not the BCS national championship?  Maybe because the last three SEC championship winners have gone on to win the BCS national championship.  It’s clear that the next goal is to win the game against Texas in January.  No one for Alabama is hoping for referees, weather, luck, fate, or anything else outside of them to work in their favor.  When it’s time to play, these guys know “Who’s in control.”

Send me an email if you are interesting in hearing Lou Tice and Nick Saban speak in Alabama on January 25.

Roll Tide.

Click here to view the embedded video.

For more information about Discovering The Power In Me (DPM) please visit my page on this program here.

I’ve been reading a lot of different blogs online and I’ve enjoyed bringing in some guest bloggers to this site.  Sometimes though, I find a cool news article and I want to do more to it than just “Digg” it.  Starting on August 11, 2009, I will have a new weekly feature of discussing some sort of topic in the news that seems relevant to the idea of “what it means to be human”.  It will be called “Tuesday Newsday” and I’ll try to have it up early on Tuesday morning each week.

If you are interested in subscribing to my blog feed, just click on the button to the right that says: and choose your favorite reader or (if you’re not sure what a reader is) the email option.

Thank you for checking out my site and please feel free to forward my contact information to any friends or colleagues of yours that might be interested in reading along (by clicking the + Share/Save button below).  You can link to a posting on your Facebook account with the button as well.  It’s pretty cool.  If you have any questions about  using TPI’s programs, just click the appropriate tab in the menu bar above or send me an email at zparsons@pac-inst.com.

What do you think of the new look?

Click here to view the embedded video.