We all have to help each other be 100%

Author and podcaster Brene Brown often talks about a conversation she has with her husband frequently. She said they check in to see how close they are to having “100%.”

So some days she will come home and say, “Hey, I have about 40 in me, where are you?”

He will look at her and say, “I’ve got you today, I’ve got 60.”

When they have a day in which they do not add up to 100, they take a quick pause and figure out something fast they can do to get there. At times, she says, it may just mean a few deep breaths to get closer; at other times, they will decide if they have too much on their plates and what needs to go in order to lighten their load.

When I hear this strategy, it makes me think back to days my Duke soccer team had conditioning with our coach, Jeff Howser. During conditioning sessions, Howser would tell us that it was normal to be less than 100% on most days, especially when we were doing hard training sessions. But, he said on those days, that is when it can be really important to count on our teammates to make up for each other.

Most of the time, I found that we wanted to do that for one another. That when a teammate was struggling to have a good game or exhausted from staying up late to study, we were happy to find a little bit extra gas in our tanks for them. It was understood that by getting our teammates as close to 100% as we could was better for everyone and it allowed us to perform better.

This idea also created a bit of a security blanket, too. We viewed it as our responsibility to take care of one another and to lift up our teammates on challenging days. During conditioning, this may have meant standing beside a teammate who was exhausted and pacing them if you felt good that day. It may mean taking a teammate dinner because they rushed straight to the library after training. It may mean checking on them if they seem to be having a hard day or if a coach got on them. It may just mean a simple pat on the shoulder after a bad training session, so they know we still had their back. Whatever it was, it mattered to each of us that we tried to get to 100% as a unit, because we all thrived from that.

Every week, I think about the intersection of lessons from sports and how they apply to our everyday lives, and one thing I have noticed is that there are often a lot of ways we can apply these lessons, but we choose not to. As a team, we are a unit. We are (hopefully) closely connected to and protective of our teammates and we want them to feel loved and cared for, and while we don’t have “teammates” in our lives, we can still have units.

To me, when one person in our community struggles, it means we are not at our best; we are not at 100% — unless one of us notices and tries to lift them up to get there. Unfortunately, I think that we may tend to do the opposite. Sometimes, we have so much going on in our own lives, that when we hear about others’ hardship, we may (secretly) sigh a small breath of relief and think, “Gosh, my issues really are not too bad.”

Then we may even talk to a friend about it. I think whether we admit it to ourselves or not, we sometimes find relief in the pain of others, and we are quick to share others’ pain with our circle of people. I wonder, though, how much closer to 100% our community, our society, our world could be if instead of sharing the struggles of others and letting it be a relief from our own, we decided to try to lift those who are down to 100%. If we send a text that says, “Thinking of you,” or give them a hug when we see them. Maybe that person never knows why you said that or what you meant, but they may leave that interaction feeling more hopeful than they did before.

We do not have teammates, but we do have to inhabit this Earth together, and I think there is great power in learning that when one of us hurts, we all hurt a bit. I hope that like good teammates do for one another, we will no longer spread the struggles of those operating at under 100%, but think of ways we can help them get there. If it makes teams stronger and closer, I think it could do the same for communities off the field.

E.J. Proctor Story, a 2014 graduate of Fike High, was the starting goalkeeper for Duke’s 2015 NCAA runner–up year, 2016 Elite 8 finish and 2017 Final Four finish. Currently the Duke record holder for shutouts and goals against average, she went on to play one season professionally with the Utah Royals FC after graduating from Duke. Now back in Wilson, E.J. is assisting with coaching youth soccer players and is employed as the Lead Physical Therapist for Wilson County Schools.

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