How Life Is A Team Sport

Have you found your people in life? The ones who understand you, would be there for you in an instant, who really know you? What if you just haven’t or maybe haven’t found them all yet?

I usually make friends by being drawn to people who feel familiar. They naturally give off a great vibe and I feel like I’ve known them forever. However, I’ve also found some of my dearest friends under more unexpected circumstance, they were hidden at first.

I truly hope this story makes you rethink the people that you meet throughout your life and helps you to open up, to be seen and to find the ones that are on your team.

I was listening to Simon Sinek’s podcast A Bit of Optimism recently, Episode 26. Faith with Quilen Blackwell. Quilen talks about the struggles he faced on his journey through life and how he was successful by having faith as well as the help and generosity of strangers he met along the way. Strangers that became friends, friends that became his people.

While reflecting on their conversation, Simon recaps what he’s learned from Quilen’s experience, “life is uncertain. Life is not a solo sport. The team is a large group of people, many of whom we don’t even know, are on our team”.

The concept is that even for those of us who are chronically independent, we all need help from someone at some point in our life and somebody will need help from us. Nobody can do life alone. The beauty is that we find our people, our team, throughout our journey only by being visible and not hiding from them.

It really put in perspective to me just how much faith we put in others. When life presents us with struggle or unideal circumstances, we have to trust and believe they’ll show up for us when we need them. Ironically, sometimes it will be those we overlook that show up for us. They were on our team the whole time and we didn’t even realize it.

My unexpected friends surprised me because when we met, I found them to be loud and assertive. I’m quiet, introverted and I get overwhelmed easily around these types of personalities. I thought, “This person is not my type.”

What I quickly learned was that their larger-than-life personas were a mask, a defense mechanism hiding the beautiful, caring, sensitive souls that were on the inside. Just like my shy, reserved self was a mask hiding the easy going and open person I believed I was on the inside. I guess we all play a bit of a role sometimes, it’s getting past it that is necessary to really know someone.

I admit that I whole heartedly judged them, right away. I’m so grateful that fate had a hand in intertwining our paths and ensuring we got to know each other anyway. It was only through our own vulnerability that we were we able to be our true selves and really see each other. I see you; you see me and we are on the same team.

Simon ends the podcast by saying,

“I actually find that actually very relaxing, actually very calming to be honest. This belief that my team is there, even if I can’t see them. I feel a lot safer, that I’m not doing this alone. The more we put ourselves out there, the more our team will show up. But if we hide, the team doesn’t know where we are.”

This interpretation just struck a chord with me. What if we really changed our perspective from me to us. What if we knew to our very core that our team is here, is out there and that we’ll find them if we have the faith to trust that they’ll show up. Our team will never find us until we have the courage to be vulnerable and show ourselves to the world.

What if we started each day being a little more open, a little more aware of the people passing by in our lives? What if we truly believed we aren’t alone and that they want to find us as much as we want to find them?

“But if we hide, the team doesn’t know where we are”. Let that sink in.