Who are 3 People from Your Childhood Who Shape How You Live Now?
The immediate and most obvious people from my childhood who shaped how I live now are my parents and three younger sisters. I have lived in the same city and worked with most of them for the past 10 years, so I’ve had ample opportunity to reflect on the blessings and disfunctions of how my upbringing has impacted me as an adult.
For the purpose of this prompt, I’m going to set them aside and consider the three people outside of my family who have shaped how I live now.
- Swim Coach #1
The clear winners that stand out in my mind are Coach Paul and Coach Sean. Sean was my coach first so I’ll start with him.
Coach Paul moved to Beaverton, OR to take over as Head Coach of the swim team I was apart of when I was 12 years old. He brought with him Assistant Coach Sean who became my coach as an age group swimmer. I credit Sean with changing the trajectory of my life from that point forward.
I remember an analogy Sean shared with us a few weeks after taking over our squad. He had five moms each make a cake. Four cakes had one ingredient left out and one cake had all the required ingredients. As you can imagine four of the cakes were not quite right or downright disgusting. One didn’t rise, one was runny, one was rock solid, and one looked okay but was tasteless. Then one was perfect and delicious.
Each kid got a number and you only got a piece of the cake that matched your number. He was trying to demonstrate in a way that pre-teens could not deny that just like you need all the ingredients to make a good cake, you need every single practice to make a good swimmer. Leave out a practice and you may leave out a crucial ingredient to success.
Saying that every practice is required to make a good swimmer is asking more than it seems on first appearance. Our schedule consisted of daily week night swim practices after school followed by a dryland workout of weights or running, Saturday morning swim + run, and 2–3 morning practices before school during the week. This schedule ran from September through the end of July with a week off for Spring Break and the month of August “off”. Suffice it to say it’s asking a lot.
I don’t know if it was because I got the lucky number five perfect cake or if he spoke to some dormant calling deep in my soul, but from that point on through the end of high school, I only missed 3 practices- one when my best friend’s dad died of lung cancer, one when I woke up puking one morning and my mom wouldn’t let me go, and one when I had surgery on my nose.
While it is debatable whether or not that level of commitment was good for me as a child growing up, I do believe the experience overall has had a positive impact on how I live now, especially considering that I had a very priveleged upbringing. This invitation to total dedication to one thing has shaped my understanding of hard work needed to accomplish something good and taught me the value of suffering in the short term for the benefit of accomplishing a greater goal in the future. I’ve seen this play out in working through challenges at work, in working through challenges in friendships, and in commitment to the Hope of my Christian faith.
All in all, I’m grateful for the impact of Sean’s invitation and influence.
2. Swim Coach #2
Coach Paul was my next swim coach from age 14–18 when I moved from the Age Group squad up to the “National” squad. During those formative high school years, I gave him absolute control over every aspect of my life. You could say I sold my soul for a shot at my dreams which were always set far too loftily to achieve.
The promise in exchange for the undivided devotion was a shot at Olympic dreams. He had coached several athletes to Olympic glory and a variety of Olympic hopefuls came to train alongside us. He pushed us to train at the level it would take to achieve this end and held us to the strictest standards in practice. There were no edges cut, or else hell to pay. With his strategies, we were sure to at least qualify for trials.
What this looked like in day to day was every detail revolving around this goal. If that rhythm of year-round 26 hours of training per week wasn’t enough, Coach required running on the off mornings and Sundays, dictated my diet, and didn’t allow “dangerous activities” like skiing. Swimming had precedence over school and any other conflicts were met with threats of being kicked off the team (I was kicked off the team once my senior year). I missed at least one family reunion to avoid missing training. He regularly used a hand caliber to pinch and measure body fat and assigned extra work if the measurements weren’t meeting standards. He gave brutally honest feedback and his greatest compliment went along the lines of “Hey, nice job today, you’re ruining your image”.
While this description probably doesn’t paint the rosiest picture of his coaching style (and maybe rightly so), I absolutely loved my coach and loved the opportunity to train with him. He was rough around the edges and “old school” but this stemmed from a belief that we were able to “be the best” and pushed us beyond our perceived limits because of that belief.
He also had a grandfatherly side (he was in his 60’s). He used to holler into the locker room for me to COME OUT RIGHT NOW. I thought I was in trouble and would come running out ASAP only to find that he had cut a “Get Fuzzy” comic strip out of the newspaper because he knew it was my favorite and he liked it too.
I never came close to achieving any such dreams, but in falling short, I was able to accomplish enough to be proud of in retrospect. I missed the moon, but hit a couple stars along the way and did so in the company of teammates I’ll cherish as friends forever.
This experience has shaped me to this day in forming a deeply held belief that I can learn anything I set my mind to given enough time and dedication (as well as resources and opportunity). When given an opportunity, I’m not scared to try and fail because I know that you can’t succeed without giving it a shot and you also can’t succeed without struggling for a couple years in learning the basics. Once you’ve failed and learned from the failure for long enough, you turn a corner and slowly realize you’re able to do the thing you previously couldn’t. I can credit my ability to step into all of the jobs I’ve ever had to this learned confidence and also fun hobbies like cycling and swing dancing. Failure almost always precedes success. My experience under Coach Bergen’s influence taught me to embrace that.
It also left several shadow sides which I’ve had to work through. It took 4 years of swimming in college to overcome a deeply engrained idea that I don’t work hard enough. I still often struggle with feelings of inadequacy that may likely be in part from four years of hearing that I wasn’t doing enough (his signature motivational strategy) while I was trying my best. And I am far more self-reliant than I’d like to be.
These years swimming have faded into a “past chapter” that rarely directly surfaces in my present life, but the impacts and formations live on. Though the relationship with my coach was complicated to say the least, it had hands down the biggest influence on me during my high school years apart from my family and a significant impact on the woman I have become today.
3. Swim Friend
The other side of all the hours in the pool was the relationships I developed with my teammates. In addition to spending 4–6 hours a day together training, we spent innumerable hours sitting on pool decks waiting to compete. We spent many hours driving or flying to competition, many fun evenings sharing hotel rooms and taking a quick tour of something cool in the vicinity if it was a special occasion.
I’ll leave to your imagination the sorts of things that bored teenagers do to pass the time. I was generally shy and conservative, but I found my niche in the group in striking up deep conversations.
The second person that shaped me, earns this honor in my memory primarily due to a single conversation during one of these trips.
During the trip in question, we had a particularly large amount of free time. I had recently started attending a new church and they encouraged evangelism of the faith. This was a new concept to me and I was eager to follow the directions given at church.
My teammate, Matt, was an atheist and we were both stuck with lots of time to kill and nothing to do but talk. He was the perfect target.
Over the course of many hours we struck up a conversation about religion and he asked me questions that in retrospect, I’m sure I had no idea how to answer, but I did the best I could to act like I knew what I was talking about. I explained to him that he and I were on equal footing before God. We were both sinners and destined for hell. But Jesus died on the cross and therefore both of us can go to heaven if we accept His gift of salvation.
I nailed it.
Then Matt said to me two things that I’ll never forget. He said,
“That sounds like a fairytale” and he said,
“You’ve been brainwashed since childhood to believe this.”
I protested that this was not the case. However. Upon reflection, I discovered that it very much was the case that I believed a story I was only nominally familiar with only because I had been taught it by my parents growing up.
I was set to leave from Portland, OR to go to college in Lawrence, KS to swim and suddenly my internal life was completely disrupted by his statements.
I left home with a burden of questions which I couldn’t rest until I had answered. I spent the next five years almost exclusively in search of answers and that journey shaped my college experience which directly shaped the woman I became post college and established a framework through which I’ve experienced everything else that’s happened in life.
That conversation was a turning point for which I’m extremely grateful. One small statement that massively shaped who I am and how I live today.
Final Reflection
This is a fun and challenging topic to reflect on. I don’t know that I’ve ever paused to consider why I am the way I am and who has been integral in influencing me. Deep relationships are complicated and I’m all the more grateful for the people I walk through life with know, and those who I’ve been privileged to walk through life within the past.
