Jonathan Niese pitcher for The New York Mets just pitched a gem of a baseball game against The St. Louis Cardinals. He pitched 7.1 innings, struck out three, walked two, and allowed six hits and two runs. The Mets snapped a six game losing streak and won the game 5-2. The last 2 games that Niese pitched before this one weren’t too good. As a matter of fact he was god-awful, and he just plain stunk. They asked Niese what was different today in a post game interview and he said “I started throwing the ball over the top again, and not off to the side.” Niese’s hand position when delivering a baseball to home plate is undetectable to the naked eye, but his pitching coach Dan Warthen noticed the difference and corrected it. Hold your left hand out in front of you with your palm facing toward someone or something. Now turn your hand at the wrist one inch to the left. Once Niese brought his hand back to the right his delivery to home plate improved. That little one inch move to the left made the difference in Niese being a winner today and a loser the last two games.

Sometimes it takes a coach to help us make changes, but in reality we don’t have a coach. A life coach that is. We go through life doing things, and saying things until we find out that we are making small mistakes in our life, in our marriage or relationships, with our children, and on our jobs. The late Steven Covey put it best when he said; “Often we climb the ladder of success only to discover at the end of our life that the ladder was leaning on the wrong wall.”

We are only a compilation of what people have said to us and what people have done to us throughout our lives, and the decisions that we make or have made are based upon the imprint that we have received as a child. The way we think, the things we say, the way we act, our attitudes, and our motives are almost set in stone by the time we are just five years old. Like a computer if our brain is not programmed correctly we will believe that what we say and do is true and accurate, and our decisions in life may be based on some false conclusions that we have drawn about the world and the people in it. Jon Niese didn’t even notice the very small repositioning of his hand on the ball; he thought that his mechanics were fine and couldn’t understand why he was pitching so poorly. As adults we don’t notice the small things that we do or say that could be rude, discourteous, or just plain inconsiderate, and believe that we are doing just fine. We have a hard time trying to understand why we keep losing at the game of life. The coach told Niese about his mechanical error, other people tell us about our shortcomings and the things we don’t see or even realize. These are our blind spots. Niese adjusted, can we? Truly, the big stuff is the small stuff.