I Wanna Get Better!

I Wanna Get Better

John Derryberry

I walked out of the gym in Orwell, Ohio, with my chest puffed out way too far for my dad’s liking. However, I didn't think it was puffed out far enough. I probably played the best basketball game of my life, but we lost heartbreakingly. On the drive home, I didn’t think any of that was my fault. That fact was not lost on my dad, yet when we got home, we had a long discussion about basketball, but it was more about life. My dad had a way of doing that, taking a normal thing, a basketball game, and showing how it could relate to life on the grander scale. It was unbelievably annoying how good he was at this skill.

The conversation we had was about how, too often, so many of us examine life through the lens of, “That was the best we are going to accomplish.” He asked me, was it worth examining the game through the lens of how we do get a win next time? How many more basketball games are you going ot have in your life? Do you want that to be the best game you have ever played at 14? That seems like an awful young age to peak at. Slowly but surely, the conversation turned to what you are doing to always get better at whatever skill, life role, and profession. In typical dad fashion, there was no denying he was right when he finished up.

It’s an anchor conversation I come back to a lot in life. The notion we should stay curious about becoming a better version of ourselves. I think it’s lost on a lot of us that there is room for improvement; even the tiniest amount of improvement could improve our parenting, our outlook on life, our job performance. We seem to have a cultural moment where we expect that it’s on others to get better; it’s on everyone but ourselves to examine their actions, and others should change course. While I’m in the business of helping people heal from trauma and abuse and figure out their emotional and mental health, I still firmly believe that change starts with me looking in the mirror and asking myself to get better.

Now, it’s gotten a lot more difficult with age and life complications. As a dad, a husband, a boss, a community leader, a son, a friend, and in every other life situation I navigate, it's fraught with time commitments, time restraints, and a complicated math equation of how life plays out. Twists, turns, surprises, and just the randomness of life can easily take us out of the “who needs to get better” equation. I hated the conversation with my dad at 14 years old. I did play the best basketball game of my life at 14, but it turns out I played a bunch more. Some of them were better than that game, some of them were about the same, and some of them were way worse. The question I am now finding myself coming back to often is: do I want this to be my peak, or is there room to get better? And the answer has always been yes, there is room to get better. It's a question I hope more people frame around themselves than they frame for others. It’s the easiest thing in the world to say, others need to be better. It’s one of the hardest to say: I need to be better. But I found that as I get better, so do those around me, and vice versa.

Nothing worth accomplishing that has lasting impact on those around us happens with everyone expecting everyone else to get better. And that was what my dad was trying to teach me all those years ago: to have the life you want, it starts with you saying to yourself, what do I need to do better? And asking again and again until you find yourself in a better spot in life. A 14-year-old is rolling his eyes that my dad was right again; almost 44-year-old John is rolling his eyes that he was right 30 years later, but I’m still asking myself that same question. How do I get better?