Dallas Stars: New Year, New You
With the onset of a new year, the Dallas Stars get a fresh chance if they can change their perspective and focus on something new.
It’s January 3rd, so we can just skip right over the customary, rudimentary resolution chit chat and go straight on to the real heart of it. While it’s great to have multiple goals that you want to reach on an individual basis and plan to do at the onset of a new year, for some of us, that can prove pretty impossible.
Everyone has their own specific strong suits. For some of us, it’s alliteration, and for some of us, it’s seeing how all the small pieces come together to make the puzzle. But then there’s those of us who are much better at focusing on the big picture.
And for those kind of people, resolutions can be hard. What’s the use of a bunch of small goals if you don’t know how they connect and what the larger purpose is that you’re working towards?
That’s why I sometimes prefer mottos over resolutions. Looking back over the course of your closed-out, lived-up year, you may start to see some themes and patterns emerge. Are they ones you like and are proud of, or would rather sweep under the rug?
Identifying overlying ideas, concepts, or principals can help us big-picture people strategize about our own version of New Years resolutions. Simply take that last year’s motto or theme that you want to avoid living through in repeat, and twist it around to what you want to accomplish instead. And bingo, you have your New Years Motto.
Still a little confused? No worries, I have an illustration that I’m pretty confident you’ll find helpful and appropriate.
The Dallas Stars seemed a little lost in their play last year in the first part of their season. The only consistent thing was their inconsistency and the pace at which injuries kept befalling them. Their motto? You win some, you lose some.
And that’s pretty much what they did. They won, they turned around and lost right afterwards, and kept repeating the cycle. They kept losing players to injury, only to rehabilitate and return them to play just in time to see another go. It was a rollercoaster, with many ups and downs of expectations.
So if this is what the Stars should be looking to avoid and even reverse in the second and final half of this season that was supposed to be a shining one for them, what should their new guiding principal be? If you can’t prevent injuries or predict the quality of play and the outcome it will have on any given night, what can you do?
You can stay the course. And that’s exactly what the Dallas Stars should focus on in the new year: staying the course. When everything goes wrong, just keep going. If at first you don’t succeed, try try again (unless, of course, your pursuit is skydiving). There are a lot of cliché, overused saying floating around out there, but I think the most accurate one comes from Aristotle:
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act but a habit.”
How’s that for some New Years motivation?
Formation of a habit requires consistency and that oh so elusive stick-to-it-tiveness that the Dallas Stars lacked in the past year of this season.
They can’t predict injuries, or how the puck is always going to bounce, but with enough determined practice and resolution to keep on keeping on, they will be able to predict their quality and level of play every night, because they will have formed as a habit excellent play no matter the obstacle in their way.
Don’t get me wrong- that doesn’t mean they’ll always win if they follow this principal. Another nugget of wisdom for us to carry into the New Year: our best isn’t always good enough. That stings, but it’s true and very freeing to recognize.
Some of my favorite Stars games to watch, ones that had me on the edge of my seat and at my most vocal, didn’t result in their victory. Sure, the end score was close, but the other team just barely nudged them out. And that’s alright. It’s the reaction to those results that should be transformed by the act of just staying the course.
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You brush yourself off, get up, and keep on like you won by three goals instead of lost by them. If the Stars start adhering to that as a force of habit, they’ll likely start to see themselves much more often on the other side of that scenario.