THRIVING DOESN’T COME WITH A PITCH COUNT

If you are a baseball fan who has watched the game for decades, you undoubtedly remember the time when pitchers routinely pitched complete games, and some of the best of them had 20-win seasons while finishing most of the games that they started. The sport has changed, and now you rarely see a starting pitcher who also finishes the game – yielding to specialists like “set-up men” and “closers”. Most starting pitchers are on a pitch count that rarely exceeds 100 pitches a game.

The pitch count concept is one that I’ve used in working with people, and my use of the concept is not always complementary – as it can be used to refer to people who start but don’t finish a job that they are perfectly capable of finishing. It’s as if they put themselves on a pitch count.

As a positive psychologist, I use the word, thriving, a lot. In working with people, my job – and theirs – is not merely to overcome the issues that they are addressing and reach a state of normal functioning. The job is to thrive in such a way that life becomes a process of not merely overcoming problems but always pursuing the thinking and behavior patterns that lead to becoming an increasingly better version of oneself. Thriving is a lifestyle!

Think about the things that help you to thrive: how you take care of your body through exercise, sleep, healthy eating, and other practices; how you keep your mind active; how you interact with and help others; how you handle stress and uncertainty. You never really reach a point where you can legitimately say that you’ve thrived enough, and now you can stop thriving. There is no pitch count associated with thriving.

I’d like to think that thriving is my lifestyle. I think that it’s helped me to handle significant loss, and it’s helped me to help others at an age when most non-thrivers are experiencing physical and mental decline. Those limiting behaviors are not options for me and they shouldn’t be for you. Life is much more rewarding when you are thriving rather than passively declining.

I never downplay the fact that genetics plays a significant role in development and adversely affects the ability of some people to thrive. Most of us, however, are able to make an affirmative choice to pursue the process of thriving because, after all, thriving doesn’t come with a pitch count.