The immediate question on my mind is not, “why don’t I take better care of myself.” Rather it’s “why is it coaches seem to take better care of their athletes than themselves.” Maybe I’m wrong, but I would love for others to chime in.

So I want to reach out to all gathering ideas on the subject and how we can change our actions to better portray the things we teach.

Edit: The “ideal body weight” for my height (6’0″) is 140 – 184lbs.

Coaches and Our Health originally appeared on Gregory A McMullen on May 17, 2012.

Why do you work so much?

I don’t do it for the pay, I don’t do it for the recognition. I do it because I want to pay off my bills. I’ve worked the same base full-time job for nearly 3 years, and honestly it’s helped me pay off my debt better than I thought it would. I’ve had some excellent situations though that allowed me to pay off 2 student loans within a year of graduating.

I’ve been blessed… Thus far, I’ve only had to pay one years worth of rent which means everything else goes towards my car, student loans and (wait for it…….) SAVINGS (401k and IRA)! (@PeteThePlanner would be proud I’m sure)

I’ve never been much of a “student” – honestly I didn’t graduate from Xavier University with a great overall GPA, but there was one class that forced me to wake up and realize what I need to do. That class was Finance.

So Prof. Sisak, thank you. I never had a professor ingrain something in my head so deeply.

At 25 years old, I have one student loan to pay off along with  $10k in a car loan left to pay. My goal is have no debt by the time Sarah finishes school and we buy our first home.

My Working Life originally appeared on Gregory A McMullen on April 2, 2012.

However, you can just add your username to the text inside of the Sharedaddy Module. Please note, I do not take any responsibility for broken code. I’m just giving you the potential for a work around.

You will want to edit this file: jetpack/modules/sharedaddy/sharing-sources.php – In this block of code.

Simply Add your username (however you wish) after

I personally used:

Which displays Via @McMullen_Greg: POST TITLE: URL

Not the greatest, but it does the job!

Adding @Username to Jetpack Sharedaddy originally appeared on Gregory A McMullen on March 28, 2012.

This season was a different monster; it was something I wasn’t quite ready for. I was responsible for practice development, discipline and general team maintenance. It was new and I was afraid of it, but I know that it helped me grow further than I thought possible in 5 months.

Meeting Challenges with Open Arms

Ask anyone around me, I was nervous (looking back on it, I still am). However, I knew that with hard work, dedication, research and a little luck our season would be a success.

The very first challenge I had to overcome was the fear of practice development and drafting meet lineups. This wasn’t an easy task by any means. For me, practice development takes a very long time. I’ve taken some advice from Glenn Mills from GoSwim.TV and GoSwimTV.com in regards to “write practices you would want to swim” and integrated that into my practice writing. My goal was to create challenging sets mentally and physically – mix it up and make them think about what they were swimming, instead of just doing it.

Gaining Respect and Faith in Leadership

While I say that practice development was the biggest challenge, I also knew that gaining respect would be difficult. Luckily, I worked with most of these athletes in the previous year. Consistency in a coaching staff created a very solid foundation with the athletes in our program. (It also helps to come from the former head coaches “tree”)

For some, it took weeks to buy into the program direction. However by mid December, after the Marion County Championship Meet, it seemed like people had bought in. This was clear by the success we had at Conference and Sectionals, but we had some great times at a variety of other meets along the path.

Respect is earned and cannot be expected nor forced. It’s hard gaining respect and I believe that a person’s character can lead to the success or failure of gaining that respect.

Finally….

The season ended with a bang. The girls finished strong. We had many athletes finish within the top 16 at sectionals and we ended up finishing 4th overall, what impressed me more was the poise at which they swam. We didn’t have nearly as much fear as we have in the past. The girls were confident and calm; they swam like it too.

The boys finished the season strong as well, including having at least one swimmer in every event. The meet started and finished the strongest, with our 200 medley and 400 free relay setting new school records.

I’m extremely proud I was a part of these teams and look forward to continuing my coaching career.

2011-2012 Season Recap originally appeared on Gregory A McMullen on March 28, 2012.

First: Eat out less and stop buying microwaveable/prepackaged frozen foods.
Second: Work out more. (The typical New Year’s Resolution, right?)
Third: Take care of myself and things I care about first and make more time for these things.
Fourth: Take more pictures! It’s something I enjoy, and I need to take advantage of it.

I know it’s well after the new year, but I still want these publicly known so that friends and family can hold me accountable.

Image: Idea go / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

My 2012 Resolutions originally appeared on Gregory A McMullen on January 8, 2012.

I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.- Michael Jordan

Failure leads to Success

I recently wrote Taking Risks; Meeting Opportunities because of my own life experiences. I’ve been too afraid at times to move on; mainly because I’m afraid of failure myself. However, should you be afraid to fail? Or simply learn from those around you and the mistakes that you’ve made in your life.

The best example I can currently think of involves Steve Jobs. We all know of the risks he took in the computer and entertainment industries, but amidst his success there was also failure.

Jobs failed better than anyone else in Silicon Valley, maybe better than anyone in corporate America. By that I mean Jobs did what only the greatest entrepreneurs can do: learn from their failures. I don’t mean learn from their mistakes. I mean learn from their abject, humiliating, bonehead, epic fails. Celebrating Steve Jobs’ Failures

The moral of this post is to accept failure. Own up to your failures and most importantly never stop learning. As soon as you give up on learning; you are abandoning success too.

And just because I can, I’ll leave you with one more MJ quote:

I can accept failure, everyone fails at something. But I can’t accept not trying.

I am a failure… originally appeared on Gregory A McMullen on November 28, 2011.

However, this solution didn’t completely work out of the box so I had to pull some knowledge in from working on previous PHP Forms.

The Facebook Code

Both of these pieces of code should be placed on your Static HTML Page/Tab

The Form

The AJAX

Please note that either of these can be edited to add or remove form fields. You just need to check to make sure the queryParams are updated in the Ajax as they are queried by the “getElementById” function

The PHP

I don’t know any other scripting languages at the moment and don’t have a desire to learn others at this point so everything else was done in PHP. The default PHP script can be found at the link above. This modified script will allow you to send an email using the PHP Mail function.

This is the code that I used. I plan on updating to counter an empty form. But haven’t had the time to do that as of yet. Let me know if you have any thoughts on how to improve a lead capture form on a Facebook page! Please note that I did NOT write this code and all credit should go to the original author George Huger and his post Submitting a Contact Form via AJAX From Your Facebook Page

Facebook Contact Forms with AJAX and PHP originally appeared on Gregory A McMullen on October 7, 2011.

The end date function goes to the NEXT month and subtracts a day to get the last day of the current month. Quite a nice piece of code if you have time sensitive offers like we do at Unique.

Orignal post: Get the first & last day of the month with PHP

PHP Code: First and Last Day of Month originally appeared on Gregory A McMullen on September 19, 2011.

People are Safe

You know what will make you happy don’t you? So why aren’t you doing everything you can to do it? I’ve seen in my life that I need encouragement do try something different. When I saw the coaching position open I was hesitant to apply, why? I knew that I had the knowledge of the sport and a want to coach. I was afraid of change and rejection.

In my job search after college I applied to numerous jobs over a ten month period. I had one interview and one job offer, it’s the position I hold now. Rejection, even after a year of employment, was still fresh in my mind. I really wanted to hold on to the job I had, and not risk losing it, especially since it pays my bills. However, I figured out that it was possible for the jobs to complement one another and I wanted to do something else with my time.

“The person who risks nothing, does nothing, has nothing, is nothing, and becomes nothing. He may avoid suffering and sorrow, but he simply cannot learn and feel and change and grow and love and live.”

- Leo F. Buscaglia

Breaking the Cycle

So how do you break the chain on a risk-less life? You take risks! Go do something you wouldn’t normally do. Apply for that dream job that you aren’t qualified for. The worst that anyone can say to you is “no thanks.” You might be afraid of rejection; but trust me, you’ll feel even more satisfied when you prove yourself wrong.

And one day, it will pay off. You will apply for the job and get it.

Tips to Succeed

If you want sure-fire ways to succeed in this, well send me the list too so we’ll both know. I do, however, have some tips of how to successfully take risks and feel rewarded.

1. Start Small – Take small calculated risks to get warmed up to the big stuff. There’s no reason to over compensate for your lack of risk taking before.
2. Be Confident – There’s nothing better than seeing someone who is confident in their skill sets. Believe in what you know and trust what you are doing. Do you think I knew anything about coaching going in? Nope, but I did have knowledge of the sport, how to do the technique and I was confident in relaying what I know to the group.
3. Don’t Let Fear Guide You – If you are smart and confident about the risks you are taking and fear will no longer be a factor. Just make sure you aren’t stepping too far out of your comfort zone too fast or you might take steps backwards. Jumping too far ahead will ruin your risk taking abilities in the future.

Taking Risks; Meeting Opportunity originally appeared on Gregory A McMullen on August 31, 2011.

My hope is that I can also urge you, my readers and friends, to also partake and keep me accountable for my goals, dreams and ambitions as I also help you.

• List some of your Major Goals. No more than 10; No less than 5. Figure out which ones need help.
  1. Become a Head Coach of a HS or Club Program
  2. Achieve Level 3 ASCA Certification or Higher
  3. Prove my self as knowledgeable in Leadership/Coaching
  4. Become a speaker on leadership and motivation for athletes/workers
  5. Get involved with post-college athletic groups, such as Master’s Swimming programs
• Assess your leadership ability. Questions not shown as respect the author and his work.
  • Strengths – Legacy, Growth, Buy-In, The Picture, Empowerment, Inner Circle, Magnetism, Intuition, Respect, Solid Ground, and Addition. From what I gather, it goes along the same lines of other analysis that I have done. I’m attracted to people and people are generally attracted to me. Essentially, I am a people person. I like to network and talk, and can seemingly gain their trust through example.
  • Needs Work – Timing, Sacrifice, Priorities, Momentum, Victory, Navigation, Influence, the Lid. What this is telling me is that I have to do a better job of increasing my effectiveness as a leader and rate on a better scale. Not only that, but I also need the willingness to sacrifice my personal time and set better priorities for myself and my teams that I work with.
  • Weaknesses – Process. Upon the first completion of the analysis this is the only area that is a true weakness. The process at which I grow needs work. I’d like some help in how to develop a prices of personal growth that I can engage in and would like some classes, articles or books to help improve myself in this category.
• Finally, ask others to rate your leadership ability. This is something I’ve not done and I would welcome those of you that read this and know me to do so.

Law of the Lid originally appeared on Gregory A McMullen on August 29, 2011.