TAKING STOCK | EXCERPT FROM MY AUTHORED BOOK

Finding Your Five Tools

Even if you’re not a baseball player

Author’s image using ChatGPT

Excerpted from my recently published book, Finding the Sunny Side: Musings for My Grandchildren.

In Alfred’s Journey to Be Liked, I have a clear message for Alfred, which is true for all of us: Know what you do well and build upon it. The following dialogue between Alfred and his coach, referred to throughout as simply “Coach,” explains why this is the right way to go.

Coach: Your mom asked me to help you become a five-tool player. I have to admit that I didn’t know what that meant, but I’ve done my homework.

Alfred: Wait! She wants me to be a baseball phenom? I can barely throw across the diamond, and I’m slower than a turtle.

Coach: Alfred, she was talking figuratively. What does being a five-tool player mean to you?

Alfred: Simple — hitting, hitting for power, running, fielding, and throwing.

Coach: That’s baseball specific. But if we take it up a level, can it be about building a range of skills that serve us?

Alfred: Like?

Coach: Well, let’s take you. You’ve got math and chess. You enjoy them, and they help you build friendships.

Alfred: So “five tools” is an analogy. Now I need to come up with three more. Does appreciating humor count?

Coach: It could, but you’ve got others. For example, you appear to be a good teacher. I say this because your friends keep coming back for help with their math, and you’re teaching them chess, too. You seem to know how to break down concepts into digestible pieces — chunks, so to speak.

Alfred: Like you’re doing for me. So now I am at three tools — math, chess, teaching — unless humor counts. I am a strong video game player. I am aiming to be a good communicator. I will never be a good dancer, but fortunately, we only need five skills.

Coach: You’ve got the idea. A few skills you’ve nailed, and a few are under development.

After Alfred meets with Coach, Alfred decides to write an essay about being a five-tool player. Alfred is excited because just using the term “five-tool” and his name in the same sentence is thrilling. After all, first and foremost, he is a lover of baseball, and he is not athletically adept.

Alfred begins his piece, which he writes partly for himself and partly for Coach:

It feels odd to write something when I don’t have to. I mean, if I were going to do something voluntarily that felt like homework, it would probably be to solve a math problem — about 90% likely that’s what I’d pick. But instead, here I am writing about my five tools. I like Coach’s suggestion, though, because it’s as close as I will get to feeling like a baseball player. After all, I can’t run fast, or throw across the diamond, or even swing a bat and make clean contact. There will never be a “go yard” moment for me — other than watching a home run on television.

But picking five tools that aren’t about baseball might just be how I go yard. My mom uses a different word. She uses the word “mature.” “Alfred,” she’ll say, “I know that sometimes you feel awkward and maybe even lonely, but I also know that you are going to mature. You will become well-rounded, and your world will be just fine.”

My mom has some of it right. I do sometimes feel awkward, though less so today as I write this.

Alfred picks his five tools: math, chess, teaching, making Soho Glob cookies, and an aspirational tool of “hearing the unspoken words.” Coach explained that it’s important to sense what people are thinking but not saying, and then gave Alfred some tips on how to hear the unspoken. This involves paying attention to body language, eye contact, speech cadence, and even intuition.

With so much required, Alfred decides that “hearing the unspoken” will be an aspirational stretch goal — and a worthy extra one to shoot for.

The act of taking stock and finding your pockets of strength is a great start toward building more confidence. Sometimes, though, we are uncertain about our strengths, so here is a logical way to proceed.

1. Ask yourself, what do you enjoy? The things we enjoy are often where we bring our best capabilities.
2. Ask your friends and family to describe the strengths and tendencies they notice in you.
3. Identify the areas where you tend to procrastinate or disengage. Maybe it’s writing or solving math problems. Maybe you get bored or unsettled when you hear people talking too much about their feelings and frustrations.

These all serve as clues. Above all, be honest with yourself. Good “data in” is how we achieve good “data out.”

Alfred concludes his essay as follows:

I am going to end this note to myself by referencing one of my all-time favorite characters in literature. I love Gandalf, the wizard in The Lord of the Rings. He is wise, great with people, and a believer that things will work out. He brings hope to the world, and he solves problems all the time. He leads in the nicest of ways.

Alfred then addresses Coach:

Coach, if these tools can in any way help me to be like Gandalf (and yes, I know he is fictional, but still), I will be proof that, as you say, “Tools equal confidence, and with confidence, I can trust myself more.” That sounds very good, and also where I want to be.

This explains why finding our five tools is important. It goes a long way toward helping us build trust in ourselves, which is a key building block for anything we hope to accomplish.

Thanks for reading my excerpt.

I hope you will check out my book, Finding the Sunny Side: Musings for My Grandchildren, here.