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Monday, December 17, 2007

Steroid Scandal...We're All on the Juice

“We herd sheep, we drive cattle, we lead people. Lead me, follow me, or get out of my way.” General Patton

I’ve often pondered: if I was a pro baseball player during the heart of the steroids era, would I have juiced up in order to beef my stats and earn another $10 million in my contract? Possibly. Would that have been a bad decision? Yes. Would I have been a bad person for having done so? No. It’s called the herd instinct and most everyone, at some point, gets swept into it. Yes those baseball players did the wrong thing but before you shake your head in disapproval, I invite you to get off your high horse and think carefully.

Popular culture breeds herds rather than individuals. Whether we’re in a political party or a social clique or a particular fan club, we often find ourselves part of the group excitement running in a certain direction and chanting a certain cheer. It’s natural and provides great times and a comforting sense of community. But…we can also get caught up with the rebellious kids or the gossipy teens or the snobby adults moving in formation toward a darker destination. In the case of the baseball players who took the “juice,” they were swept up by a herd running in a bad direction. But that doesn’t mean they were bad people.

Of those implicated in George Mitchell’s report on steroid abuse in baseball, one of the players often would come with his wife to my yoga class. He was a good guy who would always take the time to stop and chat with me after class. So when the news media blasted him to smithereens last week, I thought of him and how he surely regretted being under the influence of performance-enhancing drugs. I imagine if he could go back in time while caught in the stampede of puffy-muscled, fastball-throwing, home run hitting, injury prone “cheaters,” he most definitely would have pushed the eject button.

But when one is deep in the crowd and doing what’s cool at the time, it ain’t easy to do the right thing. So how do we build the strength to recognize when we’re running with a troubled herd?

1. Know your Juice?

“Masses are rude, lame, unmade, pernicious in their demands and influence, and need not to be flattered, but to be schooled.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

You might not be shooting up with Juice but in some way, you’ve surrounded yourself with shows and trends and sights and sounds that are shifting your course. Are those influences healthy? It’s a supreme challenge for any human being: know who and what is influencing you. For instance, I enjoy Oprah and I’m leaning toward Barack Obama. Is that really who I want to vote for? For instance, I loved the Grateful Dead and they smoked a lot of marijuana. Is that something that benefits my brain cells?

2. Find your Solitude

“There is no such thing as a good influence. Because to influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtures are not real to him. His sins, if there are such thing as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of someone else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him.” Oscar Wilde

Without time alone, it’s really hard to make decisions based on your absolute truth. If we wake up in the morning and bounce right into the craziness of the day, we never really get a sense of what’s up and what’s down. Start off your day with time alone. If it means waking up earlier to get a few moments of peace, that’s the best time to calibrate your sense of right and wrong

3. Stop-on-a-Dime

“The trouble with following the herd is stepping in what it leaves behind.” Anonymous

Visualize a herd of buffalo running across the plains. Should one of those buffalo suddenly stop, she’d risk being stampeded by the others. In other words, to be swept up in a herd and suddenly stop to move in another direction is a very COURAGEOUS action. It takes some serious guts and strength to dare to pull yourself out of the herd. Whether you’re a kid in the cool crowd who stands up for a nerd; or an adult in the snobby crowd who voices an unpopular opinion, one has to dig deep to stop-on-a-dime and face the stampede.

The best way to cultivate such a skill is to play devil’s advocate more often. When you’re in a group and everyone agrees, dare to disagree. This doesn’t mean annoy people like Debbie Downer on Saturday Night Live, but it means stand up for those opinions you’ve nurtured so carefully in your alone time. People will ultimately respect you more for your honest and deeply felt dissent…than they will for your go-with-the-flow nods of approval.






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posted by David Romanelli @ 8:55 AM