Announcements: Rays meet is due 5/16 (Friday), again it is open to all swimmers; I will be sending the file ASAP so please sign up before the deadline. The ocean swim is due June 4^th to the office with the paper work and check. Marla will send all the entries at the same time, there will be no late entries excepted past June 4^th. NO PRACTICE May 23 for all VAR and AA, will be attending a movie at Carmike theatre, Time and Movie: TBA.

Monday Meeting Recap: Today we talked about the change again, but this time we broke it down into different levels. We talked about the Seven Levels of Change, which is actually a book used by many company’s, we just happened to apply it to our job as a competitive swimmer.

1. DO THE RIGHT THINGS

            -Set priorities   -Do what’s important first

            -Become more EFFECTIVE

2. DO THINGS RIGHT

            -Follow procedure

3. DO THINGS BETTER

            -Think about what you’re doing

            -Think of ways to IMPROVE things

4. DO AWAY WITH THINGS

5. DO THINGS OTHER PEOPLE ARE DOING

            -Find best practices

6. DO THINGS THAT HAVEN’T BEEN DONE

            -Try new technique

            -Ask, “WHY NOT?”

7. DO THINGS THAT CAN’T BE DONE

            -What’s IMPOSSIBLE for you today?

            -Imagine a perfect process

What I have done above is highlighted some key words to help you recognize what is important in each of these phases of change. Steps 1-5 are very easy to do in an athletic arena, steps 6 and 7 seem to be on a much higher level of change that we are all trying to achieve at some point in our swimming career.

One major thing I would change about the levels above for swimming would be to move step 5 to the top. If you are copying the best swimmers in the world i.e. Michael Phelps’s butterfly, making it effective, then becoming efficient, improving what you have changed, you will be a productive swimmer. This can be done for every aspect of our sport. The world’s best swimmers and even our own here at Poseidon didn’t become the best because they had to reinvent the wheel, they learned from the previous athletes before them.