Al Kyte's Life Take-Aways

 

“Who was the first baseball and basketball coach at Oakland’s Skyline High School?”  That’s the sports trivia question I like to ask when meeting former Skyline students, because I was that coach and few of them would know that.  I was there for only two years in the early 1960s before being recruited away to teach and coach at the University of California.  During that first year at Skyline, only one boy who had made the “All-League Team” at his former school transferred to ours.  He was a great kid but unfortunately experienced a disappointing senior year in baseball with us.  My team had a decent season, but I felt I had failed that boy in not bringing out the best in his abilities.  So at the season’s end I was surprised to receive a letter from his father expressing how much their whole family appreciated all I had done for their son, including motivating him to go on to college.  That father, by taking the time to thoughtfully write down those words under such circumstances, lifted my spirits in a way no spoken compliment could have.  Written compliments add impact by leaving a person with something encouraging to look at, think about, and perhaps build on.

Some situations are not conducive to writing down our compliments, yet we can still add a personal touch.  There is nothing more personal than taking the time to learn someone’s name.  I did this when teaching at the University of California, learning more than 300 first and last names of students each semester and chatting with students between classes.  It always surprised me how many would later ask me to write a letter of recommendation for them even though I could offer little more than a character reference.  Sadly, many of them had no relationship with any professor in their major field whose recommendation would carry more weight in job placement. 

I found that taking the time and effort to learn names of people we met through our homeless outreach meant even more as many of them were living in shame.  Being able to greet them by name let them know they were remembered and valued as individuals.  Often we were able to follow this up by listening to their stories, encouraging them, praying over their specific concerns, and sharing hugs and laughter.  

Some people associate personalizing with having a name imprinted on a garment, but I use that term for trying to imprint a caring personality into my speech and actions.  Too often I have been preoccupied with tasks to be done with little regard for the other people involved.  In the Bible we read, “Let no one seek his own, but each one the other’s well being.”                                      

Personalizing during hard times, such as many people have recently been going through, carries an additional opportunity to step up and be there with our encouragement.  We do well to focus on communicating topics that are uplifting and even put a smile on the faces of people who may hold a different world view than our own.  This was our country’s emphasis during the scariest times I have known, the World War II years when the armies of both Japan and Germany were advancing throughout the world.  Our mood was typified in songs such as one written then and popularized by the Mills Brothers that reminded us to “Accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative, and don’t mess with mister in-between.”  

Whatever situation we are going through, there often exists a choice of taking time to care for other people’s needs in one way or another.  I have been known for my knowledge in several areas of interest, but I would prefer to be remembered more for how I care about people than what I know about things.  I have found the old saying so often true that “people don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.”