The 2 biggest things that have happened over the past 2 weeks is that I passed my dissertation defense with flying colors and moved my wife and daughter from OH (where we had been living for the past 6 months) to Cary, NC (where I moved about a month ago). I actually did both in a 3 day stretch. The dissertation defense went great. I had been unusually nervous before it but it didn’t seem to be fully warranted and my committee approved my dissertation with very few edits. The move to Cary went equally well. My brother-in-law and my in-laws helped with the move and it was relatively easy. 5 days after the boxes were unloaded in to our apartment and we’ve almost got everything in its place. Good thing too, since we’re having an athlete I work with spend the weekend here.

While those 2 things have been the center of my work-related universe over the past 3 weeks I’ve also had some other exciting things happen:

• I was able to relocate my track club from the Metropolitan association of USATF to the NC association and change the affiliation of all of our athletes competing at the USATF indoor national championships  so that we’d be properly represented. This process isn’t as easy as it might sound.
• I purchased new uniforms for all members of the club and got them embroidered and screen printed…a laborious task that took far more shopping than I’d thought.
• The members of the track club have been doing great – with 3 top 8 placings at this past weekend’s USATF indoor national championships; as well as great winning performances from the two international members of the team.
• I was invited to speak at the Beijing Sports University for a week in May. I’ve never been to China and really was hoping to be there in 2008 to do video analysis for the U.S. at the Olympics so this will be a great ‘consolation’ prize.
• Immediately prior to that week trip to Beijing, I’ve been asked to do an exciting USATF Level 1 school in Orlando, FL. Teaching coaches education schools is one of my passions and I’m excited that I’ll be able to meet up with my good friend Ron Grigg.
• I rented and took possession of a storage facility that I plan to use to house a soon-to-be-released line of incredible bumper plates and Olympic weight lifting bars. In addition to using them in my training facility, I’m also going to be the East coast distributor for the manufacturer.
• Thanks to some well-connected friends, Smoot Carter & Paul Dietzel, I had great meetings with the Executive VP of Alumni Affairs at LSU and also the new LSU Athletic Director while I was in Baton Rouge. I see both as being potential partners in future business endeavors.
• I’ll be coaching a friend’s athlete this weekend at the USATF indoor multi-event national championships which are held only 10 miles away from me in Chapel Hill, NC. I’ve met him once before and know his coach quite well. Our coaching cues and philosophies are quite similar. He should be a solid contender and hopefully I’ll be able to help him. He’ll be repping my HPC Elite track club for the competition.

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Well, as I posted on the blog about a month ago I pretty much finished my dissertation. I was originally planning on defending during the last week of the semester (last week) but a variety of factors conspired against me – my advisor was in China and quite busy, I couldn’t afford the plane tickets to get him round trip to America and back, I had a stats issue that needed some clearing up, and oh yeah, my dog ate my homework. So while I could have finished up, my advisor and I decided it would be best for all parties to just defend the dissertation next semester. The only holdup is that this would require an extension on the statute of limitations on my doctoral degree. No problem we thought. Well, I waited weeks to hear back and the semester actually came to a close last Friday with no news from LSU. I was uncharacteristically worried that I wasn’t going to get a chance to defend (at least at LSU…I would have just enrolled elsewhere).  In the meantime, the waiting kinda put everything concerning my dissertation on hold. I didn’t get any drafts back from my advisor which in turn meant that I didn’t really have anything to work on and I had basically just spent the last month doing (instead of being) ABD.  The fatally optimistic side of me pushed me on to continue on with the plans of moving and setting up a facility though. Today I received word from LSU that the extension had been….

[tune in tomorrow for answers to this and other cliffhangers]

The most important thing I’ve done is take a new mindset on how to tackle seemingly monumental tasks. Normally, I’m GREAT at taking on a million things and juggling them with a high level of proficiency. On the flip side though, I SUCK at completing the jobs that I start. On top of that, I tend to take on anything that is offered or thrown at me and often find myself wasting time trying to get things PERFECT rather than just finishing it. The combination of these traits means I’m often baking a lot of really great cakes but all the while having a hard time putting the icing on the cake so to speak. This was especially true with my dissertation. Since I started rethinking my approach, things have been more productive though. Instead of looking at the remaining chapter of my dissertation that I have to write and thinking “where do I start,” or “I can just do it tomorrow,” now I approach it with the following two points in mind:

1. I give myself a fairly low minimum level of expectation for daily work on a given task. For example, on my dissertation writing, I now tell myself that I have to write a paragraph a day. That’s it. Just a paragraph. Sometimes I write 2 or 3 in a day but I’ve pretty much been just writing 1. I know it doesn’t sound like much but I’m actually finding that when stringed together over time, these little bits of progress will add up to the completion of my seemingly monumental task.  It’s kinda like the lifetime prisoner who chips away a fraction of his prison wall each day. Before he knows it, he’s broken free from what was holding him back.
2. The second thing that I’ve done is tried to put my OCD perfectionism at bay. I fight the urge to stay on something until it’s perfect and instead just plow through whether the work is good or not. On the surface, this doesn’t sound like a good idea but I’ve found that because of how I operate, it’s better for me to “Just Do It” because if it isn’t perfect the first time around I’ll fix it later. With writing, this approach makes it easier to just sit down and wright and is a nice way of busting through periods of writer’s block.

If you find yourself in a position like I’ve described and have the same disposition as I do, try out these tips and let me know if they work for you.