Starting Out: An Introduction
My name is Brendan McGoldrick, the Positivity Coach! Among many other things, I am a high school teacher as well as a cross country and track and field coach. I’ve spent most of the last quarter century being a runner, working with runners, and coaching runners and I spend a lot of time thinking about how to be at my best in all that I do. I am always trying to find the next thing that I can improve upon, and my search for improvement has taken me down a number of roads, and introduced me to a number of mentors, both in person and in media. One of the media mentors that has made the biggest impact on my life is Jon Gordon.
A friend and fellow high school coach began retweeting these messages of hope and positivity around 2019 and I noticed they seemed to be gaining a lot of traction. They were from someone called @JonGordon11, a name I recognized but knew nothing about, so curiosity began to get the best of me. Then the world shut down and my otherwise positive disposition began to go dark. I was dealing with dozens of other peoples negative issues at school, I was missing my team, my students, my colleagues, I wanted to go to the grocery store or a restaurant with my family, church on Sundays and the park with my sons was cancelled. Things got bleak for all of us. Then I made the decision to order a book from @JonGordon11 that would change the course of my life.
The Energy Bus was Gordon’s first book, and despite being rejected a couple dozen times, it eventually became a best seller and has been translated into a number of different languages. Reading this book and the wonders of positive psychology changed my mind in a profound way. Since then, I have one on to reading each of Gordon’s books, loaning a number of them out to anyone who will entertain the books, and using his lessons with my students, my student-athletes, and anyone that I come in contact with.
This past December, I was fortunate enough to attend Jon’s “Day of Development” as well as become a “Tri-Certified Trainer.” I spent two days online with Jon and his team learning more and going deeper into his strategies and mindset practices to be able to turnkey these lessons to others! The day after completing the training, I used one of the strategies his team uses all the time, called “Tell Me Something Good!” at practice. I started practice by turning to a senior student-athlete and said, “Hey, tell me something good that happened today!” And in front of the whole team she announced a phenomenal grade on a recent test in her AP class! Without prompting the entire team began to clap and cheer for her- even the students that barely knew her! We went on to having one of the best practice days of the season, and “Tell Me Something Good” became a weekly tradition.
This may seem like a small thing, but when you learn to stack a lot of small improvements in positivity, the results can be amazing! My goal, in fact my life’s purpose, is to “facilitate the success of those around me in order to help them maximize their potential.” The way I go about that happens to be teaching and coaching, but whether I am acting as Mr. McGoldrick the high school history teacher, Coach McGoldrick the cross country coach, Brendan the neighbor, friend, dad, husband, etc…, or the nameless face in a line of traffic: everything I do has to come back to serving my life’s purpose of facilitating the success of those around me to help them maximize their potential! I’m not perfect, far from it believe me on that one, but through diligent reading, studying, and learning from the plethora of my mistakes, I believe I can help any organization learn to be more positive moving forward, and I can help facilitate your success to maximize your potential!
I look forward to serving your organization and helping increase the positivity of the world! As Jon Gordon says, “positivity is the competitive advantage” and “the best is yet to come!”
-Brendan