The BE BETTER story isn’t about me. It’s a story of relationships that helps remind us that we are strong on our own, and better together. It’s about the people who trust me, ask me for recommendations and advice, and who I coach to recognize the beauty and potential that is already inside each one of you. This is about the connection I feel with parents, athletes, and coaches of all ages as we engage in these conversations about the next right step on the path and how to honor it with intention. It’s about the feeling I get when I am in a gym, on the beach, in a yoga class, or standing on a pool deck watching people use the sports they love as a vessel to become the best versions of themselves. I know the journey intimately. It’s been a part of my own healing, thriving and most importantly has given me some of the most valuable relationships in my life. Volleyball has helped me understand myself, my strengths and weaknesses, and given me a place to come back to again and again to work on them.
As much as I love to break down the games I love by stats and technical skill, my unique gift is to see patterns that have happened on an athlete's journey and help them see the why behind their hard work or perhaps where they are challenged on the road to accomplish their goals. My new course, High Performance Zen, is a great self paced way to help athletes and their families avoid the pitfalls of burnout and create wellness for life. And our Be Better monthly membership gives you access to live discussions with me weekly, discounts on products and courses, and a robust video library of conversations with Olympians, volleyball pros, and healers of all kinds, focused on being as strong as we can on our own, so we can Be Better together.
Be Better is also a platform to connect all the ideas, services, and businesses of the volleyball community in one place so we can come together and support each other. Each month we will grow with more listings of great services from the people you want to support because they love the game as much as you do. We are not competition, we are a rising tide for athletes, parents, and coaches and a place to promote great camps, products, and content that raises the vibration in the gym, on the beach, and all over this planet that we love.
Over the last year, I have had a number of mothers and daughters that I have built deep relationships with as I have had the honor to be a part of their journey. Many times I’ve noticed, it’s not the things that happen at practice or during a game that we talk about, it’s the relationships off the court that have an impact on our self worth, mindset, and confidence. Often the paths they have walked remind me of myself and my own two girls. When you are delving into topics of identity, self worth, and the relationships that shape young minds on those things, trust is the most important issue. As both a parent and a coach, I know that relationship is in a tough spot these days. Right alongside my relationship with my own kids, this coaching relationship is a sacred space for me, and you have my word, I will always treat it that way.
Chip Conley said in one of the many legendary Finding Mastery episodes that I’ve listened to over the years
“Wisdom is pattern recognition.”
Over the last few years as my vision for Be Better has come together, there have been some starts and stops and twists and turns as I figured out some patterns in myself and in the world that needed healing. As the coach and healer I am, I want you to know that you can trust me. Whether coaching, energy healing or a combination of both, I am here to honor an athlete’s progress in life and let it transform the way she plays. I will never stop learning new ways to Be Better and I will always shine the light so you can connect with the greatness that is already inside of you so you can BE BETTER too. Come join us!
With love & optimism,
Wendy
Listen and watch my new podcast 'What I Meant to Say'. This week was with Savvy Simo, and a new one is released every Wednesday! Over the last few years as my vision for Be Better has And starting May 1, which is as soon as I will be off these crutches, I will have an office in the South Bay to do 1:1 coaching/energy healing in person. Zoom sessions are available now!
One of the reasons I love being a writer is because I get to work from my strength. My personality has always been more reserved and, like many of us, I tend to be hard on myself. Along with the love I have for a great story, writing opens up a space where I can process slowly and use an eraser or a backspace button before I put words into the world. It’s the great pause and sift that we don’t get as easily in conversations. But it’s also hard to find anything I like more than real human connection. The kind that abandons small talk and gets to the heart of things that matter, make us stronger, and the world better.
What I also believe to be true about this life is that it’s good to indulge our curiosities and challenge ourselves. I’m a creature of habit, so I’ve gotten used to that scratchy feeling that settles in when I’m prodded to try something new and know I need to accept the challenge because my life story is not meant to leave it undone. For a while now, I have thought I wanted to start a podcast. I spend a lot of time listening to some great ones…Finding Mastery, A Bit of Optimism, and my friend Jason’s Dibelius’s The Option to name a few, so I’ve got some good research under my belt. I also love the podcast world because it elevates ordinary stories that don’t make it into our sensationalized and divisive mainstream media, but connect us through the universal truths of being human. So, starting next Wednesday, I’m excited to introduce to you on all major platforms, my new podcast….WHAT I MEANT TO SAY.
I believe that the greatest gift we can give to the next generation is our own self awareness and the goal of What I Meant to Say is to connect us through the visions, stories, and life lessons of people rising in sports, business & life and uncover the optimism that is sometimes front and center, and other times under the surface. Throughout my journey, I have experienced many ‘What I Meant to Say’ moments, but since life doesn’t give us do overs, I’ve created a space to reflect and tell our stories again, with a little more grace for ourselves, and the hope that we can help others, and all get a little better for having listened.
Podcast conversations come out raw, there are no erasers or backspaces on these talks. I want to say thank you to Jason for his generous effort to tech my show and let me get my feet wet in his recording studio. Without his energy, heart, and willingness I wouldn’t have been able to make big strides this quickly. So without giving too much away about what is to come, I hope you will join us for the unerasable moments that we capture on WHAT I MEANT TO SAY. I’ve had a blast recording already and if you have a story that you think would make for a great conversation, send me an email or a DM and let’s talk. The first episode drops this Wednesday, March 16, I hope you will listen, subscribe, and tell me exactly what you meant to say.
Writers seek throughlines. Coaches seek potential. Athletes (& humans really) often seek perfection. I am all of these things. But since July 28, 2000, my deepest sense of connection is being a parent. I’ve never been more connected to a calling or felt a greater sense of purpose in my life, I guess that’s how I ended up with four of them. Whether it was a 3am feeding, getting down on their level to look at a little face, or the joy I feel watching them discover who they are, I have always sought their presence. All of these identities have collided in my mind as I try to understand the reality of the tragedy that occurred at Stanford this week. I didn’t know Katie, and I know I can’t make anything better, or create any comfort for people I don’t even know. I find myself unable to concentrate except to seek the throughline, to mourn the loss of potential, and to say that there is no perfection expected or possible when it comes to ourselves or our kids. We just need their presence. I can’t imagine life without them and what the Meyer family, Katie's friends, and her entire community have been left to grieve leaves me with the greatest sense of despair and emptiness.
All week I’ve been journaling about women, because they have shown up for me in ways big and small since my surgery three weeks ago. We are a force to be reckoned with, and at the same time, are so hard on ourselves. Even together, with a sense of a sisterhood, or a team, we can feel so alone. So many of us are challenged when it comes to asking for help; we feel we need to put on a brave face and be strong on our own. I think we are afraid to need each other. After surgery, I’ve needed help for the simple things, and at this stage of the game, I've finally gotten a little better at asking…and the women have come out of the woodwork. I'm sure Katie was like these women. They've been there to lend a hand with everything from a ride, to a meal, to laundry, to taking Matthew’s stitches out of his hand.
Yes, he managed to crash on his skateboard three days after my surgery and wind up with seven stitches and a compressed L1/L2 in his back. He scared the heck out of me to the point that I wasn’t even ready to talk about it last week. It made me feel fragile in a way I hadn’t felt in a long time, since he was little and I couldn’t let him out of my sight after his near drowning accident. Over the last twelve years since we almost lost him, I have battled with how to let him go out and experience life in the way that is necessary to build confidence and independence instead of giving in to the neurotic feeling that exhausted me because no matter what I did, I knew that I could not control enough to guarantee his safety. As parents, we never can. On the surface, life often looks harder for him than it does for my other three. School and socialization are harder and it is an achilles heel to cater more to him because from the world’s perspective he seems to struggle more. But the pressures that our kids put on themselves at the ‘top’, where internal battles are hidden under their more hearty exteriors and grace under fire ways, or the amazing wins that we all love to celebrate, are extreme. How do we know what is too much? What I know is that over a lifetime the high highs are not what bring us through but instead, the simplest forms of human connection that ground us in our inevitable moments of uncertainty, sadness, fear, or grief so that we can see another sunrise.
Life is full of questions that we never know the answers to. I am certain that the question of how a life is cut too short is one that will never leave us. The only throughline I can find is that we need each other to understand our beauty and our struggle and connect anyway. We have to tell people we love them, and help each other see a way through when we can’t find it on our own. We have to show that we are that one call that says you matter too much and the end isn't near.
I wanted to come up with an answer…the age of social media, the isolation that we have experienced, or the achievement that may seem to be a birthright for lights that shine so bright on earth, but the writer in me can’t come up with one. Every week I write to gain perspective and to connect with the younger generation to pass on whatever wisdom I’ve uncovered along my journey. But today the only thing that comes through is that we need to love and lean on each other when fear creeps in and the struggle is too much to shoulder alone. For Katie the struggle is over, but I can feel her strength is still here. I hope and pray that God’s grace covers her friends and family in the softest golden light and that they can always feel her strong presence…because as parents, from the moment any of you are born, that is all we ever need.
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