Acceptance turns up in a lot of mission statements. It usually sits near the bottom, in the paragraph about community, at a respectful distance from the paragraph about excellence.

For our gym, it is second on the list (right behind our first tenet). But it’s not there for the reason you may think.

What learning a skill actually costs

When an athlete learns a physical skill, there is a cost to doing so. Awkwardness. While there are a few truly gifted people who can learn physical skills quickly, most of us have to go through a period of doing the skill poorly. For young people learning volleyball, that typically means they have to do the thing badly, in public, over and over again, until they do it less badly. There is no other route. Nobody has ever learned to play volleyball by themselves, in private, and made the starting roster. It’s a team sport, and we have to learn together.

So learning is a public activity, and the price of admission is being willing to look bad in front of the room.

What stops an athlete from paying that price? It’s almost never ability. It’s managing attention.

Managing attention manages emotions

All athletes arrive with a fixed amount of attention, and the sport wants all of it. Learning the fundamentals, figuring out where to be in the drills, listening to the coach’s instructions, interacting with teammates — they all draw from the attention account. It makes sense, then, that every bit of attention spent on a background concern puts the athlete at a disadvantage.

“Do these people think I should be here? Did anyone see me miss that? Am I the worst one in the room? No one here likes me.”

Those thoughts aren’t weakness, and they aren’t thoughts an athlete can choose to stop thinking. That is what a nervous system does when it has not been told it is safe. This is why the list of attributes in our tenet is long. Age, skill, race, religion, ability, orientation, presentation. Every item on that list can make an attention withdrawal if the athlete feels like it is what’s keeping her from being accepted. Those withdrawals mean there isn’t enough attention to spend on the sport.

Acceptance is not the soft part of the program. It is the part that makes the hard parts possible.

Doesn’t accepting everyone mean lowering the bar?

Of course not, but the distinction is subtle.

We accept the athlete. We do not automatically accept the performance. Those are two different paths and most programs blur them, usually by accident. “That pass was lazy” and “you’re being lazy” are two words apart, with miles of meaning between them. The first one is about her pass. The second one is about her character. Say the second one carelessly in practice and she will spend the next month trying not to fail instead of trying to succeed.

Keep them separate, and you can be genuinely demanding. An athlete never has to earn her place in the room. She earns everything else: the badge, the next level, the harder rep, the starting position. The standard can be high precisely because her standing is not on the table.

A small clarification: Accepting an athlete exactly as she is does not mean expecting her to stay that way. It is the opposite. We accept who walked in so that she is free to become somebody she strives to be.

Why we hold this one

An athlete is a person who volunteers for adversity. Nobody signs up for a sport because it is easy, and the ones who stay are the ones who found out that overcoming something feels better than avoiding it.

Our job, then, is not to supply the adversity. The sport already brought plenty. A ball travels faster than she can think. Her body changes underneath her twice a year. The rally ends, and she has two seconds to let go of a mistake before the next serve. That is a full plate of hard.

Our job is to clear everything off the plate that is not the sport, so all of her is available for the part that is worth doing.

The gym is hard enough on its own. It does not need our help.