Sara and Merril talk about sports, parenting sports kids, leadership, and his slogan by which to live your life: “Find a Way”. Merril talks about his life journey and how as a father, player, and leader, he learned the power of self-reflection as a way of looking at situations differently and learning different ways than his father may have shown him.
Merril Hoge on Sports, Parenting and Self-Reflection w Sara.
Merril Hoge is a former professional American football player. He played eight seasons as a running back for the National Football League (NFL’s) Pittsburgh Steelers and Chicago Bears, retiring after the 1994 season. In 1996, he became a football analyst for ESPN television until 2017.
During a road game in 1994 against the Kansas City Chiefs, Hoge suffered a concussion, and five days later, the team doctor approved him to resume playing during a telephone call without examining him to determine if he had recovered; he was still suffering post-concussion symptoms.
Hoge sustained another concussion several weeks later and had to be resuscitated after he stopped breathing. He spent 48 hours in the intensive-care unit and was forced to retire due to brain injury. Hoge had to learn to read again and experienced memory loss, confusion, and headaches.
In 2003, Hoge was diagnosed with stage II Non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Hoge commented on this: It is destroyable, it is beatable. You have everything in you to do it. The mind is a powerful thing. There is no doubt, that come May, I’ll be cancer-free; five years after that, I’ll be cured. Fifty years or whatever time I have left after that, it will be the platform I stand for. I’ll be a better man. This has been a blessing.
Sara and Merril talk about sports, parenting sports kids, leadership, and his slogan by which to live your life: “Find a Way”.
Merril talks about his life journey and how as a father, player, and leader, he learned the power of self-reflection as a way of looking at situations differently and learning different ways than his father may have shown him.
Self-reflection helps in building resiliency and to live a life that you don’t live to regret. He also shares tools for parenting that made a difference in his parenting: He judges kids on yardsticks of how many years they have lived.. do not assume they think like an adult. He is a believer in patience and keeping perspective at all times.
Hoge reminds us that what our children see us do, they do – so we are responsible for modeling the right behavior.
Merril’s wisdom is shared and we can all learn from a man who has been a football star, but also has gone through enough of life’s challenges to learn from those as well.
This is an inspiring conversation, let’s dive in!
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