Each year it happens

It starts out with a sea of faces, a blur. Different colors, shapes, styles and lengths of hair, but all young, all looking expectant, and maybe slightly terrified. Then, the hours progress. The blur shifts and kind of burbles. And then they come in stark relief -- individuals, their names, their places, their wonderful individual quirks and needs. Then we have our first small-group session, me and my guys (a loving all-encompassing, gender-neutral collective noun), and we talk about their individual fears, the very same fears all of us old guys (the coaches, gender-neutral/collective) once had and somehow managed to overcome. Then we try to put those fears in some kind of order, we try, I think, to take the potential sting of it out and then toss the fear into its rightful place so it doesn’t stand in the way of their going fully forward. Then -- it never fails -- I wake up next morning, and each one of them, who just 24 hours before was part of the blur of faces -- is a real heartfelt and breathing (and e-mail reachable) part of my life. It’s as if I have known them all along. Jorge. Zuri. Joseph. Khalida. Natalie. Shih Fa. Joel. Sona. Andrea. Carolina. Cindy. Amanda. Joyce.

-- Mary Ann Hogan, Chips Quinn career coach