Jack Llewellyn, PhD: Everyone Can Win
Jack Llewellyn’s MS diagnosis in 2003 was the last snowball atop an avalanche of bad news: a divorce, a car crash, a home foreclosure. Who could blame him for being in a funk?
Problem is, Llewellyn's Center for Winning Performance is where others turn when they need to climb out of a funk: he's a sports psychologist and performance trainer who helps athletes and business leaders win.
“The doctor, when he diagnosed me, he told me that no matter what medicine I took, my attitude was going to be my best friend or my worst enemy. He said, ‘You’ve got to start practicing what you’ve been preaching.’ I can honestly say my life changed when I started living the program I’d been teaching,” Llewellyn said.
In the years since, Llewellyn has added a new clientele to his roster of corporations and major leaguers like John Smoltz and Paul O’Neill whom he helps to recover quickly from adversity: MS self-help groups. “The feeling I get now when I walk away from a meeting — I feel so emotionally fulfilled, I feel so good about the impact that maybe we just had on a person or on a group,” he said.
In fact, meeting others with MS has so profoundly influenced Llewellyn’s professional practice that he’s changing the title of his book, originally called Winning Sure Beats Losing & Here’s What You Can Do About It, to The Jack Llewellyn System: Achieving the Ultimate in All You Do, and adding a chapter especially for people with chronic conditions. The updated edition was due out in summer 2008. (Llewellyn, who lives in Atlanta, also is the author of Let ‘em Play: What Parents, Coaches & Kids Need to Know about Youth Baseball and a widely used textbook on sports coaching.)
Llewellyn thinks some life coaches on TV are frauds because they claim anyone can do anything. That omits a crucial step: honestly assessing liabilities and assets. Everyone has both.
“I’d like to throw a 95 mph fastball, but when I throw it, it’s like 48,” he said. “It’s a terrible, terrible thing that people like that do — giving people false hope.”
Llewellyn peddles real hope. The difference between winning and merely surviving, he counsels, lies in focusing on what you can do rather than dwelling on what you can’t.
Sound simple? Then how come so many smart people never figure it out on their own? Llewellyn tells pitching coaches not to tell struggling pitchers what pitches not to throw, and instead say what they should throw.
Llewellyn wants to help the MS movement by generating more support for care partners and by encouraging young people with MS to mingle more with older people who were diagnosed before the disease-modifying drugs were available.
“On the one hand I understand why a lot of people don’t like to come to them, because they don’t like to see people who are bad off, they don’t want to think about being there someday,” he said. “But there’s a lot of things in those meetings that people could benefit from.”