The BIGGEST Win Ever : By Shawn Coleman, MS PC

THE BIGGEST WIN EVER

Fictional character Dexter Morgan once said, “I was always good at seeing things that others couldn’t.”  As a mental health practitioner, I identify with his statement, especially within some of my favorite modalities such as Afrikan Centered Psychology (ACP), Existential Phenomenology (EP), and two wellbeing curriculum's I created in KAnscious Sports ™ (KS) and Therapeutic Boxing ™ (TB).  PerspectVe.com indicates that TB™ and KS™ can be defined as an unconventional style of trauma-informed mindfulness that reveals a person's behavioral patterns and helps increase their quality of life.  I have an incredible clinical, therapeutic, and wellbeing/healing Team; and a significant part of the work we do lay in being able to utilize what we call our intuition IQ and our existential intelligence.  We have a gift to look at something that may be considered a mundane thing or occurrence and extract or find Divine meaning in it and correlate it to the natural idiosyncrasies of a person or life in general. 

 

Interestingly, there is a belief in the martial arts world that Bruce Lee discontinued his school of teaching of Jeet Kune Do because he abhorred the way it was beginning to become too rigid like other martial arts.  He did not want it to have a fixed style.  He wanted to emphasize personal expression and freedom in martial arts rather than adherence to specific forms.  He wanted people to find their own styles of fighting – which is the essence of Jeet Kune Do.  He stated, “Jeet Kune Do is just a name, a boat to get one across the river. Once across, it is to be discarded and not to be carried on one’s back.”  Bruce Lee appeared to believe that combat was a conduit to teach personal mastery, not simply a sports competition.

 

I find an enormous amout of symbolism in the sports world, thus why I created KS ™ and TB ™.  I use to think that EP was something that was minimally used in the world; and only endeared by us self-proclaimed existentialists.  But after reading George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s book Metaphors We Live By, I now realize that symbolism, metaphors, and existential phenomenology is EVERYWHERE.  Lakoff and Johnson write, “Spatialization metaphors are rooted in physical and cultural experience; they are not randomly assigned. A metaphor can serve as a vehicle for understanding a concept only by virtue of its experiential basis.”  They challenge my previous notion that symbolism is ‘minimally used in the world’ by taking a bold position that metaphors are ubiquitous.  They state that “metaphorical…concepts…structure our everyday activities,” and then gives examples such as Time Is Money and the common symbolic meaning an adage like that carries.

 

I have been watching and listening to sports for almost four decades; but it is only in the previous two decades that I have been viewing and observing with KAnscious ™ ears and eyes.  A lot of people would say that an essential part of sports is winning.  And it is!  But in my opinion, from a KAnscious ™ PerspectVe, understanding how to win is possibly the biggest win ever. 

Recently I have been more excited to watch sports than ever before.  Not only because of the competition, entertainment element, or support for my favorite athletes of today, but rather for the KAnsciousness and symbolism that the spirit realm has been sending directly to and through mainstream media channels.

Let’s take a deeper look into this:

1.      During the 2025 Western Conference Finals, now NBA Champion and Finals most valuable player (MVP), Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, said, “…the answer is never…a hero play or anything out of the ordinary.  IT’S BEING WHO WE ARE.”

2.      In a separate post-game interview, Shai’s Teammate Jalen Williams (another NBA Champion), said, “My teammates instill a lot of confidence in me to go out and be me.  [Head coach] Mark’s done a good job of telling me just be myself, I don’t have to be anything more; and that’s given me a lot of confidence.”  The ancillary beauty about this statement is that it is cyclical in the sense he finished it in how he started it by emphasizing BEING HIMSELF gives him a lot of CONFIDENCE.  ‘#MESSAGE’

3.      When asked, What CHANGED with YOU and THIS GROUP in order to get this first championship in school history?, 2025 national champion in the Women’s College World Series, Teagan Kavan, responded by saying, “To not forget who we are.  WE KNOW WHO WE ARE.”

4.      Undisputed and undefeated Women’s boxing world champion, Claressa Shields said, that in order to win her fights, not only does she have to have awareness of herself but also awareness of the INTRApersonal characteristics of her opponents.  She said, "It doesn't take me long to watch the highlights.  I watch the highlights and I watch a girl fight and I say 'OK I know what I need to do with her'. It doesn't take me long to watch it but I do other research.  I go and watch interviews of her just talking. I go and look at news articles.  What was her childhood like?...What she been through in life?...I go and do deep research."

5.      During an interview Piers Morgan and Canelo Alverez, Piers asked undefeated and undisputed men’s boxing world champion, Terrance Crawford, about who he looked up to or modeled himself after.  Like, the aforementioned champions, Crawford responded with a sense of heightened self-awareness and a fearless connection to his identity:  "Nobody...I was always the type of person that always wanted to be myself...I never wanted to follow behind anybody.  I want to make my own way.  However it was, I wanted to do it my way in how I find the light."  Wow.

Most people may not have taken away what I did from these interviews but like Dexter Morgans statement, I was able to cut through the surface and see what others probably couldn’t at the time; the deeper meaning and significance of their words – the winning power of BEING YOURSELF. 

I am a supporter of athletes like these not because they are fighting or competing to win games or to be ascribed with a champion status.  Rather, I believe that these types of athletes are fighting to raise the KAnsciousness ™ and awareness of the power of healthy self-identity; because they have a conscious, subconscious, or unconscious assertion, that not only can it help them win in their sport, but being one’s authentic self, in my opinion, is the THE BIGGEST…WIN…EVER.

#ExpandYourPerspectVe

For more content like this, you can read the book KAnscious Sports, which is available at Amazon.com.

© July 14, 2025 PerspectVe