Can You Watch This Without Making It Funny?
I’m not going to claim that your locker room is full of Chance The Rapper and Vic Mensa fans…but they are relevant artists in hip hop culture. And I’d wager that hip hop has some version of influence in your room.
So my hope is this video can resonate with your group.
Long story short, this is a exceptionally emotional and vulnerable scene of Vic and Chance (who were very tight for an extended period of their lives) apologizing to one another and mending fences after a prolonged “beef” between them. Their friendship was literally non existent for years and this is their trying to patch it back together.
I wouldn’t put this up with a bunch of prompts and stop it at a bunch of different points. I would let it play all the way through and then intentionally call for silence for 2 minutes. Not because it’s the best apology makeup scene of all time, but because the TEARS between the two men matter. I want your guys to be able to see the emotional exchange between Chance and Vic.
If you don’t enforce the silence, you will get guys trying to escape the moment with snickering and jokes. And those mechanisms are probably their default in all heavy situations that challenge their emotional fluency.
So, make them sit in this one for a little bit. They don’t need a lecture about how “real men cry” and you don’t need to immediately ask them to share some deeply personal story of their own. They just need to WATCH two men they recognize as culturally relevant be hurt, apologize, cry, tell each other what their friendship meant and try to repair it.
I think sometimes we get ahead of ourselves when we ask young men to “be vulnerable.” Hell, some of your guys might not even be comfortable WATCHING another man be vulnerable without using humor to break the tension. So maybe that’s the rep today. Can you sit in a room with your boys, watch two men cry with one another and not need to make the moment less uncomfortable?
After the two minutes, I’d probably start with one question: “What was it like to sit and watch that without anybody talking?”
And then LISTEN.
Coach Prompts
When something emotionally vulnerable happens around your team, how quickly do YOU help the room escape the discomfort?
Do jokes and laughter in your locker room create connection—or sometimes protect your guys from having to feel something?
Are you asking your players to demonstrate emotional vulnerability before you've given them enough opportunities to simply witness it?
Player Prompts
What made any part of that uncomfortable to watch?
Why do you think guys sometimes make jokes when another guy cries or gets emotional?
Which do you think would be harder: apologizing like that, accepting an apology like that, or letting somebody see that the relationship hurt you that much?
Before we can expect a young man to confidently CHOOSE vulnerability, he may need reps simply learning not to escape it when he sees it. That's Decision Confidence too.
