Sue Enquist: Fear and Failure

Sue Enquist was a legendary softball player and coach at UCLA.  In the video below, she talks about the importance of valuing people and the process over results, the 33% rule, managing your strong and weak voice and being an engineer who builds a model around belief.

Value People Over Results
Don't load up on empty W's your entire career by thinking that fulfillment and happiness are all about winning and doing more on the field.  Winning is important, and we should be proud of our on-field/on-court success.  Just don't lose focus on how we get there or how we treat our athletes and their families.  Don't fixate more on winning and dominating and than on the people that you win with.

Focus on how you get there and the people you get there with.

Remember why you got into coaching and fall in love again with the idea of affecting others.

33% Rule

Bottom Third - The people on your team or who work with you will suck the life out of you.  They are energy vampires who worry more about themselves than the team.

Middle third - They blow in the wind.  Their buy-in changes with the success and buy-in from the team.  They are great when things are great, and they fall to the bottom third when things don't go their way.

Top Third - The special group of kids (and parents) who give you everything that they have every day with energy and enthusiasm.

Don't take the Bottom Third home with you!  They will second guess anything and everything that you do.  It's hard to make them happy.  It's hard to please them.  Some of them will never be pleased.  Don't let them suck the life out of you and don't let them rule your world.  Remember that the Middle Third is changeable and the Top Third will always create the positive momentum on good days and bad days.  That means that 2/3s of your team is doing great things, but Bottom Third sometimes has the loudest voice.  You don't have to cut the bottom third, but don't let them permeate your soul.  The goal is to leave the game with your passion intact by letting the top 3rd be your fuel.

Wear your 33% armor to keep your passion intact and be fulfilled when you are done.

We All Have A Strong and Weak Voice

We all have a strong and a weak voice inside of us.  The trick to getting to the top and staying is being able to manage those voices.  Know what your weak voice is and what it is saying.  Release your athletes to be able to admit that it is messy in our heads.  

Champions have the weak voice too, but they still become champions and stay champions because they learn how to manage the strong and weak voices.  We can't always change the weak voice, but we can let the strong voice get the last word.  Doubt is a part of human nature and is part of what fuels us.  We aren't fearless.  There is a lot of fear.  We just have to be great at letting the strong voice get the last word every day.

We then have to teach others how to believe in themselves.  Culture and mindset changes don't happen at an event nor change overnight, and neither does learning how to manage the voices and conversations in our heads.  Understand that the conversation is going on in everybody's mind all day long, and every day it is our job to release our athletes to be able to acknowledge those weak voices and to acknowledge that sometimes our heads are like scrambled eggs, and to create an environment where they feel safe to acknowledge that it is messy up there.  If we can show that champions have that weak voice too, we can learn how to use to our advantage like champions do.

Stain Their Brain
Our real goal as coaches and the calling of all coaches is to affect the way that our athletes believe in themselves.  It is our job to create the conditions through which they can do that.

Be simple, be clear, and be consistent in your message.  Be authentic.  Let them know that we have good days and bad days.  Let them know that everybody has strong and weak voices.  Then Stain their brains on who they are, who they can be, and who they will be.

When you see a sharpie, ask yourself, 'Am I staining their brain in what they can do each and every day?'

Our calling: To affect the way that our athletes believe in themselves.

Be an Engineer Who Builds a Model Around Belief

Take inventory of what your athletes do well so when it matters, you can repeat to them what they have done and you can project what they will do.  

'You have been here before.  You have done this, this and this.  We are here at this moment.  You have earned the right to be confident in this moment.  Have a blast where your feet are in this moment.  I will meet you on the other side of success.'

Your 'alright and hand-clap' is not enough.  Give them a model.  Give them a blueprint.  Give them the recipe.  Where they've been, where they are, and where they're going is the model.  Players never say about great coaches, 'I couldn't stand playing for her because she made us believe way too much.'  Players remember what coaches teach them and they remember how coaches made them feel.

Our challenge is to be an engineer of belief and to stain their brain with positive belief and self-talk.  When your language becomes their language, it stains their brain and we can scale character effect.  Become a Ph.D. in convincing because there are times that we have to convince what they don't see yet.  This is our calling.

Failure and Success Hold Hands

Failure and success hold hands.  You can't have one without the other.  Without failure, success doesn't have context.  If we can talk comfortably about failure as we fall in love with and talk about winning, our student-athletes will be more comfortable and safe in their environments and with taking risks.

Make them comfortable taking risks and teach them how to be okay with failure and unafraid to give their best against the best.

Uncoach them and give them time back to do what they think they need.  Give the game back to them because in the most important moments, we clamp on harder to what got us here.  Honor who they are and the process that it takes to get to the end.

Failure Recovery System

Have a Failure Recovery System and practice it.  Teach your athletes how to own the moment, and when they fail, team them to keep their chin up, keep their shoulders back, to keep eye contact and look at their teammates and say, 'I got you.'

Excellence doesn't blink and it doesn't wait for you to pull it together or for you to get rid of your junk.  Excellence just keeps moving and it doesn't wait for anyone.  If we want to have excellence have to find a way to keep moving too.

Conclusion
You will be remembered by how you treat the people that you lead.  Remember how you think - strong and weak voice.  Remember how you speak - the bottom 3rd, middle 3rd, top 3rd.  Remember how you act over time - this is your pattern of behavior.  It becomes your character and your character becomes your legacy.