A Coach's Diary

In the book, The No Complaining Rule, by Jon Gordon, it talks about the importance of having purposeful, positive interactions with your team. Teams and people are more successful and effective when they are positive, but a lot of us don't have ingrained positive habits, positive actions, and positive thinking in our lives. A positive culture doesn't happen through osmosis. It happens by relentlessly focusing on curating a positive culture and weeding out negativity. The best way to deal with negativity is to create a positive culture where negativity can't breed and grow and survive. Otherwise, you will spend all of your time fighting negativity. Anytime there is a break in communication, leadership, or expectations, it creates a space where negativity can grow. We need intentional, positive leadership, we need positive interactions, and we need positive communication to fill the voids so that negativity can't breed. With my teams and with my family I try to remember ...

When I was playing college basketball, I hated early morning workouts.  Every Friday in the pre-season we had a track workout, and the day before, we would have a team vote on whether we would prefer to workout in the morning before classes or wait until after classes. Almost every time, my team would vote to workout in the morning, and every time I would groan. One day, my coach called me out on it.  He asked me to find something positive to say next time instead of complaining.  When I would groan, it would bring down the energy in the room and have a negative effect on our energy.  My words impacted the energy in the room and it impacted our workouts. I started to fake being positive about the early morning workouts, and it actually started to improve my attitude, my mood, and my work ethic. I went from faking excitement to being motivated, to attacking our workouts. The point of training and working out is so that we can improve and beco...