A Coach's Diary

Landry Fields played 5 seasons in the NBA and is the GM of the Atlanta Hawks. In an interview with Brett Ledbetter and What Drives Winning, he says when working with his young guys, he likes to map out a journey of development that everyone goes through that is a mix of The 4 Stages of Competence and The Hero’s Journey. The 4 Stages of Competence is a model that describes the learning process, including the inevitable need to overcome struggles and obstacles. He says this helps bring language to our experiences and the feelings that come with those feelings. Here are the 4 stages: Stage 1: Unconscious Incompetence: Blind Confidence You have blind confidence because you don’t know what you don’t know, and your excitement and innocence have not been tarnished by struggle or reality. This is like a rookie being drafted into the NBA or someone getting a new, great opportunity. Stage 2: Conscious Incompetence: No Confidence He calls this The Fall. When you face obstacles and adversity, you ...

The video below is one of the best leadership videos I’ve seen. It gives a simple model for how to create and manage a high-performing environment. Brett Ledbetter is a thinking partner with some of the top coaches and athletes in the world He said an NBA GM was asked, “What is your role inside the organization?” and his response was, “My job is to build an environment where people can do their best work.” What is the most important thing you can do as a leader to build an environment where people can do their best work?” Brett said it comes back to three things: How you define, manage, and model your expectations. Defining is proactive. Managing is restive, and modeling happens all the time. Define Neil Armstrong once said, “If you’re an inch off in landing, no big deal. If you’re an inch off on takeoff, you miss the moon by a million miles.” What are the expectations that you need to define? The best leaders clearly define what success or appropriate behaviors look like and what it d...

Napheesa Collier is a basketball superstar in the WNBA. She sat down with Brett Ledbetter at What Drives Winning and was asked some questions about being a leader, saying, 'No,' and confidence. Question 1: As a leader, you have to be able to hold the people around you accountable. Everybody leads in a different way, and you have to know the people around you, and their personalities, and try to help them be the best they can be in their own way. NC: Delivery is really important. You can say something two different ways; one way will help a person, and one way will cause them to shut down for the rest of the game. The way that you talk to people is so important. I don't mind getting yelled at by my coach, but if you yell at some people, you aren't going to get anything else out of them. And some people need to be yelled at; they don't like to be talked to nicely. Question 2: A lot of performers are pleasers because they want the fans to like what they are doing. The ...

Character is who you are, it is what you do, and it is why you do what you do. Character drives performance. When your character is high, your work ethic is high and your intensity and integrity are high. When your character is high, you do the right things, the right way, for the right reasons. When your character is high, your performance raises. The healthier you are, most importantly at the character level, the better you are going to perform. The better you are able to understand what life is all about and integrate failure - because failure is going to come at some point - the better you will perform and the better you will be able to handle and overcome adversity. If you want to improve your performance, focus on improving your character.

Only you can come up with your priorities. They can’t be your parents’ priorities. They can’t be your friends’ priorities. They can’t be your coach’s priorities. You have to determine what’s important to YOU. Once you understand that, you have to determine how you are going to invest into that. And when you get off track, you have to have a way of bringing everything back when things start to get chaotic. Life in sports can be very chaotic. Have a plan, a schedule and a routine to help keep you focused.

Brett Ledbetter is one of the leaders in character education.  He works with the best athletes and coaches in the world.  He recently spoke with leaders in our district about how to improve behaviors. We define appropriate behavior in our district as above the line behaviors, and we define inappropriate behaviors as below the line behaviors.  We talked for about an hour on how to get all of our kids above the line. One thing that he said was that NBA athletes generally ask these three questions when working with a new coach: - Are They Smart? - Is There a Conflict of Interest? - Do They Care? You have to have the knowledge, resources, and ability to grow your people.  If you can't or don't, they just won't believe in you, trust you, or follow you. You also have to make sure that you have common goals.  You have to be working with each other, and against each other.  Everybody wants to feel valued, heard, and appreciated.  Listen to you...

"Always seek to do your very best. It does not matter what the rest of the world thinks, but it is of prime importance, however, what you think." Sherri Coale, the women's basketball coach at the University of Oklahoma, has this quote hanging in her office. She says that it is important to find your voice and to measure  yourself by your own standard of excellence instead of waiting for the world to weigh in on whether or not you are measuring up to their standards. Everyone has an opinion on everything: - What we do - Where we go - How we look Thoughts and opinions of others can get noisy, but we have to learn how to keep the rest of the rest of the world out of our own heads and shield yourself from their opinions. It is part of our job as coaches and teachers to help our kids learn how to find their own voice, navigate through the ups and downs of life, and ultimately not need us as much as they get older and so that they can pass on those lessons to ...

In gymnastics, the outcome is based on the approval of judges, so it leads gymnasts to value the opinion of others.  They are taught to be perfectionists because there is a standard of a Perfect 10.  To get the Perfect 10, you have to get a 10 from two judges.  You are taught, from the time you start competing, to value the score that the judges give you. Hearing this was eye-opening to me.  I didn't realize that gymnasts are trained to seek perfection out of each routine and to look for the approval of others.  That approval isn't even fully based on the routine but based also in part on things that they can't control - like how somebody sees and values their body image, their appearance, and their technique. They are conditioned to put their value in the eyes and opinions of others.  They even have the term 'Land and Look' which means that soon as they land, they look immediately to their coach for validation and approval for their performance....

Every great team has trust. Sometimes we have to accelerate the process of trust.  Trust = relying on others.  To accelerare trust, put your players in the position where they have to rely on each other. Trust needs trustworthiness and trustwillingness.  Being trustworthy means allowing your hand to be taken, and trustwilling means not yanking your hand away. It helps to define and show what trust, trustworthiness, and trustwillingness looks like in action and on the field.  Its important to create a culture where the players are willing to go ALL-IN and they are willing to do it for each other because they trust each other and they love each other and because that is the expectationm

One issue that coaches, teachers, parents and any person in a leadership asks consistently is,  'How do I get ___________ to give me their full effort?" - How do I get my athletes to go hard everyday? - How do I get my students to work as hard as they can? - How do I get my kids to give their full effort? - How do I get my athletes to play with grit, heart, and toughness? Becky Burleigh is the women's soccer coach at University of Florida.  She recognized that her teams sometime create excuses for not going all-in.  One of the excuses is that if they don't go all-in and fail, they are able to justify it by saying that they didn't give it their all or that they didn't care. Intentness to succeed can lead to anxiety, and the excuses of not caring or not trying their hardest can be a coping mechanism. She said that they needed to identify and define what it looks like to go 'all in,' all of the time.   They wanted to create a visual of what goi...

Sherri Coale was a high school coach at Norman High School in Oklahoma before becoming a very successful coach at Oklahoma University.  Here she talks about your influences when you begin coaching, how to measure success, how do you want your athletes to feel when they are coached by you, how to ask the right questions, and how to get teammates to buy-into each other. You Are Most Like Your Loudest Influence Starting Out She talked about the evolution of her coaching career.  Coach Coale said at the beginning of your career, you are most like your loudest influence.  It could be your high school coach, your college coach, or the coach next door.  You have an idea of what you want to do and what kind of coach that you want to be, but you tend to lean more towards the style of the loudest or the most impactful coach around you. You have to find who you are and you have to find your own voice.  You are a little of a lot of different influences, but you have...

In the video below Brett Ledbetter shows a clip of the movie Whiplash to a group of coaches.  Whiplash is a movie about a young, talented musician and his hard-driving coach who feels like it's his job to do what it takes to get the most out of his students, even to the long-term detriment of the students. They discuss the parallels of this music teacher and many coaches that we see that act as it it's their job to push their athletes as hard as they can to get the most out of them, using fear and intimidation at times, ignoring or ignorant to the long-term damage that they could be doing to their athletes mental health. This leads to a couple of great speeches by Dr. Jim Loehr, a leading sports psychologist who teaches and encourages coaches to have the right mission as they lead young athletes  We Hold Their Dreams in Our Hands It's so important for coaches to understand the extraordinary power you have in the lives of athletes that you interact with....

The video below is the third part of a great conversation between Billy Donovan and Brett Ledbetter at What Drives Winning. They talk about our legacies as coaches, how we are planting seeds in our athletes, and how to find freedom in our purpose as coaches. Planting Seeds The hardest thing in coaching is that we are always planting seeds in players, but sometimes those seeds don't sprout and take bloom until long after they are gone. And the frustrating part as coaches is that we want that plant to flower and to harvest right now while we have them, but sometimes that harvest happens at different times in people's lives. We have to keep planting knowing that our legacy is ultimately the lessons that we teach our players, what they remember about us, and what they say about us long after we are gone.   Our legacy is more than wins and losses.  Our legacies are the people that our athletes become as they grow up and start their own lives and...

Doing what it takes to achieve sustained excellence in sports and in life is not normal.  By human nature, we are lazy, self-centered, and seek instant gratification.  We want the cookie, we don't want to do the extra sprint or touch the line, we want to take a break, we want to watch that extra episode on Netflix. But to be great, we have to fight the urge of human nature.  To be great, we have to wake up every morning knowing that greatness is often a battle between who we want to be and our human nature, and to be great coaches, we have to know that our athletes are battling the same issues. When I was playing in college, we had to do times miles.  One run, I had to run the mile under 5:50. I crossed the line right at 5:50. The whole next week, I had to do morning work because I didn't make it in UNDER 5:50.   My coach taught me a very valuable lesson that day.  He taught me that good wasn't good enough.  I wasn't happy about i...

In the video below, former Florida basketball coach and current Oklahoma City Thunder coach Billy Donovan says that the best teams that he has coached have had 3 characteristics: 1 - Love 2 - Care 3 - Acceptance He said that his players on his best teams had a love for eachother, they cared about eachother, and they accepted eachother. He would often have players come to his house for team dinners, and one of his players mentioned how lucky coach was to have such a loving, caring, and accepting family.  Coach Donovan told his players that his family isnt't perfect, but that they are COMMITTED to trying to be the best that they can for eachother. None of us are perfect.  Our teammates won't always get along.  There will be fights.  There will be arguments.  But if we can be committed to showing eachother love, care, and acceptance, we can create a memorable experience and we can maximize our abilities as a group.

PLAYERS:  Being mentally tough is one of the best skills that you can have.  Being mentally tough allows you to be completely present in the moment and allows you focus on what is most important. It allows you to be afraid and still play and act with courage.  When you are mentally tough, you know that you aren't perfect and that you will make mistakes.  When you are mentally tough, you will fight through and past the mistakes.  When you are mentally tough, you will learn from the mistakes. When you are mentally tough, you will try new things.  You listen better and more intently to your coaches because you want to learn and get better.  Then, you try and practice and try again what they taught you.  When you are mentally tough, you don't practice until you can do something - you practice until you don't mess up.  When you are mentally tough, you find ways to get better everyday.  You find ways to grow and grind and get...

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....