The Ten Commandments of Coaching

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Before we get into the commandments, it is worth setting the table stakes, why this matters, why good coaching matters. Steve, you wrote a Substack post a couple of months ago about the craft of coaching, and you started that post by saying, Coaching and leading others is one of the hardest but most worthwhile things you can do, but too often we focus on the wrong things. So what are the wrong things that we focus on? We treat coaching as a prescription, and I'm as guilty as this as anyone. When I got started, I thought, Man, if I just get the perfect training plan and understand the mile repeats and the thresholds and tempos and long runs, and if I just get the great mixture, everything else will take care of itself. Well, that failed miserably. But we have that same mindset everywhere, right? In teaching, we think, Oh, if the school just buys the best education program, platform, all of these things, it'll take care of itself. That is not the case. Coaching is not the training plan. It is not the algorithm that we develop. It is not the tactics that a coach spends hours coming up with. All of those things are part of it and important, but coaching is deeper than that. It is the connection with the human being you're sitting across from. If you do not develop that connection, if you do not value that, if that person sitting across from you doesn't say, Hey, this person cares not only about my performance, but about me as a human being, you can have the perfect training plan and it isn't doing shit. All right. Well said. I think that makes a great case for it. How many years of coaching do both of you have between the two of you? I started coaching when I was 19 or 20. So I'm old now. So 20 plus years. Half your life. Half my life. Over half my life I've coached. I've got less. Let's see if you count my my phenom days when is a 12 to 16 year old. I coached the eight to 11 year old basketball teams at the Franklin Athletic Club in suburban Detroit. If you count that, I've got about 13 and a half years under my belt is an adult. I've coached for 10 years. Wow. All right. So 30 years. And I had about three seasons of track coaching, which is why I'm going to act more of a moderator. Alex Trebek here. But, you know, combined, I'll just say that combined, we have 30, 30 and change years of coaching. All right, let's get into the although I did some of my I did some of my best work on those Franklin teams when I was a 12 year old coach and they were eight year olds. I was a dominant coach back then. You seem to be like youth coaching seems to be your sweet spot. Brad specializes in the youth. I specialize in the youth coaching. No, no, no. To be clear, the 10, the 10, the 10 adult years is not coaching at you basketball. It's a, it's one, one on one performance coaching with adults, but I'll tell you what, it's pretty remarkable how similar these, uh, these principles are between the, the eight year olds, uh, basketball players and the, the 30 year old world-class performers. Interesting. Huh? Wow. Well, let's start then. Why don't you give us our first commandment? First coaching commandment, Brad. I think the first coaching commandment, Steve alluded toward this in his introduction is, um, you just have to be a coach. You have to care in, in give a damn. There's that old saying that people don't care what you know until they know that you care because especially in today's day and age, but I think this has always been the case. Like there's many roads to Rome. I think for just about anything, whether it's trying to run faster, whether it's trying to be a better leader, trying to be a better coach, trying to be a better surgeon, trying to be a better basketball player, it doesn't matter what I'd say my heuristic is of the hundred percent of plans. And ideas and theories out there, 90 to 95% are bullshit in five to 10% are going to work really well. And of those five to 10% that are going to work really well, you got a lot of options. So there's no like proprietary secret to become a better three point shooter or to, to be better in front of the board as an entrepreneur. There's programs out there that work. And what matters is, do you have a coach that cares about you that can adapt these fundamental basic principles that we know generally work to your university? And what matters is, do you have a coach that can adapt these fundamental basic principles that we know generally work to your university? You're in charge. You're the person everyone's looking to, looking up to. You're driving the ship. And what often happens is you get a little success. You get athletes doing well. You get people responding. And all of a sudden, your ego starts showing up and you say, look at that. They're getting better because of me. They won the championship. They set their personal record because of me. And what happens is, too often, we then use that towards, I'm going to keep these athletes around. I'm going to make them think that they're dependent on me to reach the stars. And if they go anywhere else, it ain't working. And this backfires over the long haul. Instead, what we want to see is, just like parents, we want to develop people, but then we want to set them off into the world with the tools and skills. that we gave them so that they can have some more independence. I've always seen coaching as almost like you have this leash. And at the beginning, that leash is pretty short and tight because they don't know what to do. And you're kind of being like, hey, that's a dumb idea. Don't do that. Don't go that way. But over time, you want to give them more autonomy. You want to give them more decision making. You want to go up to them and say, hey, here's what I was thinking for these workouts. What do you guys think? Or as Steve Kerr did at one point, hey, I'm going to take the game off. Like you guys coaching. What place should we run? That's not a sign of insecurity. And in fact, it's the opposite. It's a sign that you trust that other person out there to figure it out. And again, going back to the first principle, that trust is so freaking important. So try to make your job a little obsolete. I love that. Two examples that come to mind for me. One is from the men's March Madness tournament this past March, obviously. But when the Arizona coach, Tommy Lloyd, they were losing seven points at halftime to Purdue in the Elite Eight games. This is like, you know, this isn't first round, second round. This is a serious game. And Tommy Lloyd went into the locker room with his players and he just said, you figure it out. And he left them to figure it out. And they came back and they won. And like, I mean, that takes a lot of faith in not only your own coaching practice, but also your players and their belief in your. Program, what you've taught them to be independent in that moment that is super high pressure and super high stakes. And I would argue in that situation, he's a master coach because he actually did coach them up. He coached them up to get to a point where they could figure it out. Like that's that ultimate his ultimate coaching victory is that all he had to do at halftime was step out of the room and say, figure it out. And they were they knew exactly what to do. Yeah. Yeah. There's also one more example from what I was coaching track. I was an assistant coach in the head coach. She was great. Her name's Rebecca Stowe. where the kids were all warming up and there was this really talented freshman and during warmups, he was kind of in the back and like chatting with his friends and she pulled him over and she was like, what did you express to me like recently about your desires for the season? And he was like, I want to compete with the varsity athletes. And she was like, show me where the varsity athletes are warming up. And he was like, oh, at the front. And she was like, okay. And she's like, continue. And he went back in the drills and like, she didn't tell him what to do. She just pointed something out. And the next practice, he was up there with the varsity athletes. And then he turned in like a very, very talented runner for us. And I thought that was interesting because it was like her, instead of telling him what to do, gave him the autonomy to make that choice himself. And I think that was like really empowering in a way that probably helped him. I mean, the whole deal is like, if you can get people to make the choice, then it's ingrained. If instead you have, you know, we'll call it the old school footballer strength coach who is yelling over the top of athletes all the time to, push, push, you can do this, whatever it is, like screaming at them or threatening them with more running or punishment if they don't do it. All that sends the signal is, I only push hard if someone is yelling and screaming at me. That doesn't translate to game time or race day performance because yeah, a coach could be screaming at the sideline, but you're in the middle of the game. You're not hearing that. You're not. And if you are looking over that and thinking like, oh, I got to make this play or surge because like my coach is going to yell at me. Like you're not, you're not in the present moment competing. What you want is to train people up for stepping into that arena where it is going to be them alone in their heads, executing the plays and the things that they need to do. So it's not only just for like, from a coaching standpoint, it's from the development standpoint of an athlete. The other thing I'd say in, in the type of like performance coaching that I do, where it's not coaching a team and running an offense and getting everyone bought into a program, it's one person. And I think that can be really helpful is just to ask people like what they think they should do. So they're going to come to you with a situation or a problem. And you're like, I don't know, what do you think you should do? And then they'll go through it. And you might have some questions to clarify. You might tweak something at the margin, but ultimately you're letting them come to the answer that makes the most sense because they're living that life day in and day out. They know themselves. They know the situation better than you. It takes a certain level of arrogance as a performance coach to come in once a month and be like, here's what you should do. It's like, I don't know what you should do. Like, tell me what you think you should do. And then let me ask you some questions to help you identify some blind spots. Or after you tell me what you think you should do, if it sounds great, let me ask you, well then why haven't you done it? So now that we can, we can hone in on an obstacle. And this is what, this is what I think often irks me. And it's not necessarily wrong. It works for some people. It would never work for me about like the Tony Robbins style of coaching where it's like, I'm just going to meet you. And I'm going to tell you how to totally transform your life and kind of follow this plan and take this big risk. He's either the greatest performance, executive coach to ever live, or he's way above his skis. And I don't know, maybe the end, a lot of smart people have worked with him. Maybe the answer is the former, but like, I certainly don't have the confidence that I know someone's life that well, where I can swoop in once a month and tell them what to do. I need them to tell me what they think they should do and why they haven't done it. And then I can ask a few questions and maybe identify these like small things that will help them think differently. And then they go out and do it. - How I respond to what you're saying is like, there are no answers. And there is no roadmap and you'd better equip someone with some skills and capacity to figure things out on their own. Because even if you gave them the right answer today, it's not going to be right in five months, five years, 10 years. So equipping them with the competence is more important. I think than the answers in quotes. - That's a perfect segue to our third commandment. Steve coins this one. You can like an idea, but not marry it. I like to think of it is just have a big toolkit and be willing to use different tools in different circumstances. So I think some coaches, they come in with a program, right? We're going to run a triangle offense and basketball, or my whole executive coaching style is based on acceptance and commitment therapy. That's all we're going to do. I think that's fine. And that can work really well. I think as you get better, what master coaches do is they have all of these different tools and over time they get really good at identifying what tool is going to work for what person or what team in what situation. And they're not wed to any given tool. This flies in the face of the dogma that comes as, you know, I'm a zone coach or I'm a CBT coach, or I do like neuro brain coaching. It's like all of these things, generally, some of these things are outlandish and you should never use them. But generally speaking, a lot of these things have a time and a place. Your job is not to wed yourself to any one of them, but to develop a big toolkit and figure out, you know, based on again, person, place, context, what tool to use when. This is, this is a science of running original where I noticed early in coaching is that people would become like religious factions, as Brad pointed out. And you would say, I'm a Jack Daniels coach. I'm an Arthur Lyddiard coach. I'm a Norwegian double threshold coach. And then they limit themselves to that coaching style, which might work for most people or most of the time, but inevitably you'd get a situation or a person where, or that style just didn't work. And those kids, those athletes were out of luck because that coach could not deviate, right? It's the person who thinks I need to run a hundred miles a week with everybody. And then they get like bone fragile kid over here who needs to run like 30 miles a week and cross train and do this other stuff and more speed work. And they can't deviate because like, this is their religion. And that's what we're talking about is all of these things work. All of these things work. You want to have a robust toolkit. So if like one time happened to me, I had a kid coming back from mono who couldn't run for more than like 10 minutes straight. So what did we have to do? Short intervals all day, every day in a controlled fashion. If I didn't know how to do that. And my only tool was like long, slow runs all the time. That kid would have been screwed. Next commandment. Plant seeds constantly. You never know when they're going to grow. So one of the most frustrating things with coaching, especially for my youth and high school coaches out there like Brad youth coach all-star is that you can try to help someone. You can try to help them get better to change them to whatever it is. And it will seem like they're tuning out. It will seem like they're ignoring it. But the thing you realize if you've coached long enough, if you've coached 20 years, is that they're listening. Sometimes it just takes a whole hell of a lot of seeds to plant, or it just takes time. I've had so many athletes come to me in my retirement from running coaching phase where they've been like, Hey, remember you, you said this thing, you know, to us when we were college or high school athletes. And it'll be something where I'm like, Holy crap, they were listening. And they'd say, yeah, it took me a while to realize what you meant, but now I, I apply it like in my everyday life. And I tell these kinds of stories because like, it can feel like you're not making progress. Sometimes it can feel like all I do is, is preach like effort over outcomes or whatever the thing is, respond, not react, whatever your cliche is that has valid validity. And they just don't seem to get it. The point is like sometimes, especially with young kids, but even with adults, you, you gotta be patient. This is why every coach worth their salt. I think coaches do this really well is all the sayings, all the principles. They repeat them ad nauseum, like a thousand times. They're posted in the locker room. They're in the meeting rooms. They're on the PowerPoint decks, whatever it is, like they're all over the place. They don't repeat them, you know, in a million different ways because they think people are dumb and can't get it. They realize that no, some of these lessons take time to sink in and sometimes they're going to sink in from me saying it. Sometimes I'm going to have to bring in a guest speaker saying it. Sometimes their teammate is going to have to say it and it'll finally connect. You can't predict when it connects. You just got to keep planting the seeds. That's why you hear us say some of the same stuff over and over again. We're just planting the seeds. You may not like it now, but in five years you're going to email us our email and say, you know what? That podcast finally resonated for me. It's true though. What, what's the Polly word for mindfulness? Clay, do you know this, what the actual word is? I, I don't. I know what it translates to though. It means to remember. So like mindfulness is remembering and to remember something, you have to hear it. You're like, that's why visual cues can help. Uh, because like this stuff is simple, not easy. And how do you stick to something that's simple, not easy. You remind yourself of it, over and over again. Okay. Excellence. Actually family. 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So you can find your favorite flavor and maybe even, if you're feeling nice, share some with a friend. That is drinkelemente.com slash clay. Now, back to the show. Insurance isn't one size fits all. That's why customers have enjoyed Progressive's Name Your Price tool for years now. With the Name Your Price tool, you tell them what you want to pay, and they'll show you options that fit your budget. So whether you're picking out your first policy or just looking for something that works better for you and your family, they make it easy to use. It's easy to see your options. Visit Progressive.com. Find a rate that works for you with the Name Your Price tool. Price and coverage match limited by state law. All right. Our next and fifth principle is encourage curiosity, not fear. So something that I have been doing a lot more of in my own coaching practice with individuals who are already established high performers who are pushing their edge is from the outset, getting everyone educated on the difference between finite games and infinite games. This framework comes from an American religious scholar named James Kars. And essentially, he says that we all play these two games. We play finite games where there are winners and losers, and they are time bound. So I'm going to win an NBA championship or not. I'm going to get this promotion or not. There are also infinite games. In an infinite game, the entire goal is to win an NBA championship or not. So an infinite game is I want to be the best runner I can be. I want to be the best executive I can be. I want to be the best scientist I can be. I want to be the best writer I can be. I want to be the best person I can be. An infinite game ends when you retire from your career, when you die as a person. Until then, the whole goal is to keep playing. A finite game ends when the time runs out on the athletic pitch, when the promotion cycle ends. And what I tell these clients is, look, we are going to do two things. First and foremost, we are going to play the NFL. The infinite game. We're going to keep coming back. We're going to keep learning. We're going to keep growing. And if we do that, we will put ourselves in a position to win lots of finite games. However, we're also going to lose some finite games along the way. The whole point of this coaching relationship is for you to get better at the things that you care about and for me to try to help you at that. That is an infinite game. So how do you get better at the infinite game? You are just insanely curious. You have a big challenge. You're curious about it. You fail at something. You feel the hurt. You feel the pain. And then you learn from it. What went wrong? You succeed at something. You celebrate. It feels really good. And then you ask yourself, what went right? What could I do again? What's replicable? What's not? Okay? But you're constantly curious because curiosity is very forward-looking. And you can't fail at being curious. You can't fail at learning something. So if you have this fear of failure, or in some cases, if you have an ego bloat that comes with success, like neither of those things. Things are good for long-term progression. What's good for long-term progression is just to be endlessly curious. I mean, it's the mindset of a craftsperson, right? The saying that I like is, if the goal is mastery, that goal knows no end. And the thing that fuels that goal is to be really curious. To be curious about yourself. To be curious about your craft. And if you do that, then you're going to win a lot along the way. And you're also going to lose a lot along the way. And we have to accept both those things. We get this so freaking backwards in the U.S. We mistake this idea. We mistake this idea of making people tough or being demanding as some way giving them grit when the reality is often what we're doing is pushing them to fear, not curiosity. So to me, it's how do we push people away from the failure? Instead, give them the security where it's like, hey, you're going to screw up. You're going to fail. You're going to fall short. But in that exploration, you're going to find out where you are right now. Which tells us what we can do to get better. I'd always tell athletes before races, the goal isn't necessarily to run some PR or win the race. It's to go explore where your potential lies. And the only way we find out is if we literally go beat and knock on that door and see if it will open. And if it doesn't today, well, guess what? We found out. But some days it's going to open and you're going to surprise yourself. But the only way you surprise yourself is if you give yourself a shot. All right. Let's go into our sixth commandment. I'll call this one reward what you preach or practice what you preach. Whatever you want to do, make actions and words line up. Again, we suck at this. We do our best impression of Nick Saban and say, you know, process over outcomes. And then when the game ends or the race is finished, what do we do? We go through the list of like 15 people who PR or or like call out the person who won. Like, I'm not saying wins aren't important. But if all you're talking about is the results, then athletes will notice that instead of the handful of times you say, yeah, process over results. So the point is you want your actions and your language to line up after the race. You better give little Jimmy who finished in the back of the pack a shout out because they push themselves to the nth degree, even if they didn't win the race. Like those. Small things are what people take away, especially in sports coaching, where they see you all the freaking time is they will learn more from your behaviors. Yeah, they'll listen to the words, as we said. But if those don't align, man, they're going to they're going to tune out. They're not going to follow through. It's one thing to say something. It's another thing to model it. And your kids are always watching. I mean, shit, this is the parent. There's just this fascinating study that came out that showed that over 70. Percent of Americans are now on their phones during mealtimes and everyone assumed, oh, kids these days, kids these days. Guess what? The study found the parents are on their phone more than the kids. So you can't tell your kids the phones are ruining your brain and then always be on your phone. Doesn't matter how many Jonathan hate posters you have in your house. Your kids are going to be like, this is nonsense. So it's the same thing for coaches. OK, it's easy to say something. It's hard to do it. I just had a conversation with a very, very, very high profile coach, one of the best in the world. And what he said. Is that for the longest time early in his career, he said all these things. But deep down inside, all he cared about was winning and he didn't feel them. And then he got embarrassed on a big stage. His team had a really shitty year. And that's when he realized, actually, I think I need to start teaching myself how to feel these things. And that transformed him as a coach. So, yes, easy to say the thing hard to do the thing you got to you got to do the latter. I think it might be especially do this when you have a positive outcome in spite of not doing something well. Right. So you win the game, but maybe you did not have a good week of practice or you did not play the way, you know, you were coached to play. Because if you at least if you lose, there's a little bit of like they're down because they lost. So they failed. You could say, look, you're going to lose. Sometimes we stuck to the process. We did the right things. But if they win, they might be like, oh, we won. Everything's going great. And I think in that moment, it takes real discipline to be like, I know we won, but don't be confused. This is not good just because the outcome is in our favor. We actually didn't work the process. So I had this happen to me. I was fortunate to be coached by Tom Tellez, who worked with Carl Lewis, Leroy Burrell, all these greats in track and field. And I remember one time, I think it was my sophomore or junior year in college. I ran this this meet as my opener of the season. I'd struggled the season before I came out, ran my fastest time in like two years or so, won the race, dominated it. I'm like thinking after I cross the finish line, I'm like, I am back, baby. And then I'm like, I'm back. And then Coach Tellez comes up to me and he says, literally, it's like, what was that? Who were you out there? You didn't practice anything that we were trying to do. You were just straining and pushing the whole time. The point was to run fast and relaxed in the way that we had practiced. And in that moment, I was like, what the heck, dude? Like, I just won and ran fast. But his point was, like, what was the point of the race? It was to work on the things that we had practiced. And in fact, I know it went further because one time, literally, he had Leroy Burrell set the world record. Set the world record in the premier event, the 100 meters. And you know what he told Leroy? He said, this phase of your run wasn't good. You should have done this. And it sounds absurd. But one of the reasons he was so successful is he focused on the things that mattered. And he. His actions and words aligned. He wasn't going to get too high on those results if he wasn't preaching about them. That's Brad Stahlberg coaching the Asheville Six-Sevens, baby. He's like, I know we went 23-0. We ran through the whole county, the whole state. But you guys were not boxing out. You were not playing team defense. You weren't sliding over the Tom Tellez of Asheville youth basketball. All right. Don't put too much pressure on me. Right as we talk about how it's not about the coach's ego. It's about the kids. Shout out to co-coach Zach Neal. have this scheme in the third and fourth grade league to just draft all third graders and all these other coaches are gonna be like they're insane why they draft all third graders then we're gonna run the table with the third grade team so put put your ego aside make it about the kids developing them for fourth grade too you're not a one and done school you're building a program exactly uh only you can't draft the same kids year after year unfortunately all right number seven nail the basics fundamentals over fads fundamentals over fluff fundamentals over funky podcasts whatever alliteration you got for me the best coaches in the world are not listening to seven three-hour podcasts a week to try to find the newest hack that they're going to institute to their program okay they know the fundamentals right we talked about that toolkit they have a big toolkit those tools are tried and true and they're open to new things they're open to innovation they're open to training science they're open to psychological science but they are not spending the vast majority of their time and energy searching for the secret rather what they are doing is spending the vast majority of their time and energy trying to figure out how to get their people to listen to them on the fundamentals and to apply those fundamentals wisely here's where there's some nuance in today's day and age with the internet with bright and shiny objects with the aiification of everything it's very easy to get trapped in the allure of new fads we're like oh sexy try that oh sexy try that oh sexy try that and you end up just on a hamster wheel of fads however what you also don't want to do is be the old curmudgeon coach and this is my my weakness is i can default to this it says none of this shit works it's all just marketing pseudoscience entertainment i run my program i'm going to stick to my program i've got my tools i'm going to stick to my tools you have to be open to some of the wacky stuff working because everything that's a tried and true tool at one point was wacky but that wacky stuff should make up like five percent of your mind space and experimentation and the other 95 should be the fundamentals and too often people flip this or invert this pyramid so don't become a cynic don't become closed-minded but also have the cognitive flexibility to know that a lot of that stuff is bullshit and you should never release from the fundamentals and as you're adding new things you should never do them at the expense of the fundamentals that you know work number eight define success on your own terms know the game you're playing i've witnessed it far too often where someone enthusiastically gets into coaching because they love the sport they love the endeavor they want to help people and then they get seduced by the wins or the moving up or the doing things that someone else wants to do and before you know it on some instances they're cheating their ass off to win right or some instances they're playing a game that they don't enjoy playing outside of the sporting arena maybe they're spending all their time on social media proving that they know what they they're doing instead of spending the time coaching actual people this is like the disease of modernity where success is often defined externally by likes followers bank account wins awards whatever have you most of us don't get into the business for that and if that's the only reason you got into coaching guess what you're probably going to burn out pretty quickly you might have cheap success but it won't be long term because athletes players individuals will know that you don't care about them you're just using them to get that you know eight-year-old asheville undefeated tournament trophy so define it what matters what kind of development matters is it the amount of weddings you get invited two years after if you're a high school or college coach is it developing people into not just athletes but people who have a future and jobs and aspirations whatever it is get very clear on your why because it is easy to get lost especially if you are in an outcome dominated world especially if you're in the u.s where we go a little bit crazy and i also think that is it and i'm going to speak now to a question that i've been asking for a long time and i'm going to speak now particularly to to youth sports um but this is true for high level sports as well i think that you you sometimes have to get a little bit um granular with your why or your your your definition of success for different kids on the team because like one rule that i have or a definition of success is that everybody that played this year wants to come back and play again next year now how to get there is going to be different for different kids you might also have some kids on your team who are very competitive you know even if they're not keeping score in the league those kids their brains they they know every single stat line and for those kids you also have to let them be competitive and you want to cultivate that competitiveness so i i think that like yes you want to define success but then if you're in a team environment you also have to realize that different members of the team are going to have different definitions of success and as you get to older people i think you can ask them as a coach don't make that assumption ask them like what does success look like for you this season what do you do in a situation if someone comes to you and they say i just want to win given we talk a lot about process over outcomes right like what if their version of success is maybe not quite aligned with your version of success or what you're thinking of success for the team as first off i think it's really important that you validate their definition to a degree like if you go in and say oh i hear you you want to win but here we value process winning it's not important that that person is going to look at you and be like which also no coach would ever say yeah this this that person will look at you and be like this person's crazy so you validate you're like yeah winning matters like we want to compete like all this i can i can see that but i think on the flip side here it's like yes we want to win but if we entirely focus on winning it takes us away from doing the things that will help us get here and sometimes you see it like i would see this and have conversations with athletes you'd be like you are the most pissed off dude ever after you lose a race like look at all your other teammates and they're like yeah it sucks but like they can talk you can't even talk to anybody afterwards i love the passion but if that if that negative experience occurs after every loss then eventually that's going to wear on you so let's think of how we redirect that passion while not losing that competitiveness and that's like the nuanced conversation you have so again you kind of give them multiple definitions of success except instead of like the binary that we grow up in number nine number nine my my last contribution i saved it for last deep down inside i was hoping steve wouldn't scoot me on this one be yourself and go all the way i freaking love this saying and i think that it gets to this notion of authenticity and not like bs performative authenticity but really know who you are and channel that here's why this matters with coaching people see role model coaches they see pete carroll they see bill belichick they see dan campbell they see don staley they see cory close coach that i love they see sean mcveigh and they say that person's winning that person's getting a lot of respect i want to do it like that person well guess what if you're not a maniac whose natural intuition is to take four shots of espresso and dump them in a venti coffee at 7 a.m you're probably not going to coach like dan campbell doesn't mean you can't be a great coach doesn't mean that you can't love dan campbell it just means that trying to get the best out of yourself if you are a maniac and you want to dump those four shots of espresso into your venti coffee at 4 a.m you're probably not good coach like steve kerr who's like kind of calm and collected on the sideline right that's that's not going to be you dan campbell and steve kerr are both great coaches there's no doubt about them and i love them both and they're both role models for different reasons but you have to know who you are and you can take certain things about certain coaches that you like but you have to apply them within a framework of your own unique personality so what do i love about dan campbell i love his intensity i love how much he cares and i love how much it's so clear that he genuinely gives a shit back to caring on behalf of each and every one of his players i love that intensity does that mean that i'm going to have those four shots of espresso and go out and do down ups with the guys no because that's not who i am that wouldn't feel natural to me so you have to be able to be able to take these things to take these attributes to take these values but then ask yourself who are you what are your strengths and and really like shape your own way to coach sean mcveigh phenomenal coach los angeles rams i've gotten to know him recently and he was recently telling me that he had some experience with bill belichick and he's like you know whatever everyone else says about bill belichick he was only good to me i think he's a master coach he said though that something that he has added to his program is a is joy because sean mcveigh is a really energized joyful dude you have to be able to take these things to take these values but then ask yourself who are you that's different than belichick if he tried to just be like belichick he wouldn't be sean mcveigh so you take the things that you like from belichick the the relentless focus, the technician, you take all that, but then you also bring yourself to it. And that's what it means to be yourself and go all the way. This happens all the time. It happens in every sport. It happens even more so, I think, in football than anywhere else, especially college football. But if you're an imitator, again, the athletes will know. The people will pick it up. They'll see that you're not being authentic. They'll see that that is not who you are, that you're putting on a show, that it is all a facade. And if caring really is the thing that separates us, that makes good coaching what it is, then they're going to see that you don't really care and you're just putting on a facade to try and get some wins and get performances out of them. The opposite is also true, though. Corey Close, one of my favorite coaches, we're going to hopefully have her on the podcast soon, UCLA Women's Basketball, just pull her up on Instagram or wherever. It's so clear to anyone that knows anything about her, that program, that she is truly transformational coaching. We coach people and athletes, and it just runs through everything that she does. And what makes her so magnetic and what allowed that program to win is that she is 100% authentic to herself. So the opposite is also true. When you can be 100% authentic to yourself as a coach, that charisma is a huge asset. All right, Steve, to the top of the mountain, the prophet Steve, Moses Magnus, put on your robe. What does the burning bush say? What are we going to do? Take us home. Complete the Ten Commandments. I'm actually just going to go where you just went and use the Corey Close quote. You can never outperform your image. To me, this comes back to something I've said for a long time, which is like the story your athletes tell themselves runs the show. It's all that matters, right? And the thing I think we often get wrong in coaching is we think like, oh, if I give them the instructions, if I give them the workouts, coming back to where we started, then that will engender the behavior change. But actually what you're trying to do is get them to change their story. We can call it a mindset. We can call it a psychological frame. But what you're getting them to do is to see something that once they thought was impossible and now see it as possible. In running terms, this happens all the freaking time. You as a coach, you look at someone and you say, oh, God, that kid can run a 420 mile even though he's only running 450 right now. You see it. I'm sure, Clay, as a track coach, you saw someone. You said that person can run so much faster. You can't just tell them, hey, you can run faster. That might help a little bit. But what you've got to do is convince them to show them through workouts, through everything around there. You have to show them that that thing is possible, that that version of themselves that they can't see quite yet is possible. And this is the art of coaching. This doesn't come from just workouts or prescription. It is the job of fundamentally changing their image or changing their story. It's the hardest thing to do, but it's also the most rewarding. When you see someone a couple of years later and they're just like, dang, that person probably a couple of years ago could never see where they were, where they were going to end up. And now they're there. Yeah, it reminds me of Jim Ryan, who we just talked to, the high schooler who said that I'm committing running blasphemy here because I can't remember his coach's name. And he's a very famous coach. Who was it, Steve? Coach Timmons. Yeah, Coach Timmons. And he, Coach Timmons took Jim Ryan after he ran, I think, like 420 as a sophomore. I'm getting some of the details wrong. On the bus ride home, he sat down and, you know, he ran as fast as he could. So he's like, 420, that's pretty good. You know, I'm feeling like that's probably the upper limit I can do. And Coach Timmons sat him down and said, I think you can be the first high school kid to run under four minutes. And it's exactly what you're saying, Steve. Like he had to change Jim Ryan's self-concept and he did. And he did run under four minutes. So, Brad, that's like a pretty specific. I love this idea. It's pretty specific to sports performance, I think, or maybe I'm wrong. But do you feel like there's a corollary in some of the work you do? Yeah, absolutely. There's a corollary. Um, I think the corollary here is a lot of people will say I'm the kind of person that struggles under pressure or I don't know how to have fun working hard. Like I've only been able to suffer for greatness or I am great leading teams of 20, but I'm too much of a micromanager. So once it gets to, you know, running a whole department, I just can't do it. And those are all just narratives that people have. And sometimes that, that narrative is true and you run experiments and you say, yeah, like that's just who you are. Be yourself and go all the way. That's fine. Other times that narrative is false and you blow that narrative up and someone accomplishes so much more than they thought that they were, uh, that they were capable of. And, and that runs in the other direction too. Like there's so much nuance in this because another trap with that is that people just assume that they should take the progression. So if you're a good individual contributor and a good craftsperson, then you should run a team. And if you run a team, then you should run a department. And if you run, then you should be a C-level leader. That's like the society narrative. And sometimes that's true, but sometimes it's actually not true. Sometimes what you need to do is you need to stay as a craftsperson and be the best freaking craftsperson in your field and not worry about leading a team because that's not who you are. So I just think like sometimes people get in their own way on the way up. Other times society says that there's only one performance trajectory and that's also not someone's story. So really like you're helping someone craft their story and own their story. Against all kinds of pressures pushing you in both directions. I think it's every much a trap is, oh, I can't do this. I can't take the next rung up the ladder, which is a real trap, by the way, because of self-doubt. But I think an equal trap is I have to take the next rung up the ladder. And especially in corporate stuff, like it's a very different thing running an organization than being a star in an organization. And a lot of time, the people who are stars in organizations, even if they're good at running organizations, are miserable running organizations are such a different way of working and way of being. And I can't tell you how many people who are just great at their craft kind of just go with this default of up. I guess I got to run the company now. And then they're just miserable. So I saw all the time in magazines. I mean, the joke in magazines is that every great writer, every great writer is an editor because you're so good at it that then you get sent put into an editor track and you end up looking back and you maybe have a powerful job on the masthead. But you're like, I haven't written in five years because I've been editing. And that goes back to number one, I'm not a writer. I'm not a writer. I'm not a writer. I'm not a writer. I'm not a writer. I'm not a writer. I'm not a writer. I'm not a writer. I'm not a writer. Number eight, like, find success in your own terms, know the game you're playing. Okay, so that's it. Our 10 commandments of coaching. That is our tablet. I'm gonna run through them very briefly here. So you have a shorthand one, give a damn care you can push hard, but it has to be from a place of love to coach towards independence, not dependence. Three, you can like an idea, but don't marry it. Don't be dogmatic for plant seeds constantly, you'll never know when they grow. Five, encourage curiosity, not fear. Six, reward what you preach. Seven, nail the basics, the fundamentals. Eight, to find success in your own terms, know the game you're playing. Nine, be yourself and go all the way. And 10, your athletes, your clients can never outperform their self image. So your job is to help them see what and who they can still be. Those are our commandments of coaching. Maybe you agree with us, maybe you disagree, write me, let me know clay.growthq at gmail.com. Tell us what we got right, what we got wrong, where we can do better. We'll be back next week with another episode. Until then, take care of yourselves. And as always, be excellent to one another.