Archives for August 2019

Stop Talking About High Character, Start Doing High Character

Now the VP of Team Development at the Houston Texans, Jack Easterby—who was once labeled the Patriot’s Secret Weapon by USA Today—shared a story with me that blew me away. I asked him how he helped his players overcome the entitlement and other challenges that can so often come with big salaries.

He told me how after one high-profile player received a bonus, he invited him to the hospital. Typically, hospital visits by professional athletes are to the children’s ward, but this visit was different. Jack brought this player to hospital rooms where people had just passed away, and then they cleaned the rooms. They got on their hands and knees and scrubbed the room down.

In the hospital room the two of them were away from fans and attention, but were able to serve others in a meaningful way nobody would ever notice. Jack understood in that moment that player didn’t need a message about being grateful; he needed to just go out and be grateful.

Love Does

In his first book, Love Does, author Bob Goff shares how he spent decades attending Bible studies to learn about his faith. One day, he had an epiphany that he had become someone who memorized facts about Jesus, but he didn’t really know Him. Goff says, “I love reading scripture and find tremendous comfort and perspective in exploring God’s Word. However, I stopped going to Bible studies a while ago. Instead, I go to a ‘Bible doing’.”

What’s a “Bible doing”? Well, he gets together with a group for friends, they read scripture, and then ask, “What are we going to do about it?” Then, they would go do it! The stories of how they go out and love and serve people in the community are pretty special.

I remember reading this and thinking that we approach character and leadership in a very similar way in sports. We have a lot of character and leadership curriculums that people invest in to help develop their players, and these are great, but at some stage, we need to stop studying and learning about it—and start living it!

No classroom session, team activity, or speaker will have the same impact as getting your people to put character in action. Don’t just study or talk about being selfless, kind, or patient—go out and do it!

Here are 5 special ways I’ve seen coaches put character into action with their team:

Visit a Nursing Home. So many lessons can be learned from those who are often forgotten in nursing homes near the end of their lives. Get your players to spend time listening to and playing games with the elderly.
Host a Camp for People with Special Needs. During the Christmas season, we’d host a mini-camp and scrimmage with special-needs youth in the community. This was not only an incredible experience for those young people, but also helped our players gain a new appreciation for their ability to play a game that they love.
Visit Inmates in Partnership with Prison Ministries. Without a doubt, the most profound learning experience my students have ever experienced was when I brought a group to a prison. We partnered with a nonprofit prison ministry and got the opportunity to sit with men who were serving life sentences, hear their stories, and talk with them.
Serve at Homeless Shelter or Food Bank. How often do our athletes get the opportunity to see and serve others in need? In doing so, they will be more grateful for what they have and find joy in serving others.
Help with Home Repair or Building. Many organizations, like Home Works, understand the value of empowering young people to take the lead on service projects that help others.

We’ve discussed this concept in regards to leadership on Coaching Culture Episode 61: Let them Lead. It’s worth a listen.

Why Sleeping More Will Make You A Better Coach

Some years ago, a group of researchers in Australia wanted to understand how dangerous driving a truck was while sleep deprived. So, they gathered a large group of truckers and ran two tests.

For the first test, they got the truckers drunk. After each drink, they tested their blood-alcohol level, and then put them through a series of simple tests. They tested memory, hand-eye coordination, reaction time, and their ability to multitask and perform low-level cognitive tasks.

In the second test, they kept the truckers awake for 17 hours. After every hour, they ran the same series of simple tests as they did in the first test.

What they learned was pretty scary. After 17 hours without sleep, the truckers performed at the same level or worse than when their blood-alcohol concentration was at 0.05%. Response speeds were up to 50% slower. After longer periods of sleep deprivation, their performance decreased to the BAC level of 0.1%. (Just for reference, a BAC above 0.05% in many countries (0.08% in America) is above the legal limit.) The scary truth: Driving while sleep deprived has the potential to be just as dangerous as being under the influence.

The Importance of Sleep

It is only in the last 20 years that we have come to really understand “why we sleep” as a species. When it comes to our health, people have put a premium on nutrition and exercise but have been willing to sacrifice sleep. At what cost?

Matthew Walker—sleep scientist at Google, and Professor of Neuroscience at Cal Berkley—says, “The shorter your sleep, the shorter your life. Every physiological system of the body and operation of the mind are enhanced by sleep.” You have a 65% increase in mortality when you deprive yourself of sleep. What scientists have found is that sleep deprivation (anything less than 7 hours/night) leads to diabetes, suicidality, anxiety, depression, and Alzheimer’s. When it comes to resetting and restoring brain and body health, sleep is the most effective thing we can do.

Other than avoiding death and a host of other illnesses, there are three really important reasons we sleep! First, if you are in sports, I am sure you understand the importance of sleep for restoration. It’s why we encourage our athletes to get a good night’s sleep! Secondly, sleep deprivation compromises metabolism significantly, so you end up burning muscle (not fat!) while you sleep.

The third (and probably most significant) reason that affects our coaching performance is memory consolidation. We sleep to not only move our memories from short-term to long-term storage, but during REM sleep, we actually connect new memories with previous memories. Sleep is a powerful way to find creative solutions to previously unsolvable problems!

Sleep in Coaching

People’s beliefs around proper sleep in the coaching world have long been that if you want to be successful, you are going to have to put in long hours. The expectation is that you have to stay up late studying film to get your team ready for the next game. This is probably the case in football more than any other sport. Just look at this conversation on the Freakanomics podcast between Steven Dubner and the Head Coach of the 49ers, Kyle Shanahan:

DUBNER: So, I have to say, you hear these stories forever about coaches literally sleeping in their offices, working these hours that you described. I think anybody listening to this, those hours sound totally nuts.

SHANAHAN: Yeah.

DUBNER: And my thought is always, “Does it really have to be that way?” For people who don’t know the game or care about it, and they hear, “Wait a minute, you’re a football coach; why do you need to be working 18 hours? What are you doing?”

SHANAHAN: On a Monday, as a head coach, I need to watch the game for myself, which is offensive-side, defensive-side, special teams. It’s rewind, fast-forward, sideline copy, and there’s three clips before we get past one play on one side of the ball, and I’ve got to watch it with the coaches, and then, when that is done, I’ve got to get the whole team together, and I got to watch certain clips of the team from head-coach standpoint. Anyways, it takes all Monday, all right? It takes all Monday, and now we’ve got to start watching Seattle, who we play the next Sunday.

DUBNER: Has anybody ever tried—has any coach ever said, “You know what? Maybe all those hours that we’re working, if we slept more, we’d be sharper and try to make up for it that way?” Has anybody ever tried a totally different approach?

SHANAHAN: Yeah, totally.

DUBNER: And those are no longer coaching—

SHANAHAN: Guys you would never know their name because they don’t last long, and, I mean, it’s okay if we’re tired, and we barely can function. We don’t have to perform the play. It’s us wearing our brains out all week to put our players in the best opportunity possible for them to be successful.

Super Bowl Coach Tony Dungy disagrees. “All the hours don’t necessarily lead to a better team or a better game plan, but we do it anyway because it takes a lot of confidence and a very good grasp of things to be able to say the words: ‘We’re ready; we should all go home.’ Unfortunately, there is a new generation of coaches under the impression that a 60-to-70-hour week is normal,” Dungy says. “Those interested in regular life are few and far between.”

The Badge of Honor

I’ve worked with coaches at every level of college and high-school sports. In my conversations with coaches, the #1 challenge with sleeping more is not the fear of being unprepared for the next game. It is the fear of what others will think.

Head coaches are afraid their staff and players will doubt their commitment and work ethic. They are afraid of being compared to other coaches in their league, who sleep at the office. Assistant coaches are afraid to challenge the head coach and the norms. They feel that to rise up the ranks, the only way to prove yourself is by logging long hours in the film room.

Most coaches will privately admit that everything that needs to get done could be done within normal hours. One coach I worked with at a high-profile collegiate football program said the long hours were due to perception and inefficiency in their system of preparation.

Now coaches aren’t the only ones who wear sleep deprivation as a badge of honor. Doctors and businessmen have longed bragged about burning the midnight oil. People are shamed for getting the proper amount of rest and maintaining a good balance in life. This attitude around healthy sleep habits is a must-change for multiple reasons.

5 Reasons Coaches Should Sleep 7+ Hours Every Night

Improve Performance: Simply put, if you want to be at your best, sleep 7-8 hours a night. Researchers have shown that people who sleep 8+ hours show no cognitive decreases or attention lapses. Groups of people getting 4-6 hours of sleep a night show a steady decline each day. Surprisingly, there was little difference between the 4-hour and 6-hour groups!
Improve Your Health: Your team and your family deserve a physically, mentally, and emotionally healthy individual. Every hour of sleep you lose gives them less of that person.
Boost Your Efficiency: As coaches, we pride ourselves on efficiency. Instead of working harder, try working smarter. In today’s technological age, we should be able to do a lot more with a lot less.
Set a Positive Example: Moderation in every area of our life is an important message that we should communicate to our players and staff. Your example will speak loudly on this.
Work-Life Balance: Sleep deprivation and working long hours is surely a large contributing factor to the high divorce rate in coaching. Even if your team’s performance will drop if you sleep more (and I don’t think it has to!) is your relationship with your family worth sacrificing over a game?

Notes

How to Be More Connected Than 99% of Teams After Day One

In 1997, the American Navy was facing a big problem. Less than 50% of their sailors were reenlisting after completing a tour of duty. Retraining new sailors cost the navy at least $100K, but they understood the real cost of losing sailors was not just financial; it also impacted morale.

Why were so many people leaving? For many, it started with their first day.

New recruits in the navy—sometimes as young as 17—didn’t just have to endure a challenging boot camp; they also had to endure an isolated and unwelcoming experience aboard their first ship.

After graduating boot camp, they boarded a plane to their first ship where, upon landing, there was no welcoming party or person to pick them up. Not only were they expected to find their own way to the ship; once they got there, nobody welcomed them aboard. Usually, the sailors on the ship were so busy heading out on leave for the weekend, they couldn’t have cared less about the new sailor.

Well, in June of 1997, when Captain Michael Abrashoff took command of his first ship, the USS Benfold, he sought to increase respect and buy-in by improving the experience of every sailor. As Abrashoff explains in his book, It’s Your Ship, personal conversations with new arrivals revealed, “They felt totally intimidated that they had no friends and knew no one. They were lost for the first forty-eight hours, on their own aboard the ship while nearly everyone else was on leave.”

Abrashoff himself was only 17 upon entering the navy, and his conversations with new sailors brought back his own feelings of fear and isolation. He quickly realized that changing the first-day experience would be a critical component of turning one of the worst ships in the navy into one of the BEST.

What’s Your First-Day Experience Like?

When Captain Abrashoff learned from his XO that the USS Benfold had absolutely no “welcome-aboard” process, he asked his officers, “How would you want your son or daughter to be treated on their first day if they ever joined the Navy? What’s the first thing you’d want them to do?”

The USS Benfold quickly developed and implemented a “welcome-aboard” program, wherein sailors were picked up from the airport, brought aboard the ship, and immediately allowed to call their family to let them know they arrived safe. They were assigned a buddy for the first 48 hours as their personal tour guide around the ship and San Diego. During this time, they also sat down for a personal one-on-one with Captain Abrashoff himself.

Abrashoff isn’t the only leader who understands the importance of the first-day experience; others in business and sports are starting to get it, as well.

In The Power of Moments, Chip and Dan Heath share how companies like John Deere have completely revamped their onboarding process. In their Asia offices, John Deere struggled with employee engagement and retention, as well. So, they designed what they call “The First-Day Experience”, wherein new employees are partnered with a “buddy” who connects with them and guides them through their first day before they even arrive.

At places like John Deere and the USS Benfold, they have realized that the onboarding experience isn’t just important for the new members to connect to the group. The experience of designing and welcoming new employees provides an important opportunity to ask, “What do we want being a part of this team to feel like?” They weren’t just connecting with each other; they were connecting with their values.

Sports—just like the military, fraternities, and other groups—often have traditions around hazing new members, not welcoming them. I still remember being full of fear and uncertainty before my first basketball practice as a freshman in high school.

Nobody took the time to introduce themselves. Players were expected to step in and figure out plays and drills along with the more experienced players. Reflecting back on it, the first day was a pretty good indicator of how the rest of the season would go for me: Don’t ask questions; just show up and do what you were told. This is not the experience we want to create for our players!

As a coach, my usual system was rarely more than a handshake, asking a few questions about them, and then tossing them a ball to go get shots up before we started.

Making a great first impression isn’t just important for new people; it’s also important for leaders and the team to make a great first impression on new members. We’ve got to be intentional even before Day One by starting to form connections and communicating our standards.

The Onboarding Process

If you are like many coaches, you might be totally starting from scratch, but even if you already have a system, it’s worth evaluating the ways in which it can be improved.

One of the best ways to do this is to create your “first-day experience” with former and returning players. In just a short 15-minute meeting, not can you get your players bought-in; you can also get them excited to serve the newbies!

Try asking your team these three questions to help them design a powerful first-day experience for new members:

Reflect back on your first day. What did it feel like?
Now, imagine your best friend was going out for the team. How would you want them to feel on their first day?
What can we do to create that experience for every new member of the team?

5 Ways to Make Their Experience Special

Personal Letter from Coach: Whether it is a short note at the bottom of the practice schedule, a personal card to every player, or a phone call the day before, connection for you and your players starts before they even arrive.
Big-Brother/Big-Sister Program: Partnering each new player with a returning player is an absolute must. Get your players to design the program. Some effective methods we’ve seen used in other programs have been sending a text, posting a shout-out on social media, welcoming them on the court/field, and working alongside them during the first two practices.
One-on-One Sit-Down: Take the time to sit down with your players and get to know them as people. While you probably can’t do what Greg Popovich did—spending a few days on the beach at Turks and Caicos with his #1 draft pick and future NBA MVP, Tim Duncan—you can still make some effort! For some teams, this is could be coffee, lunch, or just a personal chat on their first day.
Photo with the Team: Many of us coaches aren’t into social media, but it can be a powerful force. Take photos with your new players and their new teammates and coaches. Share those photos on social media, welcoming them to the program; they will appreciate the public shout-out!
Share Stories: What does it mean to be a part of your program? I’m sure you’ve got some great slogans up on the wall and can fire out a powerful speech, but few things are more influential than story. Get a few players to share their story of what it means to be a part of the program.

Notes

Abrashoff, Michael. It’s Your Ship (pp. 161-162). Grand Central Publishing. Kindle Edition.
Heath, Chip & Dan. Power of Moments.

The Naturalness Bias: Why Most Coaches Value Talent Over Character

Our Fascination with the Natural

In the Academy Award winning film, Good Will Hunting, 20-year-old Will Hunting (played by Matt Damon) is a genius, working as a lowly janitor at MIT. He gets the attention of math professor, Gerald Lambeau, after solving one of his most difficult problems left on the board for his graduate students. The professor takes it upon himself to not only save Will from a prison sentence but mentor him into becoming a world-changing mathematician.

Now, one of the most striking aspects of this film is the professor’s obsession with Will’s natural talent and intelligence.

Professor Lambeau is a man of slightly above-average intelligence who has become world-renown for his contributions to mathematics. His achievements have been a product of his hard work and determination.

But instead of finding another version of himself to mentor, he chooses to obsess over a young man who is everything he is not. He chooses to invest in the “natural” talent of a reckless and unmotivated Will Hunting, instead of his own gritty, hardworking, and loyal graduate assistant.

As coaches, how often are we like Professor Lambeau, allowing our obsessions with natural ability to blind us from those who really want it?

Grit versus Natural Ability

In Angela Duckworth’s book, Grit, she shares Stanford researcher Catherine Cox’s study, revealing that the most accomplished people in history over the last few centuries were smarter than the average person, but there was little relationship between their level of intelligence and their level of influence. Whether they had an IQ of 190 or 130, it did not determine the level of their success. For instance, Sir Isaac Newton only had an IQ of 130, which is below the average IQ of Harvard students today.

So, what was the determining factor? Cox calls it “persistence”, and Duckworth calls it “grit”.

Research has also shown that while most people claim to value work ethic and persistence, when it comes down to it, we recruit, chase, and select people with the most talent.

Duckworth explains it best: “The ‘naturalness bias’ is a hidden prejudice against those who’ve achieved what they have because they worked for it, and a hidden preference for those whom we think arrived at their place in life because they’re naturally talented. We may not admit to others this bias for naturals; we may not even admit it to ourselves. But the bias is evident in the choices we make.”

What are the things you believe that you value most in your players? If you ask most coaches, we will claim traits like “hardworking, responsible, positive, and respectful”.

In reality, those traits are often just an extra bonus in our minds because when it comes to making cuts, recruitment, or even who we put in the game, we end up valuing the more “talented” players. We see the athletic and naturally gifted individuals, and our eyes light up at the “potential” we see in them.

Shouldn’t a positive attitude and a good work ethic be among the first things we look at when we try to determine potential?

Change How You Assess Talent

Talent = Ability X Character X Culture

UNC women’s soccer coach, Anson Dorrance—who is one of the most winningest coaches of all time—said, “Talent is common; what you invest to develop that talent is the critical, final measure of greatness.”

In response to those who believe his success is due to his talent pool, “That’s simply incorrect. We’re out-recruited by five or six schools on a regular basis. Our extraordinary success is about what we do once the players get here. It’s our culture.”

I know; we can’t ignore talent. But we can’t keep ignoring attitude and effort, either. Duckworth believes that effort counts twice. So, let’s at least make it equal to talent.

Imagine what would happen if we:

Stop chasing the entitled recruits, and instead give some “gritty” less talented individuals the opportunity they’ve worked for;
Made our team selections this season by leaving off a few of the more talented players, so we can keep some of the grittier players; and
Set our lineup or depth chart based on those who have worked the hardest and had the best attitude in practices leading up to the game.

Parents and fans may lose their minds and might even call you crazy, but there will no longer be a question about what you value.

Early on, you may lose some games that you could have won, but you might just have a better team by the end of the season.

When you don’t play the less gritty, more “talented” player, they may quit or be upset, but if they persevere, they will become less entitled, grittier, and might just fight their way back to the top.

The grittier, less talented player will most likely surprise you by becoming a lot more talented and even grittier. Remember, effort counts twice!

Oh, and don’t forget that you will enjoy coaching a great deal more! The players will work hard, listen, and come to respect you more than ever because they will believe you when you claim to value hard work, leadership, and a great attitude.