On Self-Improvement, Tricky Decisions and Growing From Defeat

Over the past year, The Daily Coach has spoken to dozens of coaches, keynote speakers and various other leaders about personal and professional growth, making difficult decisions amid uncertainty, and getting over a painful loss.

For this week’s Saturday Blueprint, we put together some of the best thoughts from our guests on these subjects.

On self-improvement:

It’s human nature to lament your lot in life, where you are right now and complain about this, complain about that. But complaining and growth cannot exist at the same time. It’s impossible. If you’re in the headspace of complaining about something, it’s impossible for you to grow at the same time. You can’t. You have to actually stop doing one thing for the other to occur.

To answer your question, what I try to do is to stop the complaining and worry about the growth… Every time I get in that space where I’m not handling hard better, I say, “O.K., you can do this and you can keep going down this road, but you will not be growing during the entire time you’re in this space. If you’re O.K. with that, you can keep going and do that. 

That’s how I look at it. I just focus on the growth, and amazing things happen when you focus on that. You end up having more success — and you end up having things go your way.

-Kara Lawson, Duke women’s basketball coach

You mention knowing who you are, which can be a challenge for a lot of inexperienced leaders. How do you learn who you are beyond just experience?

In our work with coaches, we’re trying to go at self-preservation. “What are you afraid of losing? What are you trying to hide? What are you trying to prove?”  

I try to help people understand the demons they’re facing, what’s holding them back, and what their competitive advantages are. Is it the way you think? The way you communicate? The way you scheme?

Also, what are the things you do that drain you of energy? You have to do a strengths and weaknesses inventory — because everyone has superpowers. What are your superpowers and how can we get you spending 70 to 80 percent of your time doing those things? All of a sudden, the burnout for leaders, the drama, the frustration starts to go down. 

If a leader can get healthy physically, spiritually, mentally, emotionally, then the burnout doesn’t happen. The best leaders multiply.

-Kevin DeShazo, mental performance mastery coach

On tough decisions:

I want to shift to some of your more recent tenure. Can you take us through those early days of COVID-19 and some of the challenges you faced?

Thursday of that week is when we stopped. Our thought was we would stop for three weeks. That was kind of the theme around stopping the spread in a contained time period.

Then, you realized there wasn’t any quick return. Gus Malzahn was at Auburn and called me early on and said, “Everybody is living with the uncertainty and the doubt and the concern. As you communicate, you can always give hope, some kind of promise that we’re going to keep trying. That would mean a lot to the players on our team.” I was intentional to try to do so.

After the year was over, I went back and evaluated my media interviews and the videos I could find. ESPN was really helpful to provide me with many of those. Pretty consistently, it was, “We’re going to keep trying. We’re not going to stop. We don’t know if we can.” I was honest about the uncertainty.

I also remember the emotions of the moment… I felt a responsibility to try to find a way, but we couldn’t. In a couple of private moments, there were some tears shed, some emotions, because I felt I owed it to the players and coaches to finish that experience, but obviously the circumstances took over.

-Greg Sankey, Southeastern Conference commissioner

What’s the toughest coaching decision you’ve had to make? 

The hardest ones are recruitment or retention decisions of staff or players. You may have a very good relationship that works well, but the organization needs a change. Putting the organization ahead of any one individual is the right thing to do, but it’s a difficult thing at times because you have to tell people they can’t stay anymore. 

You have to be as direct as possible, but with a sense of empathy and care. Sometimes, there’s no way to sugarcoat it. Other times, it’s complicated as well because players’ agents are involved. There are times where it’s not always as direct communication as you’d like.

This last season, there was a lot of external pressure to do certain things, and I had to stand my ground and do what I knew was right. When you come back to trying to do the right thing for the greater cause, it becomes a little simpler 

-Rohan Smith, Leeds Rhinos head coach

On growing from defeat:

Are there instances where you’ve been unsuccessful or failed with patients and what’s your process to move on from regret?

Nobody’s perfect, so as a practitioner, as a learner, as a teacher, we have to learn how to manage failure. It’s inevitable. To me, I like the idea of remember and forgive. What I mean by that is I think you have to do the intellectual work first before you can get to the emotional work of forgiving yourself...

The first stage of deserving forgiveness from whomever it is and yourself is you try to learn what happened. I used to dictate notes into a phone or dictate even a letter to myself. My secretary would type these up, and I’d look at them and try to translate them from pig Latin into English. It’d often lead to other things. Sometimes, I’d look stuff up. Sometimes, I’d ask my friends or ask my mentors. Two of my brothers are also surgeons, so I’d talk to them about it. I love to find people who I know are smart but I can also trust to give good advice and feedback, even if it’s, “You dumbass, why did you do this?”

There’s the mental side of stuff, and then there’s the emotional. Things are easier when they go really neat and harder when they don’t. You have to have a way of dealing with that, and I think an important part is thinking about what you learned, what you can do differently and the general ethics of action. Throughout a career, you gain wisdom and experience and a greater depth of understanding. Every situation you’ve dealt with in the past makes you a little better.

-Dr. Curtis Tribble, University of Virginia Medical Center surgeon

You were undefeated until that final match. How did that loss impact you in the long term?

That defeat made me the person I am. What’s funny is the guy who beat me, Larry Owings, said, “I wish I wouldn’t have won that match.” He said, “I wanted to be a world and Olympic champion, and it slowed me down… I didn’t know how to handle all of the publicity or my family.” 

That match also changed me not just for the next two years but for the next 27 years (as an Olympian and coach). It taught me I had to take more control of my team when I go to an event. I can’t just let them run free. They might stay out late, they might party, they might run into a newspaper guy who would bring up something I didn’t want him to bring up. You’ve got to keep them under lock and key a little bit.

-Dan Gable, Olympic gold medalist and legendary Iowa wrestling coach

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