'Don’t Put a Ceiling on Their Goals or Dreams'

In recent weeks, The Saturday Blueprint has featured lessons from coaches, executives and psychologists on organization, culture building and team values.

For this week's edition, our team at The Daily Coach put together some of the recent highlights from guests with insights into building core philosophies, defining reality for our team members, and maintaining motivation regardless of past accomplishments.

Dr. Bhrett McCabe, sports psychologist

You’re a big believer that every coach should have a philosophy binder.

I’ll give a talk to 5,000 coaches in an audience and ask, “How many of you have your system and philosophy written down?”

Coaches are all going to say, “Trust the process. Follow the system.” So you’re the expert and leader of your organization but don’t have your material written down? The mind can only remember so many things.

Then what happens is we go to a conference, watch something online and now we’re going to reactively teach our kids everything David Goggins does? Well, that may not be the right idea. Or we’re going to do everything Jocko Willink does? O.K. Then, we’re going to follow Brene Brown’s ideas and be vulnerable? Wonderful content, but those are just the seasonings of a philosophy.

What I tell every coach to do is what I call “Red Wine Therapy” or “Beer Therapy” or “Coffee Therapy.” Take out a piece of paper and just start writing. In-game strategy, what are we specifically trying to do in a given scenario? If we look at Coach Saban, we know what his philosophy is, and yeah, it’s written down. Coach Oats at Alabama basketball, it’s very clear what his philosophy is. If you meet with a surgeon about a hip replacement, I guarantee you there is a system in place. When pilots fly, they have a checklist. But as coaches, we’re just going to wing it?

Phil Beckner, NBA skills trainer, high-performance coach

You have some interesting thoughts on defining reality but not putting a ceiling on anyone’s development.

(Damian Lillard) still tells people I said he was going to be in the G-League and maybe a late first-round pick. That’s what I thought. But that’s why I now challenge coaches and players to never put a ceiling on anyone’s development.

You have to define reality for a player, how hard it is to make it, what the requirements are going to be. But don’t put a ceiling on their goals or dreams. That’s not up to us to do.

I say this all the time. The greatest way for a coach or leader to be successful is to just make the m----------r in front of you better. Whoever’s in front of you, just show up and continue to make them better. Challenge them, give them the truth, put your arm around them when they don’t deserve it sometimes. If you can make the person in front of you better, great things are going to happen for them and great things are going to happen for you.  

Drew Maddux, business executive and former high school basketball coach

You were known as a real culture builder as a high school coach. What were the hallmarks of your program and the core tenets?

The whole program was built on the Parable of the Talents. If you know that story, whether you were given five, two or one, it’s not how much you were given. It’s what you do with what you were given. We made sure we recognized and set up a culture of honor, that everyone had something specific that needed to be leveraged for the good of the group. We didn’t make cuts. It was all-comers. We could have as many as 40 players in our locker room. We’d use storytelling to set up the locker room as a manhood classroom. The locker room can be a damaging place if it’s hierarchical where the better players have the power. We wanted it to be a safe place.

Second, we focused on elements of the eulogy over the resume. We focused on the purpose over the goal. We constantly used language of what it means to be in pursuit of a life of fulfillment rather than achievement, trying to eliminate the elements of pressure performance. Go be all you can be for the good of the group in pursuit of a cause bigger than yourself.

Coach George Raveling, Naismith Basketball Hall-of-Famer and Daily Coach founder

At 85, the word retirement is not in your vocabulary. What are your thoughts on the idea of retirement?

I'm not too fond of the concept of retirement. It's the biggest force that's ever been predicated on us is this idea of retirement because the first thing that happens you retire physically, and then you retire mentally. Then you're just taking up residence in society. I don't ever want to be a resident of society. I want to be a contributor to society. Our lives consist of two dates with a dash in between. It is our responsibility to make that dash count. Retirement is a mindset that usually gets manifested into our daily reality. When retirement looms, we often stop learning, unlearning, and relearning. But even if we retire from our professions, we should never retire from pursuing knowledge, wisdom, and the meaning of life.

Anson Dorrance, UNC women's soccer coach

You have core values within your program and have players grade each other on these. How does that system work?

Twice a year, we have a peer evaluation. All of the kids on the team evaluate their teammates in each of the 13 core values. We sort of do it on a GPA scale. You have to live above a 3.0 on your core values.

You’re allowed to give out one 5. If you give out a 5, you’re saying you’re the best person on the team at representing this core value. You can give out as many 4s as you’d like.

A 4 is an exceptional example, 3 means you live this value most of the time, 2 is occasionally, 1 is rarely. You can give a 3.5, 2.2, etc. If they don’t live above a 3.0, they clearly don’t want to be in our culture. If they are below this line and they’re not on scholarship, we try to get them to quit. If they are on scholarship, we try to get them to transfer because they clearly do not want to live these core values.

Michael Deegan, Denison University baseball coach

A lot of people, particularly coaches, come to that early career crossroads of whether to follow their passion. What guided you through that time and what advice would you give to someone in a similar position?

If you’re feeling tugged in some way, at some point, you have to have the courage to just jump right in. I mentioned my family background, unbelievable parents, but my dad was of the mindset, “You’re working at Coca-Cola. You’re making more money than I make. How could you leave that? I don’t understand this.”

I had to go against the advice of people who were close to me. It was well-meaning advice, but it was from people who didn’t quite understand it. I knew in my heart I couldn’t do that for the rest of my life. I had to explore.

You can get past a lot of things if there’s true love. What I’ve learned is when you take risks and chances and you try to make a big change, certain people will fade away. But the ones who really care and love and support you, they’ll be there. Even the ones who thought my decision was a poor one were still in my corner. They didn’t hope it would fail.

But you do find that the people who really care about you will No. 1, forgive you for your mistakes and No. 2, they’re pulling for you. They want you to make it work. A lot of times, we get advice from well-meaning people, but a lot of them haven’t done the internal work to know what they want, and that’s where things got mixed up.