What Are Your Mantras?

Be quick, but don’t hurry. 

Never mistake activity for achievement.

Discipline yourself so others won’t have to. 

Coach John Wooden loved to provide these sayings — and countless others — to his UCLA basketball players over the years.

“He had a billion of them that he would just throw out constantly, always at the appropriate moment,” Bruins legend Bill Walton said recently. “They were directed to me. I know, I counted.”

“They were swirling around everywhere, to the point where we asked ourselves, ‘What are you talking about?’” Walton added. “When I eventually graduated and moved on, I quickly realized that not everyone and every place was like John Wooden and UCLA. It was revelatory to ponder everything, including the punctuation, phraseology and pauses. Things immediately started to make perfect sense.”

As leaders, we speak to our teams about a wide variety of subjects. While long-winded talks of wins, earnings and strategies are undoubtedly necessary at points, our teams are far more likely to remember our catchphrases.  

We need to develop several of them — soundbites of sorts — that express our message clearly, concisely and memorably for those we lead. 

“Repeat yourself a lot,” former UCLA guard Andy Hill said. “If your employees don’t have a couple of things that you keep saying and laugh at you about, you’re not saying them enough. You need to be confident enough in yourself — it’s not a popularity contest — to repeat things over and over again.”

“Everything John Wooden repeated was a chapter in a book,” he added. “It was a value, a characteristic that he held dear.”

The key to scripting your team’s success story of tomorrow may begin with a simple five-word catchphrase today. What’s yours?