Recent Highlights of the Saturday Blueprint

In recent weeks, The Saturday Blueprint has featured lessons from coaches, entrepreneurs, authors and various other leaders on culture building, team values and mental performance concepts.

For this week's edition, The Daily Coach put together some of the recent highlights from our guests.

What do you think a lot of coaches and leaders get wrong or struggle to come to terms with?

If you’re going to lead people, the first hard thing you have to do is the hard work on yourself to figure out who you really are as a person so that I can lead authentically from my heart and who I am. If you don’t do the hard work, people are following your ego, they’re following your insecurities, they’re following your fears.

You have to do that work on yourself so that you can be yourself, and you can’t be yourself until you know yourself. What I just described is massively hard work. If you’re going to lead people, you have to get the visions and the images and the thoughts out of your head on to paper, and then you have to bring them to life for the people who are following you.

 -Andy McKay, Seattle Mariners, assistant general manager

The teaser for your book says high performers don’t use tricks or hacks. They use mental frameworks. Without giving away too much, can you expand on that a bit?

I am so tired of the cliche advice we see on a daily basis about waking up at 4 a.m. and doing cold plunges. Sure, some high-performers do that, but that's not what this book is about. For example, I have a chapter on how to clarify your thinking and see reality more objectively, and I share some practical frameworks to do that.

For instance, the co-founder of the Center for Applied Rationality, Julia Galef, explains how some people process information like a soldier or a scout — one is focused on winning while the other is focused on observing and seeing reality more objectively. She offers certain lenses we can use to see the world by using a visualization exercise to "divorce our beliefs from ourselves," playing with perspective, and how we can celebrate being objective and not just right.

That's not a hack. That's a fundamental shift in how you see the world that can benefit you for decades to come.

-Polina Pompliano, author of Hidden Genius

You became a principal at another school at just 28 years old. Did you feel qualified at that point or how did you overcome your inexperience?

I suffered from irrational arrogance more than impostor syndrome, if I’m being honest. I was terrible at it. I was not a good principal my first year. There was a student and staff walkout in protest of my leadership.

I fired 20 percent of the staff in my first year. I was in this little town called Oregon, Ill. There was zero reason that school couldn’t be a giant, but I went 1,000 miles per hour at every problem I saw. When I think about it, every decision I made that first year was correct by the textbook. It was research-based, thought out and vetted. But my entire leadership style was just I’ll outwork and out-read you.

I was literally sitting on a wooden picnic table watching them protest me. They were still my students and I had to supervise them. I was thinking, “I have 30 years left of this. There has to be a better way.”

I did a lot of soul searching. I realized I had this faulty definition of leadership in my head my entire life. My definition was, “I get s--t done.” It wasn’t that I influenced hearts and minds or changed people’s behaviors or got them to see themselves as greater than they were. I just accomplished stuff.

I realized in that moment if I’m going to have any success in my career, I’ve got to invert this. It’s not about me getting stuff done. It’s about me helping other people get stuff done. That summer, everything shifted mentally for me.

-P.J. Caposey, Illinois school superintendent, author

You recently wrote about this concept that might be relevant to a lot of leaders called “engaged detachment.” Can you explain what that is?

I got that from a book by Rich Cohen, who was writing about his dad, Herbie Cohen, who was a great negotiator who was brought into all these high-pressure situations. That was his mantra. The way he was talking about it was the strongest position to be in as a negotiator is to care but not that much, to approach it like if I lose this, it doesn’t matter. When you come at it from that perspective, you’re in a position of power, because either way, you sort of win.

Shaun White, before he’d drop into a halfpipe during the Olympics, would say to himself, “Who cares?” It was a way to take the pressure off. Obviously, he works for years and years to get to this one moment, he was engaged and had put in the work, but in that pressure moment, he tells himself to detach and just do what he does, and the score will take care of itself.

 -Billy Oppenheimer, writer and research assistant to Ryan Holiday

You’re really big on seeing small victories along the way. Why do you feel they’re so important?

The world doesn’t see the micro failures behind the scenes. I really feel the tiny wins build momentum and that you need to catch yourself winning. It’s so easy to get down on yourself and identify your deficiencies and weaknesses, but if you pause, confidence comes from doing what you said you were going to do and stacking wins on your private, personal scoreboard. No one else is beating up on you more than you. It’s important to say, “I’m winning as well.” There’s power that comes with progress and making tiny gains. All of a sudden, those behaviors that you developed to get those tiny gains become habits.

-Justin Su’a, Tampa Bay Rays, head of mental performance

You were a role player for a lot of your professional career. How did that set you up for success down the road and maybe help you empathize as a coach?  

For me, I was a good college player, not a good pro player, but I was a worker, a very good professional, a great teammate and a good role player for whatever role you were willing to give me. I understood that. If I wouldn’t have been in these different situations — the last player on a WNBA team or been a starter — I don’t think I would.

I know what it feels like to be the last player on the bench, to go in with 30 seconds left, to be a superstar or All-American or star player who gets all the shots. I think that makes me understand feelings. As a coach, there are times where I didn’t put someone in a game with 20 seconds left because I hated it as a player. I’d rather not play. So, I think there’s a lot of things I do where I think, “How would I have felt in that situation?” I’m very sensitive to those things because I went through them and struggled with them.

-Adia Barnes, University of Arizona women’s basketball coach

You work for years in different cities and different hospitals. Then, in 1996, the opportunity with the Bulls comes around. Even with your vast experience, did you have any doubts or insecurities when you started working with the team?

I think no matter how successful you are, an element of impostor syndrome is what pushes you higher. Why would Michael Jordan or Carlton Fisk, who are the most talented athletes I worked with, push even higher? To oversimplify, it’s impostor syndrome. “I’ve got to try harder. Maybe I don’t deserve to be here. I’ve got to improve myself.”

As soon as I found out I would be one of the team doctors, I literally read every book I could on basketball. I read a book on how to shoot free throws. I’d wake up at 3 in the morning and read for three hours. At the same time, there is a balance between impostor syndrome and also having a certain amount of confidence that I can do this. I think you need both.

-Dr. Michael S. Lewis, orthopedic surgeon and former Chicago Bulls team physician

You keep this interesting stat on your website called “Luck Rating.” Can you explain what that is and maybe the larger implications beyond college basketball of a luck element in performance?

It just gets back to the idea that that’s what we’re trying to do in the analytics field: Find the signal, find what’s meaningful, find what teams are skilled at, then find what’s luck and not measure that.

I think that’s a core principle of coaching or any life activity as well: You have to control what you can control and not really worry about what you can’t control. I think the next logical step to that is understanding “What can I control?” and working on that. If the process is good, it should lead to good results. It won’t do that every time, but if you’re the better team and doing the things that should lead to wins, you should win a lot of games.

-Ken Pomeroy, basketball analytics experts

Do you have a favorite quote?

It's from Joseph Campbell. “The warrior’s approach is to say ‘Yes’ to life: ‘Yes’ to it all."

The good, the bad, that’s your life. I’m going to be 50 in July. You look back on your life and these moments you thought were the worst — the girl who broke up with you, or the job you didn’t get, or the election you lost — and you look back and think that was probably the most important thing that ever happened to me. It made me who I am and who I was and allowed me to do these other things.

-Tim Ryan, former Ohio Congressman and U.S. Senate candidate