Recent Highlights of The Saturday Blueprint

In recent weeks, The Saturday Blueprint has featured lessons from entrepreneurs, coaches, authors and 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?

Professional athletes all want the same things. They want to get to the league. They want to stick in the league. They want to make some money, and they want to win. There’s nothing easy about any of those things. That began helping me understand leadership was about partnering with that athlete to get them through what’s really hard.

I’m not sure coaches are really hard. Like, “Oh, he’s a hard-ass coach.” No, what you’re trying to do is hard. The coach is just your partner, and there’s no way around the hard.

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

What type of feedback were you getting and was any of it discouraging? 

You get feedback early on that it’s not possible because “It’s never been done before” or “That’s just not the way we do things.” Feedback like that is just rooted in historical precedent and is challenging to overcome. It’s not very common you find a lot of developmental mindsets in sports where people are looking at new rule sets or new formats. That was a big challenge. “Who is this guy?” “How can they pull this off?” Proving ourselves was the biggest challenge.

-Jonathan Mugar, CEO of “The Basketball Tournament”

You put a big emphasis on the conflict and think everything changes there.

The conflict is your story. As soon as you run out of conflict, you run out of story. It’s like your gas pedal. The conflict is saying here’s something that needs to be resolved. Maybe it’s between two people or two teams or between a person and him/herself realizing his values weren’t in alignment. The conflict is realizing something needs resolution, and that’s what the heart of the story is that’s going to be explored. We should get some type of understanding of what that outcome is as a result of the conflict.

-Karen Eber, business consultant and storytelling expert

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

The first thing you need to do in essence before you can forgive yourself and do the emotional work is to do the intellectual work you owe to yourself, to the patient and to all of your future patients.

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.

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

Is it ever difficult for you balancing between the coach side and the player side? Players probably want to open up privately, but it would seem like the coaches also want to know what’s going on with their players.

I think you have to be very, very careful. I think if you’re 100 percent in with the players, the coaches are like, “What are you doing? How are you supporting us? Why aren’t you telling us things?”

If you’re 100 percent in with the coaches or front office, the players are like, “You’re not here to help us. You’re here for them.” It’s this beautiful balance of how do you create trust with everyone? Sometimes you can, sometimes you can’t.

I think it has to be a slow, steady burn on both sides simultaneously. If you’re too embedded with the players, not a great look. If you’re too embedded with the coaches, not a great look. It’s how do you bounce back and forth and keep building trust?

-Hannah Huesman, Texas Rangers mental performance coach

You write in your book about the whirlwind of emotions when your father passed away but also your logistical responsibilities in the ensuing days. When you look back on that, how were you able to manage everything being thrown at you?

I think one of the things when you go through loss, especially when it’s unexpected, you are burdened immediately with all of these details as to what are we going to do with the literal process of death, the death certificates, picking out caskets, organizing funerals, who’s going to speak, what are people wearing, the flower arrangements?

One of the stories I tell trying to look at things with humor was after my father passed, he was an organ donor. And I got a call from the District of Columbia organ donation office, and there was this poor kid on the phone. I felt bad for him. He had no idea how to start the conversation. Basically, “So your dad died. He’s an organ donor.” And he’s reading from a script. “Was your dad involved in narcotics or using injectable drugs?” I just started laughing like, “No, the organs are good. Get him out.”

But it’s things like that that come up where you just have to find humor and not get offended. It's really uncharted territory and you’re going through so much pain and so many emotions, but you want to do what’s right and make sure everything runs smoothly.

-Luke Russert, best-selling author of “Look For Me There”