Saturday Blueprint With George Raveling

At 85, Coach George Raveling believes two of our greatest days are the day we are born, and the day we figure out why we are on Earth.

Raveling is the former director of international basketball at Nike and a member of the 2015 Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall-of-Fame class.

He co-founded The Daily Coach alongside former NFL executive and author Michael Lombardi in 2019 — and has an insatiable thirst for learning and a devotion to investing in people, human potential and personal development.

Our team at The Daily Coach spoke to Coach Raveling recently about the power of self-leadership, winning our days, managing our self-talk and empowering the 21st-century athlete.

This interview has been condensed and edited for brevity.

Coach Raveling, for the readers who might not know your story, can you tell them a little about your upbringing and how instrumental your grandmother was in your life?

I was born in a segregated hospital in Washington, D.C. – Garfield Hospital. There were four floors for Whites and one floor for Blacks. I came into the world in a segregated world. When I was 9, my dad died, and when I was 13, my mom had a nervous breakdown, and she was institutionalized for the rest of her life. Now, here’s George at 13 years old. What do you do with George?

My grandma was a product of a Blackfoot Indian Tribe. As I was growing up, my grandma was basically, if I can borrow, a religious concept – my grandmother was the Pope. Her word was infallible. My grandma never graduated from high school. In fact, no one in my family – my mom or dad – finished high school. She knew there had to be a better way for me, and she did everything she could to help me heal and grow.

Growing up as a little boy in D.C., my grandma always said that money’s the root of all evil. Don’t build your life around money. My grandma was huge on manners. The greatest quote my grandma told me was, “There’s more horses’ asses in the world than there are horses.” That’s been my favorite grandma quote.

What traits do great leaders possess, and why is self-leadership so important?

All great leaders have a growth mindset. They are extremely curious. They are constantly trying to reach their outer limits and discover them. I don’t know of a great leader in humankind who did not have a vision. All great leaders have a vision, mission, goal, purpose, and strategy.

Great leaders execute the strategy and recognize it is about WE, not ME. It is about how they can serve the needs of others. I’ve always had this theory that, if you help enough people get what they want, you’ll always get what you want. Also, there is self-awareness among great leaders. They understand that great leadership starts from within, and the most important leadership is self-leadership. If we cannot lead ourselves, how in the world will we lead others?

When we talk about being a positive change and difference maker, the thought process is about trying to change society. People always say, “Do something that’ll change the world.” Well, if you want to do something that will change the world, you change first. If we started from within before going outward, we’d have this massive movement of change that would be authentic.

Relationships have played a transformative role on your journey as a coach, educator, executive and founder. What have you learned about building genuine and authentic relationships?

Relationships, at their most authentic stage, are partnerships. The goal of partnerships is to create value and win-win situations. It’s not I win, you lose, or you lose, I win. It’s not about that. We’re in this thing together. At the core of authentic relationships are trust and respect. You have to trust a person and respect the person. What I think gets overlooked in relationship building is listening — being able to actively listen and listen to understand and learn instead of listening to reply.

How do you lead and manage your days?

My day really evolves around energy management, time management, environmental management, and productivity. One lesson that continues to resonate with me and empower my daily decision-making was learned from Charlie Denson, Nike’s former brand president. He would ask the team, “Would we be better off doing 25 things well, or would we be better off doing six things great?”

This profound question has become my truth-telling compass while energizing me to intentionally and strategically govern my days instead of having the busyness of days govern my life. Every day instead of concentrating solely on productivity, I focus on managing my energy, time, and environment. To me, productivity is a byproduct of the other three. I try to make sure that at some point during that day, I have an hour of “think time,” where I can sit and have a deep, rich, constructive conversation with myself.

What is your relationship with your self-talk?

The most important conversations that we can have daily are the conversations that we have with ourselves. But we can get trapped in a lot of chatter and mental clutter and go through days, weeks, months, and years never having a real conversation with ourselves.

Our self-talk is far more important than our conversations with those around us. The best part about the conversation with yourself is you’re in total control of that narrative. You can craft the conversation any way you want to. We have to train our minds not to be swayed by self-limiting beliefs and negative self-talk. Having negative thoughts makes us human. The key is not to let that negative thought turn into a lingering negative conversation.

When you were coaching and leading the men’s basketball programs at Washington State, Iowa and USC, you saw yourself as more than just a coach but also an educator. Was there a distinction between those two things in your mind?

I try to separate the two, so I would be constantly reminded that I have to contribute to those young men that I coached over the years more than teaching them how to win and lose in an athletic contest, but to teach them, more importantly how to win in the game of life. And I would tell all of them when I was recruiting them that if the only thing you learned from the four years is how to shoot a jump shot, play defense, rebound, and win basketball games, you could have gone anywhere in the country and achieved that.

If you come and we partner up for four years, I want it to be a unique experience. I want it to be more than about basketball. I want it to be more about winning and losing. And so, I created an environment that would allow me to see that I had a broader responsibility to each of these young people than winning and losing basketball games.

Everywhere I coached before practice, I would always have a five-minute talk with the team about something that had nothing to do with basketball. I’d always pass out little articles for them to read. And so I wanted this to be a memorable opportunity for them.

In a time of rapid change, what advice would you give those coaching and leading the 21st-century athlete?

We spend far too much time coaching and training their bodies than we do coaching and training their minds. That impedes our ability to reach deep into the hearts of the 21st-century athlete. We have to spend more time talking with the athlete than we do talking at them. The talk-to-listen ratio between coaches and players could be better. We need to listen to the athlete more and holistically understand the world they are coming from and where they currently are on their journey. I believe if we’re going to get the most out of an athlete, we’ve got to spend more time trying to understand them for who they authentically are.

What’s one quote you live by?

When I was a student at Villanova University, the sociology professor said in class, “Nothing in life is of any value unless you can share it with others.” So, I have tried as hard as possible to be a servant leader. In the early days, I did not know about servant leadership. It wasn’t a connotation I was familiar with, but I just tried to follow the success formulas that had worked for me and share them with others. That is the essence of me at 85 years old. What is it that I have that I can share with others, or what can I give away?

Q&A Resources

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