The Best of the 2023 Saturday Blueprint

Over the past 12 months, The Daily Coach has interviewed coaches, executives, authors and a variety of other leaders about navigating career crossroads’, overcoming seemingly insurmountable odds and maintaining humility despite success.

For the final Saturday Blueprint of 2023, we put together some of our favorite quotes from the series.

Even with your early success, it seems like you maintained real humility and perspective around the job.

Leadership is so unbelievably hard. It’s a never-ending pursuit. That was the biggest thing. I had clarity on that very young. If you wanted to teach somebody or help them, they had to follow you. Therefore, you had to be worthy of following.

As I worked, it became clearer and clearer to me that leadership was always about getting someone from Point A to Point B. If you go back to the original sense of the word “coaching,” coaching was a mode of transportation. Flying coach, the train had a coach.

If you work off of the model of getting someone from where they are to where they want to be, the next thing you have to understand is that what’s in between those two realities is always hard. Nobody needs a really good teacher to keep them where they’re at or to be average. It’s always about taking this next, huge step. In between, it’s all hard. There’s nothing easy about it.

-Andy McKay, Seattle Mariners assistant general manager

You didn’t have a soccer background at all. What stands out to you most from those early weeks in branding a sports franchise?  

It went from disbelief to belief in about an hour because (the new owner) asked me and another gentleman to go with him to New York when he bought the team from A.G. That was probably the most challenging 45 days of my professional career, going from marketing and selling cans to, “Go figure out how the Red Bulls are going to play here in 45 days in the home opener when I come back in April.”

It was tough as nails, but it was also so rewarding to see it come together. I didn’t play soccer. I didn’t know soccer. To me, it was the power of setting this ambition, an almost impossible goal, and finding a way. We found a way working with Adidas and everyone else to change everything from ticket stock to the paint in the locker rooms, all the merchandise and gear. We had a great event and locked in Shakira, Rihanna, Wyclef Jean. We had Pelé there.

It reminds me as a leader to continually set ambitious targets for your team and hold them accountable to them. There’s always a way to find a solution if you have the right people.

-Marc de Grandpré, New York Red Bulls president

What are some ways we can effectively respond to negative events?

The first thing I do for myself is to actively practice the mentality of “That could be me one day.” I look at somebody who goes broke as “That could be me” or someone who misses a flight and a contract with a client as “That could be me.”

I see a lot of people thinking they don’t deserve certain stuff that happens to them. To me, it’s a selfish point of view like you don’t deserve that, but somebody else does.

When that happens, I spend zero energy asking the question “Why me?” It’s just life. It’s not happening for a reason. It’s just happening.

This prevents me from being a victim of the world.

The second thing is I think we’re guaranteed two things in life. We’re guaranteed opportunity, and we’re guaranteed adversity.

We don’t know when they’re coming. We don’t know what they’ll look like. It’s hard to recognize which is which when it shows up. What I’ve done is I take a step back to say whatever I think is opportunity might just be adversity in sheep’s clothing. Whatever I think is adversity might be a sheep in wolf’s clothing.

-Brian Kight, “Daily Discipline” founder, keynote speaker

A lot of coaches and leaders probably don’t view themselves as great storytellers and may think their strengths lie more in Xs and Os or data. For someone who wants to get better at storytelling, what advice would you give?

Everyone can learn to be a great storyteller. When you see someone tell a story that looks effortless, it’s usually because a lot of work has gone into it or they’ve practiced a lot. Just like a great coach can read a situation, know what’s needed and make the right calls, in storytelling, you’re going to learn and get your sense of timing.

There are different steps that make that better. Some of it comes down to what’s happening in the brain and how do you lean into the neuroactivity. Step one, always think about your audience, who you’re telling the story to and what you want the outcome to be.

Where storytelling goes wrong is people focus on the story they want to tell and not enough on who they’re telling it to. The first thing is get really clear on the audience and what you want the outcome to be.

The second is use the context, conflict, outcome, takeaway because that’s at least going to give you an outline. From there, you just start playing with things like tension and details and making people feel like they’re there. When you put these different things in, it changes the experience of it.

-Karen Eber, best-selling author, storytelling expert

You’ve worked with IMG Academy, the Boston Red Sox, Cleveland Browns and the Tampa Bay Rays and have developed some pretty original views on performance. One of these is that you feel confidence is overrated.

A lot of people say, “I want to be more confident.” I often ask in response, “Have you ever been really confident and performed poorly? Have you ever had no confidence and performed really well?” They say yeah. To me, the amount of confidence you have is not an accurate predictor of future success. I get it. We’d rather have it than not. But what I don’t want is an athlete who doesn’t have confidence going into a game thinking they can’t perform.

I was working with another professional athlete who was working on a new technique and was really struggling, to the point where if people were to see him, they wouldn’t have believed he was a professional. I go up to him after and say, “Do you ever worry that working on something new is going to rock your confidence?” He goes, “I didn’t do that to build my confidence. I practice to build my competence and I let the confidence follow.”

People who are focusing on just building confidence are essentially grabbing air. You can’t control the level of your confidence. You can control the effort you put in every day and focus on the present to get better on a drill. We don’t focus on feelings or how much confidence we have or don’t have. We focus on our level of preparation, which is something we have 100 percent control over.

-Justin Su'a, organizational performance coach

You’re a big believer that a lot of what kids learn can hold them back later on.

Author Alvin Toffler once wrote, “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn.”

Unlearning is the skill of recognizing our deeply held beliefs about something and realizing that the inverse might actually be true. I believe that unlearning is especially important for the things we’re taught in school. A lot of my writing focuses on lessons taught in school that kids would do better not believing. Teachers convey these lessons with the best of intentions, but they’re simply not true. In fact, they’re often flat-out wrong. Kids would do better to do the opposite of these lessons taught in school.

Lessons like fearing mistakes, striving to fit in, waiting for instructions, learning “just in case,” and not asking too many questions.

-Ana Fabrega, author, chief evangelist at Synthesis

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, U.S. presidential candidate

What worries you these days?

I don’t worry about my image. I’m not trying to put on a face.

What I do worry about are people who may not be getting what I believe they deserve, and that bothers me. I try to rectify that, especially in this (Miami Heat) organization if I can.

What’s happening in society today, I am worried about where our country is headed. It doesn’t make any difference what side of the aisle I’m on. I’m worried about our overall leadership at the highest levels. It’s not a post-pandemic thing. I believe this goes back to my formative years between 1960 and 1970.

I think we’re products of our environments, our education and our experience. Between 15 and 25, even though I wasn’t well-versed in anything other than basketball, I was very conscious of what was going on with the Cuban-Missile Crisis. I loved JFK to death and was absolutely in tears when he was assassinated. When Martin Luther King was assassinated, it was the same feeling. Robert Kennedy, Medgar Evers. That was a decade of youth. There were 177 million people in America at that time, and 70 million of them were young. There was always a revolution in our country at that time because of that damn war. Late in the 60s, all of the young people began to rebel in a lot of ways that they are today.

History has a way of repeating itself when our young people are looking at a future that may not be what they were raised in. This goes across the board, not just in America but in this world.

I worry about those kinds of things that are going to have an impact on my children, and your children and your grandchildren. We have to do something about that. I don’t have the answers. We can only to do it at the ballot box from that standpoint.

Worry? I’m too old to worry, but I do have some fears about where we are today. The 60s taught me a lot about growing up and becoming a young man.

-Pat Riley, Miami Heat president

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