Building Your Inner Coach by Brett Ledbetter (Full Transcript)

We want that voice to be someone who is a contributor to your life.]

So if we had to sum up what Jim said, it’d be that your private voice can either help you out or break you down. But it’s the only voice that’s with you until your death. I want you to put yourself in this situation, you’re in a game, your whole student body is watching you, things are going bad for you, things are going bad for your team. What if in that moment the thoughts that you were thinking scrolled across the bottom of the scoreboard for everyone in the gym to see, how would that make you feel?

The interesting thing about this is when we think negatively, not only are we competing against our opponent, who else are we competing against? Ourselves, so we have to turn our private voice into our inner coach so that when we go through those tough times, our inner coach can guide us through them.

What I want to do is I want to show you a real life example of what that looks like. And it’s from one of my all time favourite college basketball games. We’re going to pick things up with four seconds left in the game. So Butler has the basketball on the baseline. They’re in white. They’re down one against Gonzaga, who’s in blue. Let’s see how this plays out.

[Video Clip]

That fires me up every time I see it. But here’s the deal, the reason I love that is because those last two plays were the exact opposite of one another. The first one was an example of failure; the second one was an example of success. So what I want to do is I want to watch those clips one more time but this time I want to call your attention to Butler’s head coach — Brad Stevens. So you’re going to see him, he’s right there. I want you to keep your eye on him the whole time. Watch his body language, as his player travels.

[Video Clip]

So how would you describe it? I think it was pretty calm, would you guys agree? Now 99 out of 100 games, when your player travels, when you guys are down one with four seconds left, you’re going to lose that game. But what did he do? He calmly walked over to the bench, subbed his player in and got ready mentally for what? The next play.

So now I’d like to call your attention to Brad Stevens one more time. I want you to watch his reaction as his player hits the game winning shot.

[Video Clip]

How awesome is that? The reason I love that is because what? He handles it exactly the same way as he handled the failure. So despite all the chaos that’s going on around him, he’s able to maintain discipline with his emotions. I’m going to show you guys how to do that, which is why you guys have those note cards.

So what I want you to do, I want you to take thirty seconds and I want you to think about this question, and I want you to write this down. I want to know the last time you felt stress, pressure or anxiety. I want you to write that situation down, chances are it probably happened today. I’ll give you guys thirty seconds.

So here’s what I want you to do now. Underneath what you wrote down, I want you to answer this question. I want you to write down what you were worried about. What about that situation caused you to feel stress, pressure or anxiety?

All right. So now what’s going to happen is I’m going to show you what you’re thinking about on your card. Anytime we feel stress, pressure or anxiety, we’re thinking of one of two things: either the future, something that could happen, or we’re thinking about the past, something that has happened.

So here’s what I want you guys to do, I want to see a show of hands, how many of you guys thought about something in the future or the past? Funny, how that works, doesn’t it?

So when we focus in on the present, we focus on the things that we can control, which is exactly what Brad Stevens did. Now this is moments after his player hit the game winning shot. I want you to hear what he says in the postgame interview.

[Journalist: What did you say to your players in the locker room to come out with such fire?

Brad Stevens: My deal has always been, I don’t care the result but as long as we have no regrets and we want to make sure we left it all out there – and they did. ]

I don’t care the result as long as what? My players leave it all out on the court. Now what’s interesting is Brad told me that he’s actually gone away from talking about goals with his team. Why would he do that? Well, here’s the definition of the word “goal”. It’s the result to which effort is aimed. When you focus on goals, you focus on results. And if you think about it, results are oftentimes outside of our control.

So when Brad says, I want to make sure we leave it all on the court, what’s he talking about? The second part of the definition, the effort aimed at the result. We call this the process. And your process is what drives the result. Everyone understands that.

Now, is Brad saying that you shouldn’t set goals? I don’t think so. In fact, here’s what he told me. You can have the goal of a championship but there’s a process to get there and your focus needs to be on that. So if you set goals, what do you need to focus on? The process. Does everyone understand that?

You know what I struggled with, when I was your age? Focusing on the process. When I entered my senior season in basketball, here were my three goals. The first thing: I wanted to get Mr. Missouri Basketball, and all that means is that the high school coaches around the States vote you as the best player. The second goal I wanted to hit, I wanted the Division 1 Scholarship. That means that you play at the highest level of college basketball. And the third thing I wanted to do is I wanted to win a State Championship.

Now what’s interesting, if you look at these goals, each one of these things is outside of my control. I can’t control whether or not coaches vote for me. That’s their opinion. I can’t control which college offers me a scholarship. And I certainly can’t control whether or not I stay healthy and my teammates stay healthy and injury free.

You know what my issue was when I was your age? My thoughts were always in the future. I saw all these dreams inside my head. And I worried about whether or not I have what it takes to get there. Can anybody relate to that? Which is why these next two coaches you guys are going hear from, I wish so badly that I would have heard this advice when I was your age.

The first person you’re going hear from is Sherri Coale. She’s one of my all-time favorite people.

[Sherri Coale: The best way to get that next position is to do an amazing job where you are. I just believe that people talk that there’s this guy and he’s unbelievable. And I just think, excellence is hard to keep quiet. ]

Excellence is hard to keep quiet. I love that. And what else did she say? The best way to get to the next level is how? To be great at your current level. Here’s how you do that.

[Buzz: There’s no shortcuts. There’s no magic pills. Nobody’s going to give you anything. And whenever it is that you do have an opportunity and you will be given an opportunity, you have to be prepared. Because you don’t know when that opportunity is going to come, you have to prepare for that everyday.]

So if I was going to sum up what Buzz’s just said, it’d be that success can be found in your daily agenda. You know what he has his players do at college? They have to document on a piece of paper every single thing that they do throughout the day. And at the end of the night, before they go to bed they review all the activities and they have to pick two things that they’ll get better at for tomorrow. And the whole idea is to improve 6% each day.

What are Buzz and Sherri both saying? The same thing that Brad is: to focus on what? The process.

Now what’s interesting is there’s something else that’s driving the process. And that’s your character. Now when I say that — that word means so many different things to so many different people. And there’s two types of character, and that’s what I want to show you now.

The first type is what we call performance character. And these are character skills that govern your relationship with yourself. These are the things that will make you get up at 5:30 AM to go workout in a gym by yourself.

The second kind of character is what we call moral character. These are character skills that govern your relationships with others. These are the things that make you a great team mate and a great friend.

Now those 15 coaches that I showed you earlier, what we did is we pulled out from our interviews with them, the top 10 performance and moral character skills that they value most. Here’s the list.

Now as you look at this list, I want you to ask yourself what do you struggle with? At the beginning of our training sessions in our academy, we start in the film room for 20 minutes. And our whole idea is to show championship coaches, professional athletes, bestselling authors to bring meaning to everyone of these words. So our players can make them a part of who they are.

Imagine if you use your inner coach to help you build all of these things. How much better would you be? So how does all of this tie in together? We want to build our inner coach. And great coaches begin with the end in mind.

So the first thing you want to ask yourself, is what am I trying to accomplish? Is it to improve at school, relationally, with your score? Once you have that, you then move to the process and ask yourself, what’s my plan? How am I going to make that happen? After you have that, you then ask yourself, what are the character skills that I’ll need to use and develop?

We have a really good player in our Academy, like best in the country at their position good, and I told them, if I don’t help you build your inner coach, I failed you. So I asked them, what are you struggling with? And you know what she told me, she says “I have an 82% in math and I need to get it up to an A.”

I said “Here’s what we’re going to do. I’m going to be you and I want you to be your inner coach. I want you to give me advice on how you’re going to raise that grade.”

You know what she said, she said, “Well, first thing you need to do is you need to meet with your teacher once a week. Second thing, you need to create flash cards so you can memorize the formulas. And then third thing, you need to quit procrastinating. You need to start studying a week out. And you are going to need to work on your discipline and your accountability”.

Now I’ve got to tell you, like I’m laughing here because I’m thinking that’s better advice than I could have ever given her. And she is giving it to herself. But what’s funny is I asked her this, “Do you speak to me with more respect than you speak to yourself?”  She smiled wide, because she’s so hard on herself.

How many of you guys can relate to that? So what do we do as we move through this sequence and we don’t hit the result that we’re shooting for? How many of you guys know who Kevin Durant is? He’s like a pretty good basketball player. For those of you who don’t know who he is. I asked Kevin what was the best thing that happened to him for his development? Here’s what he told me.

[Kevin Durant: Messing up. Going through experiences is our best teacher I think. I know if I mess up, I learn from it and get better.]

Kevin turned results into learning experiences. What did I do? My identity was wrapped up into result. So if I had a bad game, I felt terrible about myself and I was only as good as my last performance, as long as I was in an emotional roller coaster.

So how can we turn those results into learning experiences? This is an exercise you guys can do after a big performance — sport, school, whatever it is. When you have your result, you can ask yourself this question: What did I do well and why? You can take the success and focus on the why, because when you focus on the why, you can then repeat that in the future.

Then you can ask yourself this question, what could I do better and how? And by asking how, you take the focus off the mistake and focus on how you’re going to improve it for next time.

Guys, my hope for this talk is that you walk away with an understanding of how important it is to build your inner coach. So you focus less on the results and more on the process. And you use your inner coach to build your character. Winning is not a result. Winning is a process that’s driven by character.

Thank you very much.

 

Resources for Further Reading: 

Know Your Inner Saboteurs: Shirzad Chamine (Full Transcript)

Defeating the Inner Imposter That Keeps Us from Being Successful: Knatokie Ford at TEDxMidAtlantic (Transcript)

Eugene Hennie: How to Find Your Passion and Inner Awesomenes at TEDxMMU (Transcript)

Matthieu Ricard on Change your Mind, Change your Brain: The Inner Conditions (Full Transcript)

 

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