 Know Your ChickensIt’s April 2023 and we’re in Lissone, Italy. I’m coaching Team Ohio in the Jit Lissone tournament. Our team has yet to meet each other, let alone practice together. At this point, basketball is an afterthought. We’re just trying to get from the airport to the hotel.
The ride in the local taxi was like being in a real-life version of Mario Kart with another hundred cars on the road with us, a reckless driver as our guide, and everyone honking, waiving their fists, and shouting profanities. I was literally on the edge of my seat. Now at our hotel we connected with our host that would take care of the travel to and from the gym. He was a local also, but seemed much more … relaxed than our previous driver. Alberto is our guy and would become a highlight of the entire trip. He greets us with a handshake, a hug, and a hearty “Bonjourno!”. He was the Italy I expected, or at least hoped for. Alberto is clearly a seasoned vet. He is engaging with all eight of us in the van at the same time. Cracking jokes, carrying on conversations on his phone, navigating traffic, checking on our plans for the evening … and he’s doing it all without slowing down. It really is amazing. Then, Alberto takes the most memorable call of the trip. As he goes back and forth with a friend and is wrapping up the conversation, he chuckles and carelessly says (with his cool Italian accent quipped), “Ah, yes, I know my chicken!” I immediately think, chicken?! Too memorable to ignore, I ask what the phrase means. Alberto hesitates, searching for just the right English words to match, then replies: “Ah, you know, eh, very close; my chicken, very close. They your chicken, you their chicken; very close. You do anything for them. I know my chicken.” Why Should We Care? It was at this moment I began to wonder, who are my chickens? I’m lucky and have a family that is “very close”. They are my chickens. But, beyond that, identifying my chickens wasn’t so easy. I have a few, but it’s not a lot. And, I suppose that’s how it’s supposed to be. I mean, who wants too many chickens, right? To be your chicken, you must’ve seen the other person at their low point and chose to stay with them. You must’ve gone through some really difficult things together and grown closer as a result of it. You can never question their intentions. When good things happen, you are happier for them than you are for yourself. No distance is too far to drive and no time is too late or early. Time literally flies when you’re with one of your chickens. Even time apart evaporates as soon as you reconnect with your chicken - you immediately pick up right where you left off. Chickens are not best friends. The relationship doesn’t have the ups and downs of even the closest friendships. Think of them like the special forces for your foxhole. They energize you, lighten your mood, and guide you to see the best of yourself and others. I’m confident you have a chicken or two. Don’t take them for granted - take advantage of every opportunity to spend time with them. You’ll never regret it. REAL TALK - Action Steps If you’re struggling to figure out who your chickens are, I think I can help. If you’re in a relationship, I hope your significant other is one of your chickens. If not, well, that sucks - probably need to fix that. Here are a few ideas on singling out a few chickens.
Where we spend our time is a choice. We all have lives to live. But, when you have an opportunity to spend time with your chicken, don’t let it pass you by. You never get the opportunity back. Checkout Surrender the Outcome on Amazon and order The Score That Matters with Ryan Hawk & Brook Cupps. The latest blog from Blue Collar Grit can be found here!
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 The Limits of ControlWhen I began coaching over twenty-five years ago, control was my mission. I wanted to control our players, control the game, and control the opinions everyone had of me. Make no mistake, it was about me. Afterall, what does the need for control say if not, I know best?
It’s not that I hadn’t been exposed to a different way. My high school coach was not a controlling leader at all. He was incredible at empowering his players by asking questions, listening to the answers, then adjusting according to what he heard. I knew that’s who I wanted to be as a coach, but young-me was unwilling. Early in my career I roamed the sidelines, screaming instructions to the players on every pass and barking at officials on every call. I was willing to white-knuckle success if I had to. And, for a while, I did to some extent. We won a reasonable number of games - enough for other people to think I was a decent coach, which was all that mattered to me at the time. But, it didn’t last. It couldn’t. By the time my seventh season rolled around I was exhausted. I still loved basketball and I loved coaching, but I knew I couldn’t continue going about it the same way. Something had to change - either me or my job. I decided I was the one that needed to adjust. Why Should We Care? Along that same time, I started paying much closer attention to how some other coaches coached - not what offense or defense they ran, which had been my focus previously, but how they acted on the sidelines, how they responded after a mistake, and how they interacted with their players and officials. There was one coach in our area that I followed particularly closely: PJ Bertemes. He was a very successful high school coach by this time. His team’s always impressed me with their discipline and toughness. The other thing that stood out about PJ was his sideline demeanor. He sat, watched the game, and offered his insights when they were needed. There was no effort to control every play by his players or dictate the next call by the officials. But man, could he coach. His teams consistently maxed out their talent and overachieved. Clearly, the work had been done, the trust established, and the game plan mastered. As for the game, the outcome was surrendered. PJ had influence, he didn’t need control. As leaders, it’s influence we should be seeking, not control. Influence empowers those we lead. It has the potential to elevate them beyond their potential, far surpassing the contribution mere control would offer. Influence is scary though. Others must choose to allow themselves to be influenced. And, it’s not a one-time commitment. They get to choose every day. REAL TALK - Action Steps Growing our influence requires intentional actions. We are not influential merely because of our age or our title - I’m sure you can name plenty of examples to illustrate this point from your own life. Here are a few ways to magnify your influence on those you lead.
Control is cleaner, more simple, and feeds the ego. It’s also cold, transactional, and limiting. Influence is messy, complicated, and ego-free. It’s also warm, transformational, and … the only path to excellence. Checkout Surrender the Outcome on Amazon and order The Score That Matters with Ryan Hawk & Brook Cupps. The latest blog from Blue Collar Grit can be found here!  Volunteers v HostagesIn March of 2019, Pittsburgh Steelers’ coach, Mike Tomlin, was asked about the loss of star players Antonio Brown and Le’Veon Bell. Brown’s departure was a result of a trade, one in which many felt the Steelers didn’t receive nearly enough for given the Pro Bowl receiver’s stats. While Bell opted out of the Steel City for more money through free agency. Neither were amicable.
When asked about it, Tomlin got straight to the point. “We can’t do this with hostages, man. We need volunteers,” Tomlin said. “We need good players, good guys who want to be here and if guys can’t check those boxes, it’s probably best for all parties involved to go our separate ways.” Volunteers, not hostages. What a clear expression of the required mindset for teams to excel. Why Should We Care? Let’s consider the reasons most people volunteer: to support a cause they believe in, to help others, for personal fulfillment, to improve a skill, or maybe to give back. To state the obvious, when we volunteer we want to be where we are; we’re choosing that specific option over many others. That autonomy in volunteering is far more powerful than we want to admit. We can’t force people to volunteer. We control hostages. We can make them do whatever we want them to do. Hostages wanting, or not wanting, to be there, or to do what is asked of them, is irrelevant - they’re hostages. They do what we tell them to do. Hostages are there for our gain, not their enjoyment. It’s clear that volunteers give more than hostages. Not only do they give more, but it is given with more care, passion, intent, and love than a hostage will ever give. It turns out just wanting to be where you are is pretty important. As part of this volunteer, not hostage focus leaders need to understand we are not simply talking about physical location or presence on a team. While that is unequivocally true, the most common shackles of the hostage are applied to role identification. What part do I play on the team? Am I happy with it? Do I feel it’s important? It’s not enough that we want to be on the team. We must also want to be doing what we are doing for the team. REAL TALK - Action Steps Of course, our teams will always have people on them that are at varying ends of the volunteer - hostage spectrum. The best teams are always heavily bent towards the volunteer end. Here are a few ideas for filling your team with volunteers rather than hostages.
Tomlin said, “We can’t do this with hostages, man. We need volunteers.” The ‘this’ he is referring to is excellence. Accepting hostages is compromising excellence. Checkout Surrender the Outcome on Amazon and order The Score That Matters with Ryan Hawk & Brook Cupps. The latest blog from Blue Collar Grit can be found here!  Community & InconvenienceI love watching the Olympics.
Of course, I enjoy the mainstream sports like basketball and soccer, but they aren’t what make the Olympics so appealing. It’s all the other ones. The novelty of sports like badminton, ping-pong, and water polo are captivating. The dynamic between individuals and teams in sports like gymnastics and swimming is fascinating. The purity of track and field, mesmerizing. The physicality and athleticism of rugby, amazing. The Olympic games offer everything great about sport. Two areas that have stood out for me: the power of community and the inconvenience of obstacles. Clearly the Olympics pull the country together, unifying our support for a single athlete or team. But, they also turn a light on the support systems that have helped to elevate these athletes to an Olympic level. Clearly, they have not gotten here on their own and all parties are fully invested. If there’s anything more prevalent than the success of the athletes competing, it’s the quantity of their failures. From injury to foster homes, seemingly every athlete has overcome numerous challenges to be where they are. At some point in their journey, each stopped seeing obstacles and started seeing inconveniences. That’s a significant difference. Two very different aspects of the Olympics, but both critical in their arrival to this stage. Why Should We Care? Everyone wants to belong to something. Those aspiring for excellence, like the athletes at the Olympics, realize it’s not a want, but a need. Our community is our strength. Sometimes communities lift us up and sometimes they calm us down. Sometimes they highlight our strengths and sometimes they expose our areas of weakness. But, one thing is clear about a community - they are for us. They cheer, and cry, like each moment was theirs … because it is in a real community. The community makes the athlete just as much as the athlete makes the community. The teams we lead are exactly the same. Each individual we lead wants to belong to something - something special, where they’re doing work that is important, and they’re making a difference. Everyone wants to contribute to their community. I love a good comeback story as much as the next guy, but it seems like the media dramatizes everyone’s background into a rags to riches story now. What I’ve come to realize is that we’ve all had challenges and the degree of the challenge is secondary to our perspective on it. To an Olympic athlete, every adversity, regardless of its magnitude, has become nothing more than an inconvenience. Helping those we lead establish a resilience that thinks inconvenience rather than road block is paramount to our team’s success. REAL TALK - Action Steps Sure, there are hundreds of factors that play into the performance of an individual and team. The impact of each can be debated. What’s not debatable is the value of community and a grit, resilient mindset. Here are a few ideas to grow each:
We need others. We can’t quit. Sometimes we need others so we don’t quit. Checkout Surrender the Outcome on Amazon and order The Score That Matters with Ryan Hawk & Brook Cupps. The latest blog from Blue Collar Grit can be found here!  Patiently UrgentEvery season, the second week of practice, we do an exercise with our team that we call Two Strengths, One Weakness. It’s a lead into solidifying and clarifying roles, one of the most important aspects of any successful team.
Each player is tasked with sharing two strengths and one weakness for every member of the team, including the coaches. A significant level of trust is needed in order for this exercise to have maximum impact (I’ve found sixteen year old basketball players to be significantly better at this than their older counterparts). We take one team member at a time and share everyone’s strengths for that player followed by everyone’s weakness. As others are sharing, the teammate we are focused on takes notes then shares what he heard others say followed by his own strengths and weaknesses from his perspective. There’s a lot going on there that is foundational to our team. As a coach who has gone through the exercise each year for more than a decade, I’ve noticed a commonality for the feedback I receive. In my best years - best here does not necessarily equate to wins, rather maximizing our group - my strengths have always pointed to pushing and challenging the edges of what is accepted. My weakness, from the player’s perspective, is usually reported as impatience. I do recognize how fine that line is. At my best, I think I’m both urgent and patient. Why Should We Care? Excellence requires this balance. Patience leads to happiness and satisfaction, appreciation and acceptance. It combats the need for immediate results and leads to the fulfillment we long for in life that far surpasses the fleeting feeling of materialistic, comparison-based success. We are often fooled into believing that contentment is derived from achievement and accolades, when it is actually the result of patience in the process. It’s this consistent, deliberate work that enlightens us to the edges of our potential and where urgency comes into play. While urgency has a negative connotation, it calls for action. And, action is required for progress. We don’t float up stream. And, if we don’t paddle, all we’re doing is floating. Urgency encourages me to embrace change much quicker than the pleasure of contentment. Leaders need to keep this reality on the front of their minds and intentionally welcome adversity while operating with a bias for action. It's an opportunity for those who choose to view our struggles in that light. Confidence is a factor too, but confidence in what? Confidence in our ability to keep going, to be ok regardless of the outcome, to adjust our process as needed based on the results. A balance of patience and urgency bolsters confidence rather than eroding it. Now, if our confidence is tied directly to the applause of a comparison-based society, then I suppose we will neither be patient or urgent enough. REAL TALK - Action Steps Finding the balance between maintaining confidence while never being satisfied is the line we need to walk as leaders - challenge & support, champion & expose. Here are a few ideas on doing both:
It’s a fine line - celebrating current success while pushing forward in pursuit of growth, appreciating contentment with the result while constantly working to improve the process. But, it is the line leaders of excellence are willing to walk. Checkout Surrender the Outcome on Amazon and order The Score That Matters with Ryan Hawk & Brook Cupps. The latest blog from Blue Collar Grit can be found here! |
About bcI'm a teacher, coach, and parent seeking excellence while defining success on my own terms. Archives
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