 Showing GratitudeIt’s not enough to be grateful. We need to express it.
Here are fifty ideas for expressing your gratitude.
Happy Thanksgiving! 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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 Suffocating ExcusesIt’s still a clear memory. One we had spent the last several months fighting for. It finally happened. In the heat of the game, while emotions ran high, he chose to ignore it. Sure, there were several justifiable reasons to accept it, but he chose not to. It was an excuse.
Instead of turning out, he turned in. He opened his arms instead of closing them, seeking help rather than fanning strength. He accepted reality and gained respect because he chose to ignore an excuse. When facing adversity he used to seek the sympathy of a victim. Now he was owning the challenges just as much as the successes. Rather than hiding, he was confronting. Growth, from that point, was inevitable. The team had become the priority. Now, he had a chance. Now, we had a chance. All by simply suffocating a plausible excuse. Why Should We Care? As long as we are making excuses, we aren’t doing much else. Our resilience is at the mercy of our willingness to accept an excuse. Grow our ability to deny excuses and we move closer and closer to resilience. And, it’s our capacity to persist that will ultimately chart the future of our life. Excuses give us an out. Have you ever noticed that tough people and excuses don’t mix? They’re never together. You’ve never heard someone make an excuse, walk away and think, “Man, what a warrior. She’s so tough.” An excuse is nothing more than a want for sympathy. We say something like, “I didn’t know”, or do something like, turn our palms up in desperation, as a means to share with those around us that we are not at fault. It’s one of our ego’s defense mechanisms to protect itself. But, our ego doesn’t need protecting. It needs exposure, at least if leading and growing are some of our pursuits. Until we become aware of our excuse making habit and intentionally choose to redirect it, we are at the mercy of our emotions. We are a slave to the weakest version of ourselves. Nothing compromises our potential and impact more than our willingness to accept excuses. It’s an odd habit too because it ultimately benefits no one. The excuse-giver feels the momentary warmth of sympathy, only to have it replaced by the cold reality of diminishing personal standards and a depleted self-worth. The excuse-hearer is taxed with the burden of accepting or rejecting the excuse, and the choice of whether to feed into self-pity or provide a jolt of truth. REAL TALK - Action Steps I’m convinced most people don’t want to make excuses. It’s become such a mode of operation that we are oblivious to its occurrence. Awareness is the first step. Here are a few thoughts on becoming more aware of the excuses we make:
Ignoring, suffocating, and eradicating excuses will change your life. Give it a go. 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!  The Consistency of StandardsIs there anything more difficult, in living or leading, than remaining consistent when times get tough? The only thing I can think of that rivals it is remaining consistent when times are fruitful.
It’s the early 2000’s, my coaching career is just getting started, and I’m thinking I’m pretty good at this coaching thing. My first few years we had moderate success which I, of course, attributed to my brilliance on the sidelines. It felt pretty good being so smart. Year four is turning out to be a different story. To my surprise, I’m not quite as smart as I thought. Our five wins through twenty-one games was clear proof in case I needed it. I didn’t - I could feel it. Nothing I did worked to create the immediate result I was chasing. Yelling didn’t work. Patience didn’t work. The new plays didn’t work. The junk defense didn’t work. I was miserable so I did the one thing most of us coaches are experts at: I made our players miserable too. At least for the first half of the year. About half way through the season I realized something I had been blind to: I’m comparing our team to teams of older, more talented players … with a better coach. The next opponent set the standard for us at that point. And, unfortunately, that standard was one we were not prepared to meet. That external comparison will never fully go away, but nothing says we have to prioritize it - especially if it’s not helping us become our best. This revelation led me to adjusting to an internal evaluation of our team’s performance. Instead of focusing on lag measures like the final score, we would prioritize lead measures like ball security, shot selection, rebounding and touches among teammates. These are things that will give us the best opportunity to win games now and in the future. Not to mention, they’re within our control. Winning the game was clearly not. While the disappointment of losing games never dissipated, the satisfaction of growth and forward movement could be felt. We established a new set of high standards. The objective of winning games never went away, and we continued to fail at it, but we began to see and feel progress through our standards. I was unaware of it at the time, but this was a significant transition for our program. We had gone from a program aiming for a moving target, our next opponent, to a program fixed on a stable mark: our own standards. Consistency quickly followed. Why Should We Care? A few years later, we found the other side of the standard coin. Competing was no longer a problem, we were consistently winning games by large margins. Rather than allowing our performance to fluctuate with the talent of our opponents, we maintained our focus on performing to our standards. While standards are mentioned by many of the highest performing teams, it seems the real magic in them often goes unstated. Standards are so powerful because they are the golden pathway to consistency. See, contrary to what most think, it’s not the standards that make you great, it’s the consistency they offer. Consistency is what the best have and what the good and average fail to fully value. It’s easy to become distracted by the external comparison and allure of momentary brilliance. We are flooded with opportunities to allow them to take the wheel of our focus. Elite leaders recognize the distinction between standards and comparison-based successes like winning games and corporate rankings: standards are controllable. To the best leaders it’s not a subtle difference. It’s a glaring one. And, we can only be consistent with the things we can control. With our focus on our standards, where we are squarely in our circle of control, we tap into the consistency all great teams operate with. REAL TALK - Action Steps So, the obvious questions: how do we create standards and how do we operate by them? Good questions. Here are a few ideas to get you started:
Our standards are actions that are fully within our control. This control fuels one of the most critical attributes of every great team: consistency. And, with most teams, it’s a daily fight. 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!  Where You BelongIt’s early November, which can only mean one thing: high school basketball season is here. Even after twenty-five years, the start of the season still feels like opening your most anticipated birthday present. The anticipation never gets old.
As great as the excitement around the start of season is, it also carries with it my least favorite part of coaching - making team cuts. Nothing in the profession comes close to it. Some are certainly easier than others, but delivering the news to a fifteen or sixteen year old that desperately wants to be a part of your team is never enjoyable. More often than not it’s downright awful, yet necessary. Of course, back in the day, these tough conversations were avoided by simply posting a list of the players who made the team. Everyone else was left wondering if their name had just been forgotten. It’s a cowardly approach that disregards a young man’s efforts and courage. I suppose the effort required may depend on the standards of the program, but the courage to tryout is a direct reflection of the makeup of that young man. That courage needs to be honored. Society does the best it can to beat it out of us - stay between the lines, play it safe, don’t rock the boat. Regardless of whether a player makes the team or not, as a coach I have a responsibility to recognize the risk taken to attempt to make a team of twelve in a school of three thousand. If maintained and fostered, that is a trait of a successful person regardless of the result of a high school basketball tryout. The other aspect of the risk these young men are willing to take that beckons my attention is always a simple question: why? Why do these guys keep trying out? Why do they keep coming back? Our entire fall preseason conditioning program is grueling, our weight room sessions three days per week are exhausting, and our breakfast club workouts every morning will make the most dedicated weary. While the struggle and challenge drives some away, it draws others in. Our desire to belong to something runs much deeper than we know. Why Should We Care? Understanding and appreciating the significance of belonging is a powerful leap for a leader. It will change the way you organize meetings, interact with colleagues in the hallways, make promotions, celebrate wins, welcome people onto the team, and communicate off-boarding news. But, more than anything it will allow you to fully value the people you are leading. You can find plenty of books out there talking about evolutionary history for the need to belong to a group or tribe. I’m not disagreeing with any of them - they all make sense. I mean, I wouldn’t want to get eaten by a sabertooth tiger either so being a part of a group where I’m not the slowest one seems like a pretty good life choice. In today’s world you almost have to try to not belong to a group. Your family, your place of employment, your Thursday night softball league team, your stamp collecting chapter, your dog walking club, your motorcycle gang … the list could go on forever. Even going out of your way to be different will likely align you with a brotherhood of misfits that satisfies your unknown desires for belonging while rebelling against it. Now the calling is more about discovering where you want to belong. And, from a leadership perspective, creating an environment and a set of standards that is appealing to those you want to belong to your team. All aspects of your culture are at play - your words matter, your actions matter, your vision matters, your values matter. Culture has become such a buzz word that we’ve lost sight of the functionality of it. This is one of the primary roles of our culture in our organizations. Our culture should be drawing in the people we want to belong to our team and expelling those we don’t want. REAL TALK - Action Steps Of course, people wanting to be a part of our team is a good thing. Some motives will naturally be impure or self-promoting. In the best organizations those driven by their desires for prestige or money will be washed out by the standards that drive the teams success. Ideally we can avoid those self-seeking individuals and get right to the people that want to be with us for pure reasons. Here are a few ideas to consider when trying to create a culture that will do just that:
We all want to belong to something. Leading with this understanding will allow us to create a culture that gathers ‘our’ people together. 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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