KEVIN GARNETT'S WORK ETHIC

I don't always agree with the way Kevin Garnett handles himself on the court, but I will never question his passion for the game and how hard he works. Here is a video via Kevin Eastman

JOHN MAXWELL ON SELF DEVELOPMENT

A great resource to keep close to your desk is John Maxwell's Daily Reader. He provides wisdom and insight for each day of the year. It really helps get your day started right. In this post I want to share with you what he wrote for May 22nd:

What you are going to be tomorrow, you are becoming today. It is essential to begin developing self-discipline in a small way today in order to be disciplined in a big way tomorrow.

1. List five areas in your life that lack discipline.
2. Place them in order of your priority for conquering them.
3. Take them on, one at a time.
4. Secure resources such as books and tapes, that will give you instruction and motivation to conquer each area.
5. Ask a person who models the trait you want to posses to hold you accountable for it.
6. Spend fifteen minutes each morning getting focused in order to get control of this weak area of your life.
7. Do a five minute checkup on yourself at midday.
8. Take five minutes in the evening to evaluate your progress.
9. Allow sixty days to work on one area before you go to the next.
10. Celebrate with the one who holds you accountable as you show continued success.

Remember, having it all doesn't mean having it all at once. It takes time. Start small and concentrate on today. The slow accumulation of disciplines will one day make a big difference.

DON MEYER INTERVIEW

This post was in an email from Shane Dreiling's Team Arete Newsletter.

Q&A with Former Northern State Head Coach Don Meyer

By Adam.Warner

Don Meyer finds himself in an unfamiliar territory these days. After 38 seasons and 923 wins, the winningest men’s basketball coach in college history is now retired from the game and spends his time working as a professor, speaker and author. In the first edition of Coaches Corner, Championship Productions editor Adam Warner sits down with the coaching legend and learns about Meyer’s life after retirement, his coaching philosophy, helpful advice for coaches and players, and what exactly he wants people to remember most about his truly remarkable career.

You’re now retired from coaching, what’s the feeling like being away from the bench?

I don’t really miss it at all because I just can’t do it anymore. I don’t have the physical stamina and emotional reserves to deal with it. When I got out of coaching, I realized just how much I put into it, and you don’t realize that until you retire. I said to myself, “How was I able to do that for so many years?”

I watch the games and I see mistakes and they make me upset sometimes. But I know basketball can’t be played perfectly and it’s none of my business, but I still watch and enjoy seeing the game played. I don’t go to practice anymore. It’s not the right thing to do, especially with a new coach and a new program. In my last few years, I knew I didn’t have it, and I knew retiring was the best thing for the team.

When did you know that you wanted to be a coach?

When I knew I wasn’t good enough to go pro. I also liked teaching. I had a baseball job at Western St. College and was also an assistant basketball coach. I received my masters at Northern Colorado when I finished playing. Although I thought I did, I didn’t understand basketball yet. I was lucky to get into the game and learned a lot under Bill Foster at Utah. I also liked coaching at the college level more than at the high school level, so I knew that was the right place for me. There’s less parental influence and more teaching. Everything changes though, but that’s the only constant thing, the teaching in coaching.

What do you think is the greatest aspect about being a coach?

The most fun was to see kids develop into a team, become team players, play team basketball and just team everything — players that look out for each other and help one another on and off the floor.

Over 38 years, I only had one player who didn’t graduate. That talks about what you do on and off the floor. You work with a kid individually on how he can execute or help the team win a game. I enjoyed seeing the team play hard, smart, together and having fun while doing it.

How do you think you’ve changed as a coach over the years?

You get humbler the longer you coach. I don’t think I ever looked the other way. I used to sleep on problems a bit and then come back the next day having thought things over. But some things you have to deal with immediately, like if players fight, things like that. There’s a lot of facts you need in situations before you make a decision. And as a young coach, you can’t have procrastination. You have to deal with things as soon as it’s wise to do so.

How would you define your coaching philosophy?

After a while, it’s less about the on-paper stuff and more about feeling it in your gut. You have to have a concept in your mind about how you want kids to behave before you worry about how you want them to play. How they behave is how they end up playing.

I’m a big believer in courtesy, concentration, communication, competing and consistency. The ability for kids today to concentrate is tough. You snap your fingers and they are gone and so teaching them to concentrate is doing a great service.

With courtesy, it’s about please and thank you, things like picking up trash and cleaning up hallways and cleaning up after other people. Communication is about teaching on the floor and off the floor and resolving problems before they become a big deal. Meanwhile, people that don’t compete, complain. True competitors are too busy looking to win and don’t have the time to complain. And all of these things lead to consistency. It’s about doing the right thing and the next right thing right. We will always make mistakes, but the next thing must be right.

Also, treat people right who can’t do anything to you or for you. We far too often ignore those who can’t do things for us.

As a coach, where did you draw inspiration from?

Coach (Bob) Knight was a great teacher. Dick Bennett, Pat Summitt, Rick Majerus and Mike Krzyzewski are all great teachers. More often than not, the biggest inspiration comes from the small-time coaches, the one’s that are really into teaching and have it figured it out, like Bob Hurley and Morgan Wootten.

What’s the best advice you can give to a new coach?

Don’t ever take a job for the money. Also, you can expect to get fired. There are two types of coaches: been fired or about to be fired. Actually, the best coaches get fired because they take a
stand, especially at high school or college.

Can you talk about one of the most successful plays you’ve used throughout your career? What was it called and what made it so effective?

You need an inside game and an outside game. You need to get to the rim on offense and also be able to hit the pull-up shot. If you can do all four, you will be impossible to guard. How good you are defensively determines whether you’ll be good offensively. If you’re bad at defense, you have no chance. It starts with the stop and then the score.

We modified a drill from coach (Gregg) Popovich of the San Antonio Spurs where “Team A” goes up against “Team B.” Basically, if you get a stop and a score, you win the game. You can’t win big games without stopping the other team and if you can’t defend, you won’t be playing in March.Is there a particular drill you’ve always used throughout your career?Joe Paterno once said that a coach’s job is to replicate game situations in practice. My son (Jerry) also has a good saying, “Make practices like games and games like practices.”

To me, it’s about being a skill coach and not a drill coach. It’s about learning how to play the game and then properly execute the fundamentals that are part of the game. Just look at the game itself, it’s all about passing, catching, dribbling and shooting. Then you add moving without the ball and screening. That’s when you work on one of those things at a game tempo once you’ve taught them in order to get good at them. Our practices were always geared to make everything game-like.

Talk about some of the in-season conditioning programs/routines you instituted over the years. Why did you choose them and why were they effective?

I believe there’s too much preseason training and plyometrics. That’s why there are so many injures to athletes now. We have trainers looking for injuries everywhere. I believe the best way to get in basketball shape is to just play basketball.

Talk about some of the most common mistakes you see being made in the game today.

It’s no different from when I was coaching. The pros often set a bad example for college players and college players set a bad example for high school players, and so on. It’s the disintegration of playing the game through class.

Take for example all the chest bumping, arguing with refs or tapping chests. For myself, if I went back and coached, I would try to be sounder about how the game was taught. We’d play the way that was the best way to win and we’d be more solid in terms of integrity, academics and behavior. We’d also be simpler. The sounder we play, the better we play. Things have taken a funny path and have changed a lot over the past 30 years, and that’s not too long ago. It’s all a microcosm of society and a reflection of how people are today.

Besides talent, what are some of the most important key ingredients needed to have a championship-caliber team?

First is humility. Then you need players that are willing to listen and can play the game together as a team. Butler was a great example of this last year. It was a team that wasn’t as talented as the others, but they enjoyed playing together, had a system and believed in it. They played team ball and did the little things they had to do in order to make the team successful.

Also, I’m a believer that you should lean toward the defensive side of things as a coach. It’s remains true in every sport: You must be able to defend.

What do you look for in an ideal basketball player?

Toughness. Being mentally and physically tough is so important. You can’t put a value on that. After that, if they are athletic, that helps. Also, it’s important that they have the ability to learn and pick up skills. It’s impossible to know for sure with any player at the onset the way recruiting is structured. As a coach, it often comes down to a gut feeling you have about an athlete. You ask yourself, “Will I like or dislike coaching this kid?” Then comes the reality of coaching and finding out for real.

Looking back on your career, is there a feat or accomplishment you are most proud of?

If you like what you are doing and if you work with great kids, that’s a great blessing. I’ve been fortunate. The other thing is serving other people. Being a servant leader is what life is all about. Our guys would get shirts with T.E.A.M.S. written across them. The T is for toughness, E is for effort, A is for attitude, M is for motive and S is for servant leaders. If you could be servant leaders, that said it all, and all the other things would lead into that.

What do you want people to remember most about your coaching days?

It’s my hope that the kids who played for us can help others and held some of those values that we held into our coaching and went out and used them. Your legacy as a coach is what kids accomplished when you worked with them. I give the kids all of the credit. They came in with great values and hopefully they

were okay when they left. And you accept that.

The whole legacy of a coach is his players. Hopefully, you can also have an impact on the game, the way it was played and the treatment of others. Wins and losses do not mean a whole lot in the big picture, but you do have to win if you want to keep on coaching. But the accumulation of wins doesn’t mean much. It’s all about how kids come out of the program and what they do down the road.

TOM BRADY'S COMMITMENT TO IMPROVEMENT

Bill Belichick on Tom Brady's commitment to improvement:

"I think Tom is the type of player that works to improve on everything every year, every week, every day. So over the course of time I think he’s improved in a lot of areas because he’s continued to work on them and work on all the little things. And that’s not saying they were deficient to begin with; Tom just strives for perfection. I think there is always a place for every player to improve and that’s what Tom does. He works hard to try to find that little area of improvement that could result in a better play somewhere down the line. I would include, really, all of his game in that."

JIM HARBAUGH ON DAILY IMPROVEMENT

What we are focused on is improving every day. Daily improvement. Better today than yesterday, better tomorrow than today. This improvement would not only include performance but also relationship with our teammates, family, friends, school, making today the most important day on the calendar, making the next game the most important schedule, making the next meeting most important you’ll have, the next drill is the most productive of the season. We believe what will follow is significant team improvement. Improvement leads to wins, wins lead to championship. Improvement daily equals team success. That’s what we are striving for.

Holtz on His Approach to Daily Improvement

This article appeared the the May issue of The Championship Performance Coaches Journal and I thought it would be good to share.

We asked our coaches an players to ask themselves on a daily basis:

1. Where did I come from?
2. Where am I
3. Where are we going?
4. What have I done to help us get there?

When I took the job at South Carolina, I told the team I had no idea how long it will take us to reach the top, but that would be our goal. Any team must go through 4 stages to be successful

1. Learn how to be competitive. Go into every game believing you are capable o winning. We must reach the point when we believe we are good enough to beat anybody on our schedule.

2. Learn how to win. Regardless of the situation, you have faith and confidence that your teammates will make a play in order to allow us to be successful. You enter the season expecting to go to a bowl.

3. Learn how to handle winning. Losing presents some problems, but winning does also. The players want to bask in their glory and don't prepare to win. I have told our players that we will make many mistakes and I will forgive everyone of except one. That mistake is the failure to prepare. It is a known fact, that when teams start winning, they can take success for granted and stop doing the little things. You can also be assured that jealousy and pettiness will infect your team. Eventually, we must learn to hand success.

4. Take it to another level. When you cope with winning effectively and continue to dream, you will reach the level of the top teams in the country. This is the stage where you expect to not only win, but also do so consistently and impressively. You want to be the best and anything less is a disappointment. Losing becomes totally unacceptable. When an organization takes it to another level, they develop a sense of camaraderie and friendship with their teammates that is seldom duplicated the rest of their life.

Conquering Self

As a leader I frequently get asked the question: What is my greatest accomplishment— the greatest thing I have ever seen happen as a leader? And after reading an Earl Nightingale article he titled “The Greatest Things,” I thought I would compile my own list of a leader’s greatest “things.”

The list I am going to share with you over the next few months is very subjective. I suggest that after I share them with you, you do your own assessment—because there is no right or wrong answer. What I am giving you is my own subjective and personal thinking on leadership. So let’s get started with the first one.

The Leader’s Greatest Victory—Victory over Self

My greatest victory every day is victory over self. I don’t want to put this in past tense because this is a daily battle I have to fight. Not a day goes by where I don’t have to work on myself and battle the temptations of self.

When people think of leadership, the common thought is a leader’s greatest victory is with others. That is a normal and understandable thought process. Because what do leaders do? They lead others. They are taking people someplace, right?

I have found that most of my problems in leadership are my problems. It’s like the guy who said, “If I could kick the person most responsible for my troubles, I wouldn’t be able to sit down for a week, because I would be kicking myself.”

Halfway though writing my book Leadership Gold, which is a compilation of 26 of the most important lessons I have learned as a leader, I realized I learned almost every lesson because I did it wrong. In other words, the lesson was learned not because I was smart or got it right, but because I messed up. I had to reverse and ask myself some questions, like, How did I get that wrong and what could I have done better?

When I work with leaders, many of the problems they have with people are their own problems. It reminds me of when I was doing a conference and a college student raised his hand and said to me, “John, I love all this leadership information, but I don’t have a team yet. So who should I start leading?” And my answer to him was start with himself. Because if you wouldn’t follow yourself, why should anyone else? The philosopher Plato said, “The first and best victory is to conquer self.”

Ralph Stayer, president of Johnsonville Foods, wrote: “In most situations, I am the problem. My mentalities, my pictures, my expectations form the biggest obstacles to my success.” I think Ralph was feeling what I felt many times. He found the enemy, and it was himself.

In my book Winning with People, there are some people principles that address victory over self. Let’s take a look at a couple.

The Lens Principle: Who we are determines how we see others.

This principle says once we get our own act together, we will be able to help others get their acts together. It’s impossible, if I am an unhealthy leader, to have healthy followers. I have to fi x myself. We don’t see others as they are; we see others as we are, because each of us has his or her own bent and that colors our view of everything.

What is around us doesn’t determine what we see. What is within us does. For example, if I am an untrusting person, how do you think I will see you? I will see you as untrustworthy. I am going to view you not as you are but as I am. I am going to look at you through the lens of John Maxwell. So anything that is unhealthy about me is going to spill onto you. This is what leaders have to understand.

As a leader, if I can get victory over myself, if I can fix John Maxwell, the odds are high I can help fix others. If I can’t fix myself, the odds are high I will never be able to add value to and help others.

The Mirror Principle: The first person we must examine is ourselves.

People unaware of who they are and what they do often damage relationships with others. The way to change that is to look in the mirror.

A leader’s tendency is to examine someone else, asking what is wrong with that person. Why aren’t they doing their job correctly?

Why don’t they ever come to work on time? Unfortunately this is how many leaders react. It’s easy to teach leadership; it’s difficult to model leadership.

Within the first six months of becoming a pastor, I came up against a real issue that I had to settle within my heart. It centered on the question, How do I teach my congregation a biblical passage I wasn’t living correctly or falling short of? What was I going to do with that teaching session?

I grew up in a culture that would say just fake it until you make it and just tell them how to live and move on. But I wasn’t comfortable with that. I remember sitting down with my wife, Margaret, and discussing this with her. And I made a determination early on as a young pastor that I would never teach what I didn’t live.

And I went to my congregation and told them I was very young and inexperienced, and there may be times when I bring in other pastors to teach certain principles. And if that happens I will come and sit with them in the pews and take notes alongside them. I have tried my whole life to live that principle of not trying to export something I don’t possess. That’s why victory over self is so essential for the leader.

Author Terry Felber in his book Am I Making Myself Clear? said the following:

There’s something innate in us that looks out for our own interests before those of others. If I take a photograph of a group you are with, who is the first person you look for in the picture? Yourself, of course! You’ll think to yourself, look at my hair! It’s all messed up! And my eyes are half closed. Look at that crooked smile on my face. The most important person to you is yourself.

A key difference between followers and leaders is very simple. Followers think of themselves first, leaders think of others first. Putting others before yourself is a key victory for a leader.