Paul Assaiante: Learning to Face Your Fears

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/c0b886a90e9afd98

When
Players come into my office and they do all the time with thorny issues or
Whatever they're wrestling with.
I always ask the same
Rhetorical question, which is
What's the worst that can happen?
Once you address the concept of what's the worst that can happen.
It's not that bad.
Is this really uh gonna be a life altering experience? And if it is, how do I come to grips with that? And if it's not.
Then why am I making it a bigger deal than it actually is?
Welcome to the Knowledge, a podcast about mastering the best of what other people have already figured out, so you can apply their insights to your life.
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My guest today is none other than the winningest coach in college sports history.
Paul Asante.
Paul is the men's squash and tennis coach at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut.
From 1998 to 2012, Trinity went undefeated.
Winning two hundred and fifty two consecutive matches, including thirteen national championships.
The longest winning streak in college sports history.
I wanted to talk to Coach because not only of his record, but his unique approach to unleashing our potential.
He helps his athletes conquer their fears, their anxieties, and
Their worst nightmares.
There are things that hold us back in all of us, in moments of tension and crisis when the lion roars and you just want to run away.
Or you're tempted to stand there like a deer in the headlights.
Paul advocates that safety
Counterintuitively, is actually found in running towards the Roar.
While most coaches and managers ask people what their goals are.
Coach.
says those goals are easy. You can write them down in a few seconds. They're visible. They feel good.
And if you're good enough and you work hard enough you'll reach them.
But Paul doesn't care about your goals.
He wants to know what you're afraid of, what's holding you back, what's keeping you from achieving and fulfilling your potential.
And he says, What sunk the Titanic was not the tip of the iceberg that you could see poking out of the water.
It was what was underneath and out of sight, and if we want to reach our potential, we have to get to the source of our own issues, into what seems unsolvable, into what we are afraid of. We have to run toward the roar.
And that's what this episode is about, learning to love the journey, running towards your fears, and reaching your full potential.
It's time.
To listen.
And learn.
Oh
I wanna start with
Running to the roar, which is one of the concepts that you have that I absolutely love. What
What does it mean to run to the roar?
Yeah, so that's an interesting uh question to kick off with. When I was
really getting into the um self-exploration
You know, I was meeting with my shrink. I'm a I'm a neurotic mess and
He he said to me one day, You know, you're really an interesting dude because
I've never met anybody who is so
conflict avoidant. You you run from your shadow and yet
On weekends you
lead players into highly emotional competitive
environment. So I'm gonna tell you a little story and
It's a true story.
And the story is that in Africa lions hunt in packs.
And
When when they go out to hunt, they take with them the oldest female of the pride.
By this point she's old and infirmed and
Toothless.
can no longer catch her old her own prey, a little bit like me.
Um, but she has the deepest roar.
And what the lionesses do, and it's the lionesses who do the hunting.
The lionesses position this old lion in the middle of a field.
facing the bush. The bush could be a mile away.
And the prey or between
The old lion and the bush.
And all the lionesses hide in the bush. And when this old lady roars
The prey run away from the roar.
to their death.
And so the the concept is
Go at the problem.
Go at what you perceive to be the problem.
And what you'll invariably find is it's a toothless old lady.
When
Players come into my office and they do all the time with thorny issues or
Whatever they're wrestling with.
I always ask the same
Rhetorical question, which is
What's the worst that can happen?
Once you address the concept of what's the worst that can happen, it's not that bad.
And that has been the thing that's holding us back.
Once you come to grips with that, you're fine. I think
Them the bravest warriors in history were the samurai.
And when you ask the question, what's the worst that could happen?
The answer would be to die.
on the battlefield.
Yet they saw that as a glorious cause.
And that made them fearless, so
When you're struggling with something, step out and ask yourself, what's the worst that can happen?
Is this really a gonna be a life altering experience or
And if it is, how do I come to grips with that? And if it's not.
Then why am I making it a bigger deal than it actually is?
How often do you think
What we're worried about
is losing something
versus gaining something.
It was interesting. I was a f with a friend this weekend who's a very successful hedge fund.
uh investor.
And one of the things he talked about was that he embraced risk.
And people in that business that are successful
Are um
very much wired that way.
And probably it's one of the reasons that their failures are are so much deeper.
But I think mostly we're protecting
What we have, where we are.
You know, one of the things I find as a coach.
Is in an effort to move forward.
You sometimes need to take a half a step backwards.
And people will absolutely fight that to the death. I don't want that. I I want to become I want to go from good to great.
But I'm not willing to go to good minus for a short time.
To get to great.
And so I I think we we tend to protect
Where we are ferociously.
Tell me more about going backwards to move forwards in the context maybe of your players or uh working with business people.
Well, you know, it's i for for the players it's usually a
It's something a mindset.
a skill deficiency
not approaching competition as a opportunity.
And so to
To dive in there.
It almost becomes like I become a man without an island.
This little island I'm on. I know I want to get to that big island, but I'm on this little island and I don't really want to go back into the water.
But that's the only way you can get to the big island.
I also think
You have to recognize that what got you here won't get you there.
You've you've probably heard the phrase, don't change your winning game.
Well, a winning game is only gonna stay a winning game.
And this is in the game of life.
If other people are not paying attention and making their own adjustments.
So I always look at life as a as a race and
If you and I go out for a mile run, four laps around the track.
And the first lap
I lead.
I'm running at whatever pace, say seventy five seconds.
And that's the pace that led.
And you now decide to pass me.
If I continue running at seventy five second pace, I'll lose the race.
I now must adjust to your adjustment.
But we're oftentimes so frozen and and unable to recognize
that that shift needs to occur. That
It's all over us before we even notice.
And this is where my
feelings about emotion.
Are your enemy.
Because emotion takes away your ability to recognize what
adjustments and shifts need to be made.
I really want to dive into emotion, but it's part of a broader concept that I want to explore first, which is
How do you define
success and failure.
Such an interesting thing. I I
I have never had any money. I'm just a coach.
But I've always been on the sidelines.
Of wealth.
most of the people that I gave lessons to had
disposable income or that sort of thing. And in that world
It's very common
That the measure of success is how much money you have.
But I think success
Is to get to a place
Where you can look in the mirror.
Almost nobody gets here, by the way.
You can look in a mirror and say
I have enough.
To me, that's really successful. Now that doesn't mean you take your foot off the gas.
You continue to drive down the road, you continue to do the things
That allowed you to achieve whatever it is that you have enough of.
So that you can live the life you want to live. Or
You know, give to the causes you want to give to.
Бо та міс.
Well you can just
Look in the mirror and say, I I have enough.
I have a player.
who I am just so enchanted with. He's young
He graduated only a few years ago. He was from Sweden. He was a beautiful squash player. He's got a wonderful wife from Sri Lanka.
And they have two little children and they're in the investment industry in Philadelphia.
And I saw him recently and I was
I asked him the question my father always used to ask me.
What's next? What's next? What's the next conquest? What are you striving for?
And he said, You know, coach
We're earning enough
to live the life that we want to live.
Man, that you don't find that very often.
But to me that's the definition of success.
is being able to reflect on where you are
Feel very good about that.
And
Continue to work toward
Continuing that.
Then how would you define failure?
Failure is
Chasing.
To me fair and this is very personal.
But for me
Failure.
was chasing.
And
For me in my career
A good part of that time
was very ego attached.
I'm embarrassed to admit that, but I was doing it
Unknowingly
'Cause I was n I was feeling a
of an empty vase that was my self perception.
And so I was striving and striving and I was gonna get there whatever there was and hell to be all others and
And then I realize that it's nothing to do with me.
And then that became a wonderful time. It's
To give you an example, I recently got a phone call from a friend.
And he said, You know, one of my neighbors was your assistant tennis coach at West Point.
in nineteen seventy five.
And my stomach knotted up.
And I said to him.
Please tell him he would like me more.
Today then then.
And that I apologize.
I was so busy.
striving and and to me there was no peace in that
So
To me that's failure.
Not being authentic to what it is that's important to you.
And then
Striving toward that.
I wanna come back to sort of
uh emotions and maybe we can tie it into this
Uh one of my kids came home
early in the school year and did really poorly on an exam.
And you know, there's a little light switch in me that's like, oh, this is great, right? He goes to a school where the they're perfectly comfortable failing them.
Uh but he told me he he said he looked at me in the eyes like I did my best.
Wow.
And I knew in that moment
That that was not the time to talk to him.
Uh, and so I waited and then later that night we pulled out his test, we went over it.
And I said, Let's talk about what it means to do your best.
And we talked about all the elements of doing your best that lead up
To the test itself.
Right. So all the preparation, all the things you control.
So when he told me he did his best, what he meant was I did my best from ten to eleven AM.
Yeah.
How do you think about competition
doing your best, what goes into that and winning and losing
I and and talk to me about this in the context of preparation emotions.
Well, first of all, y what a good father you are. That's that's beautiful.
You can never
Teach.
Or coach.
On the heels.
Of loss.
Business
Or otherwise.
In your relationships.
When there is emotion, that is not the time to
go in and try to figure out anything.
You need to come back later.
when things have calmed down.
You can't come back too much later.
Because then the opportunity for learning is lost.
So to me everything is preparation.
Practice is
Everything.
You cannot
Perform
On game day.
You cannot present in the boardroom.
Any better than you can in practice.
And so
The key to me, and what I will miss most.
In retirement.
His practice.
Practice is an opportunity to fail.
And failure is the playground of success.
And so when you talk to your son, okay, let's talk about
How did you prepare?
How did you study?
Did you leave it to the last minute?
Did you
Did you do it in increments as you went along?
Did you when you woke up, did you feel healthy? Did you eat properly? Did you go into the exam alert and ready to go?
And then
There was the exam.
Did you handle the moment well?
Did you choke when you realized that you didn't know some of the information?
Did you cheat?
All of these things
Are things to
to talk about.
And
Then on the other side of it.
What was learned.
And his failing in that exam
gave him an opportunity to learn more than if he had gotten a ninety five. You don't learn very much in that moment.
I think preparation is everything. There are sports psychologists in the world
Who are making tons of money
trying to teach people how
Two
Compete.
Or perform.
With a calm mind the way they would in practice.
Now this is just me and far they're all wealthier than me and they drive nicer cars than I do.
I think that's backwards.
Because you know what? Once you put a scoreboard up there.
All of a sudden it's human nature becomes more important to you.
And so I believe the opposite.
I believe let's make practice more difficult.
Make it more like game day.
So that game day
doesn't feel like such a shock to the system.
We don't have a hard time getting young people excited to play Harvard on f Saturday.
But we have a hard time getting the nineteen year olds to find the relevance in practice on a Wednesday afternoon when nobody's watching.
That's when you need to earn your living.
That's when you need to get their attention.
And demand.
Full engagement.
So I believe in the Japanese philosophy, which is that you
cry in practice and you laugh in competition.
And you also have to practice the things that you're bad at, which means
you're going to look like an idiot, but you also have your your identity wrapped up in being
uh a hedge fund trader or a squash player or an and you're
You're really good at that.
by definition of what you're doing at the level you're doing it.
And so practicing, I was actually talking to an MBA coach uh a couple of weeks ago, and he said something similar. He's like the hardest thing to do is to get
I can make players better, no problem.
But I need them to practice.
the things that they're bad at and they don't wanna do that because then they look bad in front of their peers and their colleagues.
I believe that
You practice your weaknesses.
But you compete to your strengths.
And the more you can shore up your weaknesses when your opponent
tries to expose those
Then
you're gonna be more able to get past it.
You always want to go out there in competition playing to your strength.
It's interesting when I was coaching, you know, doubles in tennis.
You can position people so that
Their weaknesses are almost never exposed.
And and that's that's the sign of a good coach.
So one of my friends is Bill Belichick.
And Bill is the coach of the Patriots.
And you know, there he goes, Aciente's name dropping. But Bill has this great phrase that to me is an onion.
It has so many levels.
And as you go down in in peels
It gets sweeter and sweeter.
And what Bill says is
Do your job.
Okay, that's what does that mean?
He puts people in position and this is the sign of a great leader.
So that their
able to compete using their strengths.
They're able to perform
Using their strengths.
And then he says
And stay in your lane.
And that's brilliant. Because what he's saying there is
Now that I've put you in a position where you should
be able to hit that forehand all day long and run around the backhand.
If you go out of that lane.
now your weaknesses are gonna get exposed and now you become a liability.
And so
I think that is really important. We do one of the things you do in squash is what's something called solo practice.
Um
Which is you come into the courts alone.
And you practice for a period of time.
And
We sort of orchestrate what that would look like.
Um, particularly in terms of working on your weaknesses. So
Joe has a weaker backhand than forehand.
Joe shows up for his ten A. solo practice, and what does he do? He goes out on the court and he hits four hands.
Chao.
What are you doing?
You're not
working on the things that need to become less liabilities.
But on game day, we're playing to your strengths. We're playing to your forehand.
If I asked you what it means to prepare.
I I think of this sort of like
put yourself in a position for success. What does it mean to put yourself in a position for success before you reach
The stage.
on which you're performing.
Whether in athletics or in life.
Well, first of all, I think we procrastinate
especially this generation, this generation will
You know, I it's always interesting. I've had you know, I've coached tennis and squash and gymnastics, but tennis and squash
And
These people have been highly successful.
And they were successful, they've been successful because every day they put in a little.
Whatever that is, whether it's mental, physical, emotional, what what are they working on?
But every day they put in a level. And then you they go to class.
And
They wait until the week of the final.
And then they take study aid.
medication.
So they can pull two all nighters.
And try to get ready to take the exam.
Guys, what do you you didn't get great in tennis?
By pulling all nighters the night before a tournament.
That's crazy.
Put in a little every day. So what does that take?
That takes
Discipline.
Unless you've been given sprinkled with fairy dust.
You've gotta put in every day.
And
And I view every day as another brick in the house that you're building.
And no one brick is any more important than any other brick.
But it's it's that daily consistent discipline.
And putting it and enjoying it.
You know, it shouldn't be a burden, it shouldn't be work.
The great ones
Have this great capacity for imagination.
Where they can come in and it's ex it's fun, it's exciting, they see the value, they see the purpose.
For the others it's drudgery.
Nobody wants to go to get root canal work done every morning.
So if if it's drudgery, then you've got to do a real serious mental shift there,'cause that's not gonna work.
A lot of people
want the results, but they don't want to put in the work. And and what but what I mean by that is like
We wanna learn a different language. So we sign up for Duolingo. We do it for a week. Yeah. And then we're like, oh and then we start doing it inconsistently every few days. And then we're like, we're not making progress. It's it's as if we're like Sisyphus rolling this boulder halfway up the hill.
And then we're like, I I don't feel like keep going. I'm gonna come back tomorrow, but when we come back tomorrow, it's at the bottom of the hill and we have to start all over again. That's a good analogy. Thank you for that. Talk to me about the relationship between sort of uh consistency, how it gets in our way, and maybe intensity, which is
When you were talking about your students, it's like they're focused on intensity over consistency when it comes to
Testing.
But when it comes to competition, they're focused on consistency over intensity.
Well it's interesting. You know, you've you've asked something that I've never thought about before. Maybe the intensity is a f is a function
of doing something that you don't necessarily enjoy.
Mm.
First of all, there needs to be a realistic measure of where you are.
And where you're trying to get to.
I think too many people have unrealistic goals.
And it's instantly a deterrent.
You know, I wanna get up that mountain.
But I can only do a half a step today.
Well that's that's where you are.
Meeting me where I am, I'm at a half a step.
I'm not gonna take two steps because two steps is too painful.
And I don't want to come back tomorrow and and go through pain. So I think the consistency comes from measurable, reasonable.
Goals.
And
I I personally believe in terms of conditioning
I don't want people to put in a hundred percent on any given day.
I want them to save a little for tomorrow.
I want them to be able to say, That was good. That that was good work out. I feel pretty good about myself.
I'll come back tomorrow and we'll start again.
So consistency discipline.
Yeah.
Enjoying
The process
is so important. It's ironic, you know, when they come back to visit in ten years with their partner and their children.
We they don't talk about individual matches or where number they were.
They talk about you remember that bus ride in the snow on the way to Maine and
Do you remember we arrived late from you know they talk about pieces of the journey.
You know, I I have a friend who recently passed away and I
As he was getting closer to the finish line, I said to him
What's this all about?
And he said its purpose.
Have you found your purpose?
It's not hard getting up.
And
Working toward
Or in sync with your purpose.
But if you're doing something out of
yourself or your your
Own desires.
That's work.
You know, I I've had some failed relationships in my life.
And
I have found
That
A bad idea.
No matter how hard you work will probably never work.
And a really good idea.
A a partner
Who's your friend?
And who likes you?
That can almost never fail.
And it's and it's true generally.
Of the day to day
Conditions.
You know, it's obviously we have to do things that we don't like.
I have our the boys on the team make lists, constantly making lists. They don't this generation doesn't do that.
And I tell them before you go to bed, I want you to read your list once.
And then you wake up, you find yourself more focused on the tasks at hand.
And there's one thing on that list typically is that you're not looking forward to.
Or you're looking forward to the least.
Do that first.
Mm.
Get that out of the way.
Now the rest of the day is kind of fun stuff.
But what we do is we push it off and we push it off. And it's sort of that hairy monster. It's sort of that
Lioness.
And we just I don't wanna have to deal with that. Oh, it's tomorrow. Now I have another sleepless night.
worrying about what I could have knocked off this morning.
So
This is a beautiful life.
And
In the steps.
And the interaction should be
Joyous and and additive.
And
That's a great gift and you can get people to to appreciate that.
I think a couple of points as you were saying th the standing on the bottom of the mountain and looking up.
And the gap between where we are and where we want to go seems really large.
And that makes us
We we we notice that gap when we're chasing the result and not the process.
And I have the this saying that I use all the time, which is a lack of patience changes the outcome.
So when you chase the result and you don't work on the process
You're inevitably gonna fail.
Even if you succeed, you fail.
It's it's a weird sort of
dynamic, right? But i if you
set yourself to what can I do better to put myself to prepare better today.
to put myself in a position for success tomorrow, and you repeat that over and over consistently.
then your goal doesn't seem so far away anymore. Your goal seems right in front of you.
And so you can make progress and it and get positive reinforcement there.
I th I like that a lot. Um, you know, I'll I'll be invited to speak to a company.
And it's usually at a retreat.

And the CEO will get up and
Say this is what we did third quarter. This is where we are in the fourth quarter. These are our goals in the first quarter.
And then I get up to speak and I say, Well that's
I'm sure that's s super important.
But I don't necessarily
Agree with that.
I think if you take care of your people
They will take care of the scoreboard.
If you focus on the scoreboard
You're gonna fail.
I have never seen an athlete.
performing in any activity.
where they're running around with a scoreboard clicker in their hands.
They're focusing on the nuts and bolts.
The tasks at hand.
And as a leader
I think the single most important quality you can have.
is empathy.
And to h be an empath.
You need to be able to put yourself on the other side of the desk.
and understand where that person is coming from.
and how you can help and influence them.
and inspire them and get them to be the best version of themselves.
And in terms of the best version of themselves
Perfection is the enemy of the good.
And I've I'm as I uh age and I get closer to the finish line
That becomes so much more clear to me.
You know, I I'll be speaking
to a group of parents and
their focus is getting their child into the best school possible.
'Cause I I'm usually talking to that age group.
And you know, my feeling is if Tommy
is a lovely young person.
He looks people in the eye, he shakes their hand, he's character large, and
A good human being, kind and gentle.
And he prepares well for things, but he's a C student.
That's pretty much who Tommy is.
What's wrong with that?
There's nothing wrong with that.
Celebrate your C student Tommy.
For all the other wonderful things that that person is.
We don't do that.
We were so driven by goals.
And sometimes those goals don't work for who we are.
And I and I think that's
Well, we're gonna hire tutors and we're gonna get
We're gonna do the pr SAT seventeen times and we're gonna
Well
Because my identity as a parent is wrapped up in your success. No question about it.
And it's so unfair.
To Tommy.
I wanna come back to uh managing emotions before we sort of like I wanna talk about this generation and our relationship to failure, but before we get there.
I I wanna explore
What does it mean to manage our emotions and how do we as as parents or coaches
Teach our children and ourselves.
To manage our emotions better.
And you have a great analogy, sort of like with an Oreo cookie.
I'd I'd love to explain Yeah. Yeah, life lessons through Oreo cookies. We live in a very angry society.
We live in a society now where people are
If you're not on my team, then you're the enemy.
There's no middle. The middle is sort of gone away.
And so when I'm talking to young people
I talk to them about life lessons through Oreo cookies, and I stand up and they see my big belly and I say, Well, obviously I love Oreo cookies. So
Let's talk about Oreo cookies and as a metaphor for
Life and I say how many of you have ever been in a car when somebody is in road rage?
That's not a safe place to be, is it?
No, it's n it's scary. Get away from that person.
So I want I'm gonna give you two Oreo cookies.
Put one down.
I want you to take that Oreo cookie and stand it on its edge.
All right, now you're looking at that Oreo cookie.
This wafer.
Represents
Thoughts.
In the course of the day, we have thousands and thousands of thoughts.
Many of them are not very good.
And then the other wafer.
is action. So we have thought.
and action.
So here we've got these thoughts going on and then we act. What is the cream in the middle?
The cream in the middle is time.
There is a period of time
measurable.
Between thought
in action.
Okay. Now I want you to take the wafer off of one cookie and the wafer off of the other cookie. And I want you to put the two Oreos together.
With the cream.
What have we just done?
We've just doubled the amount of time.
Between
Thought.
And action.
That's a good thing.
All right, because now we're less likely to act.
On a thought.
That may have been a bad thought or a knee jerk reaction.
The goal is to increase the gap of time.
between those two.
How many of you watch the Academy Awards?
When Will Smith went up and smacked
Chris Rock in the face.
That dude had no cream in his Oreo cookie.
And that's what we need to do. We need, especially with young people.
And and it's very hard right now with Instagram and all of these things in our phones.
Because everything is short snippets now.
And everything is going on fast and we don't we don't really stay with the thought for very long.
You know, used to be that you could coach your team for thirty minutes and then you needed to take a breather. That is way, way shorter. So
Again, thoughts.
Action increase the gap of time.
Eat more Oreo cookies.
So that that's my analogy. How how do you let kids or adults even know, hey, like you're
Right now you're succumbing to your defaults, you're you're succumbing to your emotions.
Your
Uh you're not thinking clearly, you're just reacting.
How do how do you how do you tell them or point it out? Because I think like nobody makes a bad decision intentionally.
Right. And so
In these moments, you're you're not thinking, and that's you're reacting without reasoning, and that's what leads to all this trouble.
uh inevitably we have to repair a relationship. You know, we do something that is irreparable. We
Uh, but we're not thinking. Nobody taps us on the shoulder and says, Hey, do you want to pour water or gasoline onto this situation? Well, if somebody did that, we'd be like, Oh, obviously, like water.
Uh, but we don't have that. We don't feel that. So how do you
How do you point out to people
That the that
That's where they are right now in a way that empowers them.
Well, first of all, it's gotta be presented in a way that doesn't come across as being judgmental.
I have three young daughters, which
I've been given a second chance in life and
How lucky am I?
My older daughter, my twelve year old, is very reactive to things.
And when she reacts to something
usually anger toward her younger sisters, I'll say you just reacted.
I'm I'm not upset. I'm not raising my voice. I'm just sharing with you
That that happened?
Just be aware of it.
That's not the teachable moment because once you bring that in
Now there is going to be emotion on her side. Oh Daddy's angry me, he's rejecting something, whatever.
And then you've got a problem. So
You don't ignore it at the moment.
But you do address it at the moment in a non
Confrontative way.
And you come back and talk about it later.
The best analogy, and I we kind of stumbled into this.
Ma one of my children was a biter.
And in day daycare
You know, we get a call, oh, you know, so and so bit somebody.
If if a child bites someone
Well and use again, this can be a metaphor for a million different things.
'Cause it's a learned behavior.
If a child
Bite someone.
And you come in at that moment, s and this is what our parents used to do. We're gonna stick mustard in your mouth, or we're gonna bite you so you can see how painful that is.
Nothing gets learned.
And so
What we would do with Emma
Is we would say during the day.
When there was nothing going on driving to the mall
You know, Emma biting is really
A bad thing.
It it hurts people.
Oh, yeah, Dad. I don't want to talk about it. No, I understand.
And then we'd bring it up again and we'd bring it up again a couple of times through the course of the day, repetition, repetition. She stopped biting within a week.
Because it was addressed in non emotional
times not at the moment. Now
Obviously if there's something that is about to happen where danger or someone is gonna get hurt.
Well then you have to stop it.
But
There's no learning going on there.
You're just simply triaging the moment.
The learning happens on the other side of it.
You can point it out.
You lost your temper again.
Please stop.
And then later on, do you remember what happened last night when we were Yeah, oh yeah, yeah.
It's incredible.
How you can break the cycle and this learn behavioral thing is interesting.
Because
You if you become a scientist in terms of observing
Human behavior.
You see
That exactly so why do some people raise their voice and yell?
'Cause they've learned over time that's the way to stop a conversation.
Or they've learned over time how to that they can affect
the outcome through that behavior at the time.
I I caught I had a uh
One of my learned behaviors is somebody
told me that I had done something, I instantly apologize.
W whether I did it or not, I instantly apologize. You know what that learned behavior did?
It stopped the anger.
It stopped the conversation.
You can't you know, because oh you just told me that I did something wrong and I said I'm sorry.
You you gonna beat me over the head about it? We're gonna move on to the next.
But that's not necessarily a good
Behavioral trait.
So
The that's how I see emotion and
In game adjustments
Or one of the k's
To life.
We can prepare
All we want.
We can be so ready.
But when we go in
Something happens and now you have to adjust on the fly.
That's what successful people are able to do.
If you I'm going in to ask a person for money in in my fundraising role.
I go in, I have to be able to read the body language almost instantly.
This isn't going well.
This is going in the wrong direction. This doesn't seem to resonate with that person. I'm going to adjust. Doesn't matter how many hours I put in in preparation.
I've got to be able to adjust. Now
If there is emotion present
I don't recognize that.
I'm not able to see the adjustments that need to be made.
And so
Again.
Emotion is not your friend.
And so
And that's whether it's elation.
Or depression or anger.
All of those things take away our ability to just be cognizant.
Of what's happening.
And what adjustments do I need to make?
I would hazard a guess.
That in the world
That we live in.
finance, teaching, whatever.
Very v precious few people.
Can say
I was at the mountain top.
Because it went exactly as I planned.
It doesn't.
It won't.
You know, we talk about mental rehearsal as a way to prepare for an activity.
That's important.
But you know what else is?
Believing going in, it's not going to go the way I thought it was. And I need to recognize what are those things happening and what adjustments do I need to be
I need to make.
It's really whack-amole. Life is really just a big game of whack-a-mole.
I like that.
So you've been coaching for forty five years now. Are you worried about kids today? What are you seeing?
I am very concerned for this generation of young people.
Because we as adult in their lives will do anything.
And it's human nature, but we'll do anything.
To help them not experience discomfort.
We'll do anything to make sure they don't have to go through pain.
And
It's through the pain.
That learning occurs.
And so
In the name of love
We
hurt young people's
Development.
I think one of the most important qualities to success in the human
Being is resilience.
And
You only way you can become resilient is to fail.
We have to let them fail.
And listen, and I have failed in this. I'm not preaching that I've done this all right. I haven't.
Um but I'm trying.
Our little one.
Would be walking down the hallway in her diaper.
And she would fall on her bum.
If when she landed on her hine
We went
She would look at us and cry.
If she fell on her bum and we said yay
She gets up, wipes herself off.
And walks away.
It actually starts federally.
And
Again as parents or coaches or educators or leaders
What just happened?
Let's talk about that a little later.
Okay.
Did we prepare well?
Were we ready to go?
Was our opponent just too good for
For us.
Did we lose the bid?
Because the other company was offering
A better opportunity.
I think we n to reкогніze.
That
We must fail.
to learn and grow and improve. So
I'm working at a college.
People come to the door now, they look more put together than they've ever looked before.
And yet the first time they face adversity they fall into a million pieces.
And then the parents come flying in, what's wrong?
How did the people supervising your journey?
let you down or fail you.
It it just breeds this
This continuation
Of
It's okay to fail.
What happened?
Let's analyze this.
Let's try to do better.
That's not really happening right now.
And so in the name of love, we're letting this generation down. It's a f I heard a comedian recently and he was saying when I was a little boy, and I hate that when I was a little boy, you know, I'd walk
twelve miles in the snow to go to school. Well, I you know, I I didn't have to do that. But
You know
W w I remember someone he said when I was a little boy, I'd go up by the house and my mother'd be in the kitchen.
And I'd say, Mom, I'm going down to the lake.
And she'd say, Okay, son, don't drown.
Now
little boy walks by the window and says, Mom, I'm going to the lake. She sprints out of the house
lather'em up with sun tan lotion, puts swimmies on him.
And probably even goes to the lake with him to make sure he's safe.
That's I mean it's a comedic

But it's pretty true.
And so
Наго I had to speak to a grub of parents.
in Greenwich Greenwich, Connecticut. And the topic was
Raising balanced children.
In a pressurized society.
So I got up and I said, How many of you have seen a few good men? And everybody raised their hand.
And I said, Well, I'm afraid you can't take the truth.
Because you're the reason it's a pressurized society.
And now we gotta come to grips with that. Well the
headmistress was running around, she was nervous that I was offending all of these wealthy people.
And at the end of my speech I got a standing ovation because people were so happy.
that I was talking to the person sitting next to them.
We live in a world without mirrors. We're not able to look and say, Wait a minute
How am I hurting my child's development?
To become a better
member of society.
That's the end game.
Or it should be.
Not what
College you went to or
Did you go to college?
I had an opportunity to do a panel with the world renowned
doctor Jim Lair.
And he is just the an a rock star.
And we were on the panel and he had a blackboard.
Or a whiteboard.
And
He said, All right, and only he could get away with this.
He said
I want you to raise your hand and tell me the big three.
When your child was born, what were the big three?
That my child you count all the fingers, you count all the toes, that my child was healthy.
That my child was happy.
Okay, so we got three uh things on the board. Now he says your child reaches a certain age.
And you you now register your child to do an extra curricular activity.
Whatever ice skating
Football, playing the oboe.
Being in a play
What were the big three?
That my child learned confidence through the activity.
And my child learned how to play nice in the sandbox. So he's got these six things on the board. And he looks back at the crowd and he says, Okay, now my question to you is.
Where did you collectively lose your minds?
It was like whoa, that's intense. But he was right. We we went off the path.
Because all of a sudden now
We were looking to make sure this child achieves certain things.
Hopefully for themselves, but
Probably so that we could go to the country club and brag a little bit about that child's
you know, performance or activities.
What
Well we're not letting them fail. We're paving the way for them to succeed now.
But I will guarantee you to fail later.
And now we have all of these mental health issues as a result.
Well, not as a result. It's one of many reasons why we're wrestling with mental health issues.
But
I heard of statistic recently that forty seven percent of college students are in therapy.
Now on one hand, that's a very healthy thing.
That means people are in touch with their feelings and
They don't view getting help as a negative thing.
But wow, how did we get to there?
Yeah, it's a little crazy.
It is, and it's because
Fear of failure is a gitanic
gigantic, not measuring up, unrealistic goals.
I and a lot of that is the social media. The cell phone is the seventh gate to hell. There's no question in my mind.
Because everything is perfect.
You know these young people
We'll take eighty pictures of themselves.
Post the one that's best.
Someone else is looking at that picture feeling less about themselves.
How do you think about building resilience?
uh mental resilience, right? In the sense of
I'm a parent. I have a you know, I have two young teens.
How do I
help them to fail. I mean one of the things that I've done is try to put them in Jiu Jitsu because there's rapid feedback. You're constantly failing.
Uh, but like outside of that, what can we do to help them do that?
And then how do we build
mental toughness.
failure, just mental toughness to be able to look through Instagram and not get caught up in those moments of other people.
I think you just have to be omnipresent and communicating.
Don't get swept away into what's happening around you.
Celebrate
the failures. What just happened? That's amazing.
So you just spilled your ice cream on this row sidewalk.
So let's clean it up.
Yeah.
And let's talk about
How did that happen?
I mean that's a tiny little thing, but
You know, it's
I've got a granddaughter
Who's learning how to drive.
And she doesn't want to listen to her parents.
Giving her instructions.
Well
The outc that's not gonna go well.
So let's talk about let's talk about why
Why you're you're
resisting this. What's happening? Let's just keep talking about what's happening.
Being present, why did this happen?
That's great. Or you know
Gee, that didn't work out. Let's talk about how, why, how.
Did we buy it off more than we could chew?
Or is this just
Beyond our scope.
I but again it it's talking
Talking talking.
It's um interesting as a coach, you know, twenty five percent
of the student body leaves every year.
So what I I have to constantly repeat, constantly repeat.
And um
It is the repetition of the constructive things.
That need to to happen all the time.
My my purpose in life is messaging.
I have come to the understanding that all I want to do is share messages.
Things that I've learned.
Mostly from failures and mistakes.
Right.
So
That's where w what we're we're in the business of doing now, you and I and others
Like us, and є.
I am basically an introvert.
At the end of the day, I don't want to talk anymore.
'Cause all we're doing all day long is talking.
Um
But you have to.
If you're going to be messaging
And you signed up for that.
And you've got to share the messages.
And
And is a non
Critical
Constructive way.
I think one of the things that we've hit on today that maybe I I
underappreciated was the timing of the message.
is also
probably more important in some ways than the actual message, right? Whoa, it's everything. I can't tell you how many fights I've gotten into with players.
Where
I went over to coach them after a loss or a bad moment.
And they they resist.
I mean they're they're dug in'cause they're in their temperature is way up.
These are nice kids, but they're gonna fight me at that moment.
So I learned early on that's not the time to do any teaching now.
The other thing I learned
The hard way.
was I learn oh now's not the time to talk to Tom.
He's very upset.
But I still need to go over to him and put my hand on his shoulder.
And say that was a tough one.
Because if you don't do anything like that, they think you're angry at them, or that you're disappointed in them.
Hey, that's a tough one. We'll catch up in a little bit.
And then
the teaching happens on the other side of that.
And it's true in all human engagement.
We'll be in a difficult conversation and you just have to get to the point where you say
We're just gonna have to agree to disagree here.
And let's circle back a little later.
And and as the temperature's rising and the voices are getting louder.
You know, there's that wonderful saying the louder you speak, the less that I hear.
That's really it's really important, and how we internalize
The communication given to us by
The people supporting our life journey.
My parents were fabulous.
I was so blessed.
And yet, so much of what they said and did
I internalized incorrectly.
My grandfather was a shoemaker, came over from Italy.
My father work managed a factory.
The most wonderful human being I've ever known.
He would walk across a f f a a wet field and leave no footprints.
It was just a gentle soul.
That said
I think he greatly enjoyed whatever successes I was having. For me, I think it was really for me.
I don't think he went to the country club and bragged we didn't belong to a country club.
But every time something would happen, some level of success.
He would say to me, What's next?
So what what's the next goal?
What are you striving for? Are we gonna go for another national championship? How's it look for next year?
And if finally at about the age of sixty
I said, Dad, what's wrong with just
Sitting here and
Letting this
Feel good and thinking about it for a little while.
I don't want to worry about what's next.
Ne what's next will happen. We'll get there.
And so I internalized his well intentions.
Incorrectly.
And um so
I think it's hard to understand or find out how a young person internalizes
Mm.
what it is we're sharing with them.
And I think you need to be pretty sophisticated in watching their behavior afterwards.
'Cause that will really tell you how they internalized it.
Are they harder on themselves than you are most of the time?
The kids, the b kids on the team? Yeah.
No.
Did they used to be?
Yeah, no m much less now.
there's lack of ownership. So if I don't own
An outcome.
Why would I take the time to beat myself up about it?
You know, it's uh funny as a coach
If I
team or a person fails
The finger.
Points at them.
Or so in other words, if I fail, my finger points at me.
But if I fail twice
The finger points at the coach.
Hm. If this isn't going well, it's your fault.

And in this generation coming out now.
And I talk to companies about this all the time.
If I'm not th earning three hundred thousand dollars at the end of the first year, there's something wrong with the company.
Well, maybe not.
May maybe that's not the real problem here.
And
And so ownership.
is super important and if mommy and daddy are gonna run around
Yeah.
making sure that, you know, you're not failing. How do you own that?
But y but you get these kids, they come in.
You know, you you can start coaching in November.
How do you get them to go from wherever they're starting from to take ownership over what they're doing when it comes to
What you're coaching them.
Time repetition repetition. But what messages are you seeing? What principles are you using? How are you getting across to them, I guess, is the Well, I try to do it in it
In a way that they don't feel like I'm judging them.
And just say, look, this is my observation.
This is what just happened.
What were you thinking?
Where was the o cream in the Oreo cookie?
Why did you react that way?
What you know what?
This age group needs to be right all the time.
There's nothing wrong with letting somebody
else be right.
Even if you don't agree.
Just let them win that little conversation and we can move forward.
Instead of feeling like it like you have to fall on every every debate.
It's really about the human interactions and
how you're sharing with them in an on
non judgmental way. The other thing I have found that's been very helpful
Not everybody can do this and not everybody should do this.
I am very open.
With
I I share my humanity.
All the time.
You know, I'm medicated on for depression.
They know that.
I let them know that.
I don't want them looking at me like some other worldly creature.
This guy's as human as they come.
And I appreciate his humanity.
And I'm gonna appreciate yours.
And I'm gonna treat you with respect.
And we're gonna try to improve.
But I think
Sometimes one of the things that you notice when you go to college, right, is
You go away.
And Mr and Mrs. Parrish.
enabled you to go to college.
And then you come home and one day
They're just suing Tom.
They're just people.
Mm. And that's a great transitional
Understanding that they're just people doing the best that they can.
And I think as a leader, it's important to share with them
Your humanity.
Because then as I if I'm human
And I'm
Teaching
Uh I'm not on a mountaintop. I'm not judging you. I'm right in here with you.
But I'm seeing some behavior that you need to consider is maybe not helpful.
I remember the first time I apologized to my kids, uh
for you know not having enough cream in my Oreo cookie.
And it was so hard. It was just hard to walk up to like a six year old and be like
I didn't react the way that I want to.
I shouldn't have done that.
I'm gonna try to do better in the future.
Uh, but it was just really, really hard to acknowledge it. I maybe it's just me, but I find it hard.
To be vulnerable in that way.
Yeah, and I and obviously we're all like that, right? But
If you're trying to teach your children to be better
Mm.
And the role my l you know, the old saying, I'm sorry, I can't hear what you're saying. Your actions are speaking too loud.
Yeah. That's really true. So
I'm I lost my temper there, I'm sorry.
That wasn't an okay way of communicating. Yeah.
And now when they lose their temper
See, it's it's not okay.
It wasn't okay for me, and it's not okay for you.
So let's try to be better.
When I think about the the you know, sort of
when it comes to these vulnerable moments, shifting the mindset to the bigger goal, changing your perspective allows you to open up, right? So my perspective, if I if I walk into that moment with
You know, what is my goal as a parent, right, to raise strong, independent children?
Well, is this gonna put me closer to that goal or further away from it? And then it takes it out of me, right? Like it just takes it into this is like a good thing for them to learn. Like I need to model the behavior that I want them to.
to exhibit.
Acknowledging you made a mistake.
uh trying to correct it, improving going forward.
So that comes back to the f the very beginning, purpose. Why are we doing what we're doing?
Where is this getting us to?
Last night we were in the kitchen and s my daughter was doing something
with a butter knife which could have been potentially
Dangerous.
And I raised my voice and she turned to me and she said, Why did you raise your voice?
And I said, because that was going to potentially become a problem. I had to stop the train.
Now later on we can talk about why you were doing what you were doing.
And we can you know
hopefully get better. But I thought it was really adorable that she said, Why are you raising your voice?
'Cause we've talked about the fact that that just doesn't get you anywhere.
Right. And but it gets her attention in that moment because it's like, Whoa this is really different. Yeah.
And it it yeah, the safety issue. I like that. Um
One of the things I would imagine is really hard about your job
But
I don't think I've ever heard you talk about it.
Managing the diversity of
cultures and religions
Amongst players.
Yeah, we have thank you. We have
a tremendous amount of diversity.
Here in the program. We h last year we had eleven different countries
on the team represented.
And that
Is a large number of different religions.
And so we have Hindus and we have Muslims and we have Zarastians
And on the first day of practice they're all sitting next to each other and I I say to them
These are your brothers.
And now you have to
Develop a level of empathy, understand where that person is coming.
And let's do this.
in the best way possible. Now
When you're born into a family you don't choose your brother, but he's there.
And so now you've got to develop a meaningful relationship with that person.
And we talk about that every day.
The religion thing turned out to be the biggest difference of all.
And it blew up in my face one day. I just
figured like Pollyanna, everything was perfect, everything is great. Look at how wonderful we are.
And one day
There was a uh a dispute in the cafeteria
Involving a couple of Muslims and a couple of Hindus.
And it and it ignited like a forest fire.
And I thought, Whoa.
We need to address this.
Because
The way that this blew up, it's so distorted.
That this is a big deal.
And we sat down and we talked about why did we get to here? How do how are the religions different? How are they similar?
I'm a cr I consider myself a Christian. I'm not particularly holy, but
You know?
I'm taught that Christ gave up food for forty days and forty nights, so
I will make the ultimate sacrifice and I'll give up
M and M sort.
or Oreo cookies for forty days and forty nights. But now we have our boys on the team that are wreck are s d you involved in Ramadan.
Well
That's pretty similar length of time.
Maybe these religions are a little bit more like each other than they are different.
Let's talk about that.
And
that you reach a level of comfort in at least understanding.
We one of the other big differences on this campus is
um socioeconomic.
We have some very wealthy kids on this campus.
The one percenters
And most of our boys on the squash team are on financial aid. They don't have very much at all.
And that makes them feel less about themselves.
And you know, they may get invited to the same party.
But
They're not
Of that class.
And so we're constantly talking about the differences and the similarities.
And the more they recognize the similarities
the easier the journey is
We went through nine eleven. The world went through nine eleven.
But we're not that far from New York City.
And many of the kids on this campus at the time
Had friends, family, neighbors, knew.
involved in that crisis. And I will never forget
The president of the college called me and he said
'Cause you remember the it was just being streamed, constantly being streamed the pictures of the terrorists.
And the pictures of the terrorists, there was, you know, headdresses or certainly of that part of the world.
And he said, I want your team to come to my house tonight.
And we went there.
And he said guys.
My request of you
Is don't go anywhere where people are drinking.
Because when p people the something can explode on us.
Now obviously there was no incident, there was nothing, but I thought that was particularly powerful.
that that came out in and and it was conversed
About
in a way that said, We're concerned and we want to make sure you're safe.
I had a young man coming to Trinity many years ago.
From South Africa.
Two days before he arrived I got a call from one of the p people in one of the offices here
And she said, Coach, I have to ask you a question. I said, Right.
She said, Is that person white or black?
I said, I don't know.
She's and I said, But why are you asking that question? And she said, Well
There is apartheid there.
And w I don't know what this person's views are gonna be.
about things and how is that going to affect
That person's experience here on campus.
And
You know, it's just
This whole
Continuing
A theme.
That we realize we're more like each other than we are different.
But we need to address both sides of it.
So that everybody comes out of here
Richer and wiser and more
One of the things that I Shane and I know we don't talk about politics on this show, but
Wish
We're so far apart on all of these issues, and in the world of education
We tend to focus on one side.
And we don't seem to offer the other side very much.
And I think we have the obligation to do that.
My father called it the green tree theory.
If you have a tree that's bent to the left and you want the tree to grow straight
You don't tie the tree straight.
You bend it to the right.
And then the tree find the middle.
I think we have to
Share
All perspectives and let the kids make up their own minds.
One of the things that you do that I'm interested in is you call your team captains every morning.
Yeah.
What's behind that? Why do you do that?
What impact does it have?
Two things. One
The captains are sort of the
Telephone line.
Between the team and myself.
And so I need to know what's going on. I need to know how they're thinking, how they're perceiving things.
Particularly as I've gotten older.
You know
Most people in business work with people of varying
Ages and
They go through life
Shifting and changing.
In my world
I'm working with the same age constituency.
All the time.
Yet every day the gap between my age and their age
gets wider.
And so it's very important that I remain relevant and understand where they're coming from.
I don't really care what Taylor Swift is singing.
about tomorrow in Seattle, but I gotta know.
I gotta keep up with that stuff.
And the captains keep me engaged in ways so I hey
Joe's ha having a hard time right now.
All right, great. Let's let's
Figure that out.
Um
I've got to filter what's real and not real and what's important and not important.
But that's that's a factor. The other reason is
As a leader, I have only one obligation to them. Well, I have two. One, I need to make sure they're always safe.
As best I can.
But the other obligation I have to them is
As future leaders in this world
They deserve to know.
What goes into every decision.
I have no expectation that they're gonna like it, agree with it. It's not important to me.
But they need to know why.
Why did we get to here?
And so
As captains, particularly on the track of Ultimate Leadership
I want them always to know this is, you know, I know the team is upset with me, but this is what I was thinking.
And and and I don't know, we may be very different in this way, but I'm sort of like the bug
That scurries along the top of the water.
I probably have short interactions
With dozens and dozens of people in a day.
And I make sure those interactions stay
Brief.
I don't want to go too deep on anyone.
'Cause that's time and I don't have the time.
So I'm making sure people are okay. I'm skimming along. Obviously, if there's a problem, I'll take a deep dive with that person.
But mostly I'm just the surface skimmer.
And I it I
I find I can talk to a lot more people in the course of the day that way.
Yeah, you're just taking the temperature, right? Yeah. There's a if there's a problem you can dive in, but if you don't take the temperature you won't know.
Exactly.
We usually end the podcast with a question that we started, I think it was our second question about what w what is success.
I think we'll end with what do you see as the commonalities or patterns?
That the people
Who a decade after
They're on your team.
End up with the
happiest, most fulfilling, most successful, and I'm using successful broadly.
Life.
Well, in terms of my coaching, um
I have found that
For the players
With whom I shared the most difficult times.
Our relationships are much deeper and richer.
Mm-hmm.
You know, like a marriage.
In the marriage.
What you're doing is you're you're building experiences together.
Birth and deaths and
Fights and illnesses and
It's not all just the the happy vacations that you took.
And it's true here as well. It's we shared some hard times and
And that level of respect that came out of it.
One of the most interesting things so now that I'm retiring.
I make it a point
to reach out to one person a day that I haven't spoken to in a long time.
And just say, Hey, how you doing?
And
One of the things that I have been finding recently is
For the young people that
We struggled.
With
Now that they've had time.
They usually apologize.
And I'm not looking for an apology, but she's coach, I'm sorry I was such a jerk back then or
And I didn't you know, I I always think of it as the Mark Twain quote, you know.
When I was fiftin
I couldn't believe what a fool my father was.
Mm-hmm.
And when I was twenty five, I couldn't believe how much he learned in ten years. Yeah You know, circling back with fellows that, you know.
Why why were you drunk at ten o'clock on a Wednesday morning?
What were you running away from back then and
And they
They have a tendency to
almost be a little sheepish or embarrassed about it. And
And those little light touch calls
It's okay.
I'm not judging you here.
I didn't judge you then.
You know, we're all human.
But we're still in the game together and that's a beautiful thing.
And that I see
is a real gift.
It's touching back and saying, Hey, we're we're cool.
And so
But in terms of answering your question directly, what do I see back then?
Life is hard.
They all
They all go out there and they all get beat up.
Like we all do.
And just being engaged and connected through it.
Um
Just like we were when we were together here.
Is a gift.
And
As I am getting ready to go off into the sunset, so to speak.
I can honestly tell them
I received more than I gave.
And I wanna thank you for that time that we shared.
And you as you get older you'll see the truth in that.
It's a beautiful way to end this conversation, Paul. Thank you so much for taking the time today.
Oh no, the honor was all mine.
And thanks, Shane.
Thanks and learning with us.
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