The Five T's of Great Coaches - Part 5: Grit

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1:02So the fourth T is tenacity. And at one level, you know, there are many close cousins to the word tenacity. People have talked about grit. They've talked about resilience. What exactly is this? The point over here is helping your team build the muscle, mental muscle, to really deal with the highs and lows of sports. Sports has winning and sports has losing. And so it can be an emotional rollercoaster. Part of a coach's job is to keep the players centered. How do you preserve that sense of equilibrium on the team? Now here's the counterintuitive part. Don't get so high on the wins because you're going to have equally lows on losses.

1:49I talked to Pete Carroll actually about an infamous moment in the Super Bowl when there's a little more than two seconds left in the game and Seattle has the ball on the two-yard line of the New England Patriots and they're going to win this game. Everyone thought the game was over, even the New England players. And instead what happens is Russell Wilson decides to pass the ball. That was a called play. Instead of running the ball and it gets intercepted and they lose. And so I asked Pete, I said, what did you do when you went back to the locker room? Because you got all these players and they're calling it on you, saying you called the play.

2:26We lost because of you. So part of what happens in losses is you want someone to blame. Either it's the coach or another player who may have made a mistake. What did Pete do? First thing is he made sure they didn't blame the players involved. There were several players involved who together should have not allowed what happened to happen. He took it. He said, I'm the leader. It's on me. I called the blame. So, deflecting it onto yourself, avoiding that blame to set in, helping people realize and say, look, let's focus not on winning, let's focus on how well we played. We had an amazing season.

3:06We have a lot to feel proud of. Now, it's easier said than done. This is really, really hard. But winning coaches say we're building mental muscle for the long haul. Nick Saban has a 24-hour rule, like where, you know, they win the national championships, and, you know, he's back at work the next day saying, time to plan for next season. What did we learn from last season? And they're like, come on, we need to celebrate some more. It's like, no, onward. So how to build that mental muscle? You know, if you really want to understand tenacity, one place to look at it is the legendary Michael Jordan Nike advertisement, where, what does Michael Jordan say?

3:47he said, I have missed 9 ,000 shots over my career. I've lost almost 300 games. And 26 times I was entrusted to make the game-winning shot, and I missed. I have failed over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed. Keeping that focus, yes, I have lost, but I have succeeded. We've got to give Phil Jackson credit over here to really helping his players put the game in perspective. By putting it in perspective, it doesn't mean becoming indifferent to the game. You want to win. So don't get me wrong. It's easy to take this and say, oh, he was just saying, come out and chill. No, no, it's not about just come and have fun.

4:29It was about saying, come and have fun in a way where you are at your very best self. The competition is not out there. The competition is you. And Jordan said that too. I'm not here to compete with anybody else. I'm here to compete with the best possible self I can be. We're in extremely tumultuous times. We have a pandemic, we have a war, economic uncertainty, technological uncertainty, regulatory uncertainty, supply chain uncertainty, I can go on and on. In these tumultuous times, how do we hold that collective tenacity for our team? You might think that tenacity is all about coping with losing.

5:13That's what people think. I've come to realize tenacity is also about coping with winning. Because what happens to winning teams sometimes, and there's Nobel Prize winning research on loss avoidance, is when you've won, you start to play not to lose instead of playing to win. You're so fearful of losing because you have this reputation and you're the national champions. That's why you see very few back-to-back national champions. Winning organizations get complacent. They get arrogant. They get indifferent. They get lazy. They ignore their customers. They become internally focused. They become siloed and bureaucratic and slow and risk-averse.

5:55And a leader's job is to maintain focus on winning. Tenacity is as much about keeping people's mental equilibrium after winning as much as it is after losing. How do we have that forward-looking mindset in the face of ups and downs that are a natural part of life?