The Exchanges

Q 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. I want to 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?

A Yeah, so that's an interesting 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 environments. So I'm going to 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 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 are 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 wit…

AI assessment note: “And so the, the concept is go at the problem.”

Q sort of like, I want to talk about this generation and our relationship to failure, but before we get there, I want to 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 and I'd love to explore that.

A 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 has 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, it's scary. Get away from that person. So I want, I'm going to 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 Is action. So you 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 and action. Ok. 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'…

AI assessment note: “We've just doubled the amount of time between thought and action.”

Q I like that. So you've been coaching for 45 years now. Are you worried about kids today? What are you seeing?

A I am very concerned for this generation of young people, because we as adults 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, and I think one of the most important qualities to success in the human being is resilience, and the 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 hiney, we went, ah, 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 that early. And Again, as parents or coaches or educators or leaders, what just happened? Let's talk about that a little later. Ok. 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 need to recognize 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 p…

AI assessment note: “I am very concerned for this generation of young people”

Q 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 10 to 11 a.m. Yeah. How do you think about competition, doing your best? What goes into that and winning and losing? And talk to me about this in the context of preparation, emotions.

A Well, first of all, 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, is practice. Practice is an opportunity to fail, and failure is the playground of success, and so when you talk to your son, ok, 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 95. You don't learn very m…

AI assessment note: “So to me, everything is preparation. Practice is everything.”

Q 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?

A 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. But to me, that's success where 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 …

AI assessment note: “to me, that's the definition of success is being able to reflect on where you are”

Q But what messages are you saying? What principles are you using? How are you getting across to them? I guess is that.

A Well, I try to do it in a, 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 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 you have to fall on every, every debate. It's really about the human interactions and how you're sharing with them in a 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 otherworldly creature. This guy's as human as they come, and I appreciate his humanity, and I'm going to appreciate yours, and I'm going to treat you with respect, and we're going to 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 Sue and Tom. They're just people. And that's a great transitional und…

AI assessment note: “I try to do it in a, in a way that they don't feel like I'm judging them.”

Q How often do you think what we're worried about is losing something versus gaining something?

A It was interesting. I was 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.

AI assessment note: “mostly we're protecting what we have, where we are.”

Q 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?

A With your, 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, because their inner temperature is way up. These are nice kids, but they're going to 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 learned, 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, 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 the…

AI assessment note: “it's everything. I can't tell you how many fights I've gotten into with players.”

Q 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?

A Well, first of all, I think we procrastinate, especially this generation. This generation will, you know, 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 got to 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, it's fun. It's exciting. They see the value. They see the purpose. For the others, it'…

AI assessment note: “it's that daily consistent discipline and putting it and enjoying it.”

Q fail. I mean, one of the things that I've done is try to put them in jujitsu 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 beyond failure? Just mental toughness to be able to look through Instagram and not get caught up in those moments of other people.

A 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 road sidewalk. So let's clean it up 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 outcome, that's not going to 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 bite off more than we could chew? Or is this just beyond our scope? I, but again, it's talking, talking, talking. It's interesting as a coach, you know, 25% 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, what, what we're, we're in the business of doing now, yo…

AI assessment note: “Celebrate the failures. What just happened? That's amazing. So you just spilled your ice cream”

Q We usually end the podcast with a question that we started. I think it was our second question about what, 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.

A 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. You know, like a marriage. In a marriage, what you're doing is you're, you're building experiences together. Births 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, you know, I didn't, you know, I, I always think of it as the Mark Twain quote. You know, when I was 15, I couldn't believe what a fool my father was. And when I was 25, I couldn't believe how much he learned in 10 years.

AI assessment note: “players with whom I shared the most difficult times, our relationships are much deeper”