Insight
Assaiante: Emotion is the enemy of performance because it blinds strategic adjustments
“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.”
Insight
Assaiante: Practice should be harder than game day
“I think that's backwards, because you know what? Once you put a scoreboard up there, all of a sudden, it's human nature. It 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 s…”
Insight
Assaiante: Athletes should avoid giving 100 percent effort in daily conditioning
“And 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.”
Insight
Assaiante: Focusing on people drives results, while focusing on scoreboards fails
“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.”
Opinion
Assaiante: Smartphones are the seventh gate to hell for young people
“The cell phone is the seventh gate to hell. There's no question in my mind, because everything is perfect.”
Opinion
Assaiante: Modern youth are less self-critical because they lack personal ownership
“Yeah, no, 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?”
Insight
Assaiante: Educators must share all perspectives so students decide for themselves
“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 finds the middle. I think we have to share all perspectives and let the kids make up their own minds.”
Insight
Assaiante: Directly confronting perceived problems reveals they are harmless
“And so 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.”
Insight
Assaiante: Moving from good to great requires accepting a temporary backward step
“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 want to become, I want to go from good to great, but I'm not willi…”
Insight
Assaiante: True success is knowing when you have enough without stopping effort
“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 continu…”
Insight
Assaiante: Leaders should never coach or teach immediately following an emotional loss
“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 …”
Insight
Assaiante: High-stakes performance cannot exceed the quality of practice
“You cannot perform on game day. You cannot present in the boardroom any better than you can in practice.”
Insight
Assaiante: Athletes must practice their weaknesses but compete strictly to their strengths
“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 going to be more able to get past it. You always want to go out there in competi…”
Insight
Assaiante: Elite performers find joy in daily practice, while others see drudgery
“The great ones have this great capacity for imagination where they can come in and it's fun. It's exciting. They see the value. They see the purpose. For the others, it's drudgery.”
Insight
Assaiante: Leaders must explain the 'why' behind decisions, not seek agreement
“As future leaders in this world, They deserve to know what goes into every decision. I have no expectation that they're going to like it, agree with it. That's not important to me, but they need to know why.”
Insight
Assaiante: Increasing time between thought and action reduces knee-jerk reactions
“We've just doubled the amount of time between thought and action. That's a good thing, alright, 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 tw…”
Disclosure
Assaiante openly tells his athletes that he takes medication for depression
“I am very open with, I share my humanity all the time. You know, I'm medicated on for depression. They know that. I let them know that.”
