Holistic Athlete Weekly Newsletter

Lead with Your Strengths

When a coach starts with a team, or a player becomes a captain, they may ask themselves: ‘what does this team need?’ or ‘how can I get the best out of this group?’ While those are worthwhile questions to explore, we often miss an important step. Since people in leadership positions aren’t installed there randomly, (typically hired, selected, or voted to the position), it’s important to identify who you are as a person authentically, what your strengths are, what your pitfalls are, and how you can utilize your skillset, mindset, and values to help the team simply by being yourself.

There’s roughly 1 trillion books on leadership that define what it means in 1 trillion different ways, provides all sorts of suggestions and tips with no context of who you are as a person/leader, who you’re leading, what your group’s goals are, what resources you have, etc. It’s sort of like reading a book about how to be healthy that suggests doing pushups every day — but the book doesn’t know that you just had shoulder surgery. Leadership is not a one-size-fits-all skill and approaches have to be flexible based on the endless variables of the situation.

The right place to start is with self-reflection and an honest identification of your strengths and weaknesses. When a coach or captain is interviewing or hired, I start with a self-evaluation where I give them a sheet like this:

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I ask them to cross off 5 words that don’t describe them. That’s fairly easy. Not everyone is all of these things. Then cross off another 5. Another. Another. Now it starts to get difficult. They might think “I want to say I’m responsible, but is that the best way to describe me?” The process can be difficult and uncomfortable as they narrow it down to a top 10. A top 5. A top 3.

Once we finish the process of identifying 3 positive character traits that best describes them, I give them a sheet like this, and follow the same process.

This is an arduous process of self reflection. The goal is for the participant to go through positive and negative characteristics and come up with a top 3 of each that they believe best describes them (not who they want to be, who they are).

The debrief of the activity is that regardless what the books, reddit, movies, TV shows, and advice you’ve gotten externally — identify who are you authentically and lead with your strengths. If the three characteristics they identified on the first sheet were honest, approachable, and diligent, I challenge them to approach any and all circumstances and challenges with a commitment to telling uncomfortable truths, welcoming of conversations and conflict, and to work meticulously and passionately — in line with their self-identified best traits. Being who you are consistently will always yield better results than trying to adapt who you are to what you think every situation requires of you. For the characteristics identified on the second page, we can now be aware of our blind-spots, our vulnerabilities, and to remember our tendencies to fall into those traits under duress.

I encourage coaches to do this activity for themselves, with their staffs, and with their captains.

Being Stoic without Suppressing Emotions

When we think of great performers, they’re often ones who execute under pressure, control their emotions, and are unflappable in the face of pressure. We may categorize them as “stoic.” This article discusses the differences between actual stoicism and its benefits, and a misconception about stoicism — the need to “suck it up” to suppress feelings. The researcher utilized a test to track people’s ability to be stoic and its results. People who scored highly reported greater life satisfaction, stronger resilience, and lower levels of anger and anxiety. By contrast, those who scored highly of “stiff-upper-lip-stoicism” (suppression), did worse in all areas.

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