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: