DISCOVER YOUR NORTH STAR

 

Here is an excerpt from my book WIN THE DAY, published in 2020. A great book to help you use strategies of coaches like Steve Kerr, Phil Jackson, Tara VanDerveer, Pete Carroll and others yet remain true to who YOU are. This is a recent media photo that will be on my next book, Competitive Buddha

Until I understand where I am, I can’t get to where I’m going. This is the value of a compass when we need to know we’re going in the right direction. But we also have an internal North Star...that little nudge that tells us if we are on the right path to fulfilling our potential.
                                                           John C. Maxwell, Author, Leadership, Coaching

For me, that nudge is a set of core values that keeps us on track as a culture. My advice is to pull out the spiritual compass that I present in this book every so often and make sure you are going in the best direction on this journey in sports and life.

My purpose in writing this book is to make a difference in the lives of coaches and athletes, to change the status quo of sports cultures and to offer an ethical, spiritual and emotional compass that can inspire, empower and guide others to believe that their lives can be something other than ordinary. It is a book about caring, core values and connection, of competing and coaching with love in athletics and life. As a philosophical base, I lean on the wisdom, teachings and values of a variety of cultures such as ancient Chinese and Buddhist thought, Native American tradition and Western psychology. For example, Taoist warriors understood that the power of their honorable core values (included in this book) was greater than the power of arms. This is what the Chinese call Wu Shi, or the Warrior spirit, which is about being totally alive to experience your potential for peak capacity using values they considered weapons of the heart. These core values - connection and caring are our non-negotiables. They are our North Star. According to President Barack Obama, “There are gonna be a set of core values that shouldn’t be up for debate. They should be our North Star.” Much in agreement with Obama is CEO of Apple Tim Cook: “Your core values matter. They are your North Star.”

Being a champion is more than simply winning on the scoreboard; it is about winning the bigger, deeper more meaningful lessons of life through the experience of athletics. Basically, coaches and athletes champion what I call a “win the day” attitude by executing the important little things they can control now. It is an attitude that asks and answers the question: what’s important now? Greg Mckeown, in his book, Essentialism, talks about how

WIN is an acronym that stands for “what’s important now?” – the “in the present” experience of the play at hand, rather than obsessing over future results or outcomes. You WIN by staying focused on how you’re competing now and thinking about your game plan, not the opponent’s, and concentrating on what I call the essential absolutes, all those items you can control...your North Star.

WIN THE DAY lays out the essential core values of championship sports cultures. This book is a way to care, connect and help unite others, embrace diversity, have each other’s backs, be selfless and work together for a common cause greater than any ideology or any one individual. It is a book to help build, cultivate and sustain a culture of champions who “win the day” by practicing specific core values that we all crave. It is about rediscovering our North Star or conscious compass in a chaotic world and infusing those values into our nervous systems in order to experience extraordinary performance and a sense of equanimity with right action and a more mindful way of competing and living. “Win the Day” means that coaches and athletes control what they can and let go of outcomes and results. It means to never give up regardless of the score, never be fearful of losing because it’s our greatest teacher, and never let your opponent defeat your spirit, your commitment to winning the day. It is about physical, emotional, spiritual and mental preparation and doing the little important things brilliantly in the present moment rather than the big things marginally in the future. It’s all about “what’s important now” (WIN) in order to win the day.

I combine the body of work I have created with 115 championship cultures in the hope of changing the world of sports as we know it, while inspiring more joy, happiness, fulfillment and success to anyone ready for a change in the status quo. I will make available to the reader practical, easy to implement tools, strategies, exercises and activities that I have successfully used with coaches and athletes in championship cultures for a more caring and connected environment.

For example, to implement the value of selflessness, I tell a story about a professional athlete who gave up his starting role because it was in the best interest of his team. Then I offer this exercise for all athletes to use: Every Monday, group text your team telling them what specifically you will do that will demonstrate a “giving attitude,” a selfless act of kindness. In this way, they take ownership and accept responsibility with a willingness to be held accountable. We discuss this together and make sure all are on the same page in order to win the day.

I also combine this wisdom and experience from my work over the past 30 years with the expertise of twelve nationally acclaimed Hall of Fame head coaches from the professional and collegiate ranks who utilize the core values presented in this book with their championship cultures. Together they have amassed well over 100 national championships in a variety of sports. I have had the honor of working intimately with most of these iconic coaches and their teams as well as having had the opportunity to talk with and/or simply observe the others. A point that should not be lost here is thatthese 12 coach examples I’ve chosen to feature present an interesting mix of personalities and used a variety of practices throughout their careers. Despite their disparate approaches and differences in personality, all of them recognized the significance of team culture and were open to learning about how to create environments that allowed themselves and their athletes to excel. There are other, current successful coaches I’m less familiar with that I refer to in this book who have cultivated and sustained winning cultures such as Dabo Swinney, head football coach of nation champions at Clemson University.