Leadership and Coaching: Baby Don’t You Drive My Car???

What an interesting quote…no idea who said it originally and not sure I’d believe it if someone gave me a name to attribute this to…probably someone like Abe Lincoln or Mark Twain:

“If every car on the road is driving straight at you–you’re in the wrong lane.”

Yeah, there are times in life where you’re right and everyone else is wrong–and if we are honest with each other, that happens once in a blue moon and you KNOW every instance that’s happened in your life.

More realistically, I think it’s more likely that we make mistakes and refuse to change–there has to be something in the brain’s wiring to cause that. Without going too far into politics, consider some examples of this: *Vaccines = bad (really…because they’ve been used going back to George Washington and his Army circa 1777…not to mention the near-eradication of small pox and polio in the 20th century)

*A presidential election was stolen in a conspiracy…by the same president/advisors who are so incompetent they aren’t doing anything right…but they managed to hide hundreds of thousands of ballots.

*Police treat blacks equally to whites. Uh huh. …even in the face of FBI crime statistics because the FBI tampers with its statistics-scraping program.

And yet–people insist on these things in the face of incontrovertible evidence they are dead wrong. Even now, there are people reading this already upset at me for making the political assertions above–that I’ve drunk the Kool-Aid (it was actually Flavor Aid) or I’ve been brainwashed by the ‘MSM’ (short for mainstream media). I guarantee this.

Now–imagine that with coaching. You just gave up match point and lost 14-25 in front of 5,000 people…are you going to claim that that didn’t happen? Will you claim the results are invalid because the R1 didn’t sign the scoresheet? No?

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One of the most important characteristics in leadership is taking responsibility.

HUGE TANGENT IRRELEVANT TO THE POST HERE BUT I THINK IS COOL KNOWLEDGE: I’m going to quote Marine Leadership Principles…but when I was doing some reading yesterday, I found (via the Library of the Marine Corps) that Marine Corps Leadership principles only came into being in 1951. More interesting, they were taken from the U.S. Army’s 14 leadership traits as published in FM 22-100 (until the 1983 edition after which a list of leadership traits is completely removed). JUST AS INTERESTING–Pt #2 is “be tactically and technically proficient”…but in the original Marine text, it was put differently, simply: “KNOW YOUR JOB.”

The 11th Marine Leadership Point is: “Seek responsibility and take responsibility for your actions.”

So here I am–thinking about the twenty billion times where I dug my heels in about 150% wrong and still insisted I was right. How do I get out of that? How do I get on the right path–get stuff right?

*Admit the mistake, take responsibility. It’s never too late to choose the right answer.

*Apologize if needed–because sometimes being wrong hurts other people. The apologies written by lawyers for celebrities are crap. Sincere apologies are different–and my heart tells me that most of those are accepted in the spirit in which they are given. We have a good idea when a person has remorse/means what they say.

*Stop digging! Once you take an untenable position, don’t double down on it.

*Read/research/think–critical thinking is so undervalued in society.

—thinking of this from a VB standpoint…man, oh, man, the number of people who insist, despite the physics, that wrist snap exists; that despite the literature on block vs. random skill deveopment, insisting on completely blocking practices, relying on drills rather than game-like organization. Ugh. I was one of ‘those coaches’…and then saw a bunch of people I value/respect arguing the opposite…so I read, watched, learned. Critical thinking–learn it, love it, live it!

The other area where this comes up is arguing a call. Are you really right? How many times is the official going to change the call or admit an error…and rather than coach the next point–what you CAN still help with–you’re stuck on something that won’t help. [And to be clear–this isn’t me preaching…it’s really about thinking about the times I refused to listen to feedback or was SURE I was right regardless of anything else and that being right was more important than anything else as well.]

This last time around–I have to handle this better.