As someone who has chosen a career that directly impacts the lives and futures of young college athletes, it is imperative that I not only embrace the growth mindset, but that I model it daily and teach it to my college athletes. While I am measured by the success of our team on the field, I also measure myself on my ability to send my athletes off to be successful in their future careers. College athletics is the perfect setting to model and teach the growth mindset, because my student athletes come to us from many different settings, both home and academic, and from many different schools of athletic thought.
As coaches, we will face a season of challenges, learning to work with a new team of co-workers with varying styles, habits and mindsets, as well as facing a season of challengers in the teams we will face. We will begin the year with a team that will come to us from a smaller program, a team that will possibly not provide as much of a challenge. Our athletes will probably feel some successes early on. We will follow that with an away game playing a large Division 1 program in Lubbock. The opportunity for challenge and growth is huge, but embracing a growth mindset here is critical. I see a large part of my job teaching the Growth Mindset for opportunities just like this, helping my athletes embrace the challenge, continue to persist until the final seconds run out, the every bit of their efforts as a path to growth and mastery, learning from the criticisms every athlete gets following any game for missed assignments or missed tackles, and embracing the lessons learned from both a great victory or a hard fought defeat. These are lessons that are not only critical on the football field, but critical for success as an employee, spouse, or parent.
The word “Yet” will be very key to how we approach the season with our kids. As we report Day 1, the formation of the team will not be shaped, yet. Our strengths of our team will not be defined, yet. The weaknesses of our team will not be visible, yet. The only clear thing that will be defined will be our main goal that we have been working on since middle November of 2017. The goal will be simple, it is to be the most successful version of our team we can possibly be, and bettering our athlete’s lives because they were a part of our football program.
In today’s society, like a microwave of wanting success instantly, the ability to have a fixed mindset is very easy. At the first sign of adversity, or the first failure that a person takes in, the fixed mindset is very easy to accept. Our challenge as a coaching staff will be to have the ability to challenge our young men in the program and to be able to identify when the fixed mindset sets in and coach them away from that mindset. The fixed mindset is common and easy for those who are content just to get by. To be able to accomplish where we want to be, we need uncommon people and uncommon mindsets. Hearing the fixed mindset, we need to be able to combat that collectively as a group to move forward to the next step. The fixed mindset does not let you raise the bar. To be uncommon, we must move the bar higher and in step of being an uncommon group of people. When we start this part of the journey, each step of the way is a foundation. Each step of the process that we have built since November of 2017 has been a gradual build on the foundation. We have added new pieces to our puzzle each part along the way and the final pieces to the puzzle arrive as we start the last part of our journey to build this group to be the 2018 Lamar Football Program. Throughout this process, if we listen to the fixed mindset, our foundation to this will be unfinished. There will be bricks missing that are key to being able to maximize our full potential.
In life, everyday you wake up you have a choice. There are 86,000 seconds in a day. From the moment you wake up, there are choices you can and you will make. You have the opportunity to use all of the seconds with in the day to set yourself towards a direction in life. Each choice we make, each direction we choose to use our effort in these seconds with in the day will come with consequences, either positive or negative. In the TEDx video, Lara Boyd explains during her video segment that walking in to listen to her speech “You will not be the same as you were walking out as you were walking in.” This is very comparable to what we will do on a daily basis. Legendary football coach Joe Paterno once said, “Every day you step onto this practice field, you are either getting better or you are getting worse. You will not stay the same”. This is also the same everyday you walk into our facility for the next 5 months until the 2018 Lamar Cardinals story has been written. The way you choose to use these opportunities will not only affect you on a personal level as a player, but it will also affect your teammates. You have accountability to them. It will be my job and our job as coaches to be able to hold our student athletes accountable to make those decisions to help maximize their potential as individuals and members of a team.
Within these decisions there will be a constant struggle to be average. You will hear in your head the fixed mindset, with just being content in doing the bare minimum. Your job will be to challenge that mindset and thought process to fully succeed and maximize the potential to yourself and this organization. “Mediocre people don’t like high achievers and high achievers don’t like mediocre people,” one of my most referenced Nick Saban quotes. The whole outline to our success has been “Being Uncommon”. We will be in a constant battle to be able to attack average, to attack common. When the fixed mindset comes in to be content, it will be vital that we attack that mindset with “One more” or “I haven’t finished ‘yet’”.
To move forward, to use our growth mindset, we will constantly be on the mission to do more. To not use this in a negative way, we will always have the mentality that our opponent is working and that we have to do everything possible to one up them in a daily routine. The part of our process is walking in everyday and not seeing the scoreboard to anything. Life and our life in this team that you are putting in is not about looking at the scoreboard to see who is winning and losing. We will use each day, each moment, each play to treat it like it has a life of its own. Our growth mindset will all be based on short term domination of each little thing that presents itself in front of us. There will be challenges that face us on a daily basis. How we prioritize our opportunities to accomplish these things with a “Do More” attitude will be crucial to be able to be uncommon.
On a daily basis we will meet as a team, as a group, as our football family. In any successful organization, communication is key. To be able to get where we want to be, it is key that we are all speaking and thinking in one common voice and thinking in one common goal. It will be imperative that we keep the word “Yet” at the forefront of what we are doing. In everything we will do as a team and as a family, we must improve and move forward. Identifying what our yet is will be very important early on. We must know that our “Yet” is to the model process of our ability to improve on a day in and day out basis. As stated in the beginning, keeping Yet at the front of what we do is very important to our process of being Uncommon. We have Yet to reach our full potential as an organization.
In 2018 where technology is so crucial and vital to most organizations, corporations and educational atmospheres, we will be no different. In the day to day operation of our organization, we are constantly using technology to better adapt and better engage all aspects of the program. Whether in meetings on a day to day basis by using the film that we watch to better ourselves and prepare for each opponent, I think that it is vital and key to be able to spread motivational messages that are consistent with our message as a group. Sundays come with a video to help keep the message for the week, to prioritize what we will accomplish this week. One word will be the key for what we do during the week. Having a video what echo’s what we do, not only will be able to hold our kids focused for the week, but be able to be a fun way to be able to share along the journey and be able to stay more engaged for our kids. A video such as this is really a way that I am looking to be able to keep the kids engaged and focused on the mission at hand.
Not only does this help us with accomplishing our mission that we have at the point at hand, I think it is also a way we can engage our fans and future prospects that may come into contact and be able to better connect with fans and engage more people to our product. I think it is also very key to have an extra video before we leave the hotel and get to the stadium. Sort of a “get your mind right” type video and get locked into the mission we will have at the current moment.
All of these ways that we incorporate technology into our program is a way to not only keep our kids interested and keep them on task at the mission at hand, but it is also a way to be able to make this journey a little more fun and be able to let them be a little bit loose. It seems that in this life we want to make things business business business twenty four hours a day seven days a week. But it is imperative that we keep the main thing the main thing and remember this is a people organization and using technology to keep the priorities straight, but be able to lighten the mood a little bit will be very important.
I think it will be key to stress the growth mindset, if not on a daily basis then at least two to three times a week. I think it is very easy to be able to sit as a coaching staff each week as we prioritize what we are going to do each week, but be sure that each message we are sending comes from the growth mindset. Whether we have success or failure week to week or day to day, it is important that we don’t waste a feeling, either bad or good. We will not be perfect. There will be room for improvement each day. By using the growth mindset, we can preach the uncommon goals and uncommon people we are looking for on a consistent basis. The growth mindset really reaches towards and strives to the One More type mindset and the uncommon person. The growth mindset should be and will be a daily fundamental in what we do.
Speaking to me individually, using the growth mindset will be an instrumental part in what I do. There is a saying I picked up on a long time ago “If it is to be, It is up to me”. All these words and motivational sayings and ways that we will use the growth mindset are all just words if you are not using them yourself. You have got to be All In in what you’re doing and what you’re saying on a daily basis. Successful companies and successful organizations run at a championship level because everyone in the building runs at one pace and runs with the belief of one common goal. Everyone from the janitor to the CEO, from the ground level to the top story corner office runs with one common goal and is willing to do their job to the best of their ability day in and day out by running with the same goal in mind. Learning the growth mindset, really fit and gave me a why and a new perspective on what I do on a daily basis. In reading Carol Dwecks book, it made me realize that there were different ways to be able to get to what I wanted to get accomplished. I have always been a firm believer in innovating yourself on a daily basis. If you are not constantly innovating what you do, then you are being left behind in whatever area of life you are in. The growth process is as innovative as you can possibly get. It gives you a challenge, it gives you the opportunity to grow and be able to move forward and constantly innovate and challenge what has just been the bare minimum to get by. I think using the growth mindset and striving for everyone in our organization to be able to use the growth mindset and challenge ourselves more and more will be crucial and be very beneficial to our lifeline and our success to not only have our players be more successful on the field, but also be better prepared for life because they were a part of our football program, where they will become better fathers, better husbands and better community members because they were a part of our program. I think that if I use and preach the Growth Mindset on a daily basis, this will help me achieve my goal with reaching our young people day in and day out.
Boyd, L. (2016). Superhuman Brain - After watching this, your brain will not be the same. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfEj4kuhXbk
Dweck, C. S. (2006). Mindset: The new psychology of success. New York: Random House.
Ole Miss Football: Welcome Home (The Grove). (2018). https://vimeo.com/247829394
Peterson, N. (2017). Preparation: Georgia Football. https://vimeo.com/245291363