FIND A LESSON

We’ve all had competitive moments where we go from only giving half effort to being GAME ON. For Coach Mackey, one such moment was with his oldest son Harrison, when they were playing a video game against each other. The way that they competed with each other while playing the game showed how much they value each other.

When you compete, it shows who you value and how much you value them, based on the way that you do it. When you value someone a lot, you’ll go GAME ON when you compete against or alongside them, no matter where you’re competing and what competition means in that place.

When we place an outsize value on talent, it becomes a convenient excuse for when we lose or fall short of our goals. When the focus is on talent, we lost because how could we possibly compete with the other team’s stats and natural talent? When the focus is on skill, we lost because we weren’t prepared or we didn’t try hard enough or they out-worked us. Either it’s not our responsibility so we can’t do anything about it or it’s fully our responsibility and we can do better next time.

Instead of focusing on talent and abdicating our responsibility, we can focus on cultivating zero talent skills. These are things like preparation, positivity, and coachability—skills you can learn that don’t require any natural ability or athletic talent.

Your opponent is not someone across from you. It’s someone within you. You are your own greatest opponent. This is especially true when we experience performance anxiety. That anxiety steals your potential and that which you can become. It holds you back from being your best.

It’s important to state right now that performance anxiety doesn’t mean you’re a weak-minded person or abnormal. Performance anxiety is a thing that breathing people deal with, so today let’s look at some ways to deal with this performance anxiety so you can win the first fight against yourself.

You’ve got to go pro in your mentality long before you go pro in reality. Otherwise, you might not get to the professional stage at all. Pros have three key things in common. They look for the next great challenge to overcome. They understand the concept of “garbage in, garbage out.” And, they work when it is required, not when they feel like it.

When you go pro in your mind, it allows you to go pro in your body. Go pro is a mentality. It’s a mindset. It’s a mantra. Stop thinking like an amateur and go pro today.

Every morning you have to make the choice to either rise and whine or rise and grind. The morning is going to come whether you like it or not, but how you choose to greet the morning will determine how the rest of your day goes. Rise and whine is all about excuses and complaining–neither of which will get you anywhere. But rise and grind is all about getting up and doing the work anyway, which is the only way to succeed.

The rise and grind mindset doesn’t just apply to the morning, though. When your mindset is rise and grind, that translates to making your whole day better.

It’s easy to get caught up in the potential. When the talent or skill is there, it’s so easy to think the game is in the bag. But as any athlete can tell you, the game isn’t over until it’s over. And as Tiger Woods said, “Until it happens in the game, it hasn’t happened yet.”

Doers do. When you lose, don’t take that as the end. Do something to create another opportunity. Do something to get a different outcome. Potential is nice, but it’s not a guarantee. There is no guarantee at all. You just have to do what you can to the best of your ability. Don’t just bank on your potential to get you to the success you dream of. Get out there and do!

No matter how chaotic life gets, you have the power to stay steady. When you take responsibility for your actions, you take the power away from your circumstances and you give it to yourself.

Life will be like a roller coaster most of the time. There will be great days and horrible days. You will feel awesome and you will feel terrible. Life is chaotic. But when life comes at you, when you are praised, or when you are criticized, do your best to stay steady.

We live in a fast-paced society. Everything and everyone seems to be moving at the speed of electricity. But sometimes that breakneck pace can actually break our necks, or at least, it can break our goals and dreams. Life is too short to run through it like it’s a race. Instead, we need to learn to slow down.

When we slow down, we give ourselves the opportunity to give our best to what’s right in front of us. That doesn’t mean the end goal doesn’t matter to us; it just means that we’re able to be where our feet are. We need to slow down, so we don’t miss receiving something in this moment that will help us reach our goals in a future moment.

If someone asks you to go one mile with them, go two instead. In fact, don’t wait for them to ask. As a servant leader, be willing to go the extra mile for others because of who you are, not who the other person is. But before you can go the extra mile, know that you’ve got to have humility. It is impossible to go the extra mile without being humble.

That’s because humility is giving the best of me for the best of you, even if it costs me.

A servant leader will go the extra mile for others, but he or she is only able to do this with humility. A humble heart is a prerequisite for becoming an extra miler.

Rock solid confidence depends on your mindset. Mindset is how you see the things around you. When you make the choice to see what’s happening around you through the right lens, you will develop confidence that can’t be shaken by the momentary circumstances you encounter. To build rock solid confidence, it helps to know what confidence is and what it isn’t.

Building rock solid confidence means knowing what confidence is, what it isn’t, and how to orient your mindset for maximum confidence, no matter what circumstances come up.

Whether you win or lose is less important than what you do in the aftermath. How well your team plays the game determines whether you win or lose, but how well you accept and respond to a win or loss determines whether you will be successful in future games and in life. Winning well makes you better at losing, and losing well makes you better at winning.

How you deal with a win or a loss directly reflects your growth as a leader and a teammate. Everyone will lose at some point. The questions to ask are: What will you do when you win? What will you do when you lose?

Are you a pretender or a contender? Everybody will say that they are contenders, but what do their actions show? At first glance, pretenders and contenders look the same, but that’s only on the surface. If we look a bit deeper, the differences become clear.

Whether you are a pretender or a contender has nothing to do with your words and everything to do with your actions. If you want to be a contender, follow your integrity, embrace what you can become, and be patient in pursuit of your goals.

One of the most powerful tools that you have at your disposal is a simple phrase. One that, if you let it, could change the course of your life.

“It doesn’t have to be this way.”

There are certainly circumstances that are out of your control. But as we’ve said before, though you may not be able to control every situation, you are in control of how you RESPOND to every situation.

And the reset button isn’t always a one time thing. How many times have you tried and failed at something, only to have to keep attempting it again and again and again?

The reset button is a muscle, just like anything else, and it needs to be exercised just like any other muscle.

It’s not fair.

Why is this happening to me?

These are common thoughts when reality doesn’t meet up with your expectations. Common, but unhelpful. Life isn’t fair. Bad things happen to good people. Everyone makes mistakes.

Even if you do everything right, you may still fail, but you have an opportunity to learn from this event and prepare for similar situations in the future. One method for seizing opportunities like this is the OODA Loop, originally developed by U.S. Air Force Col. John Boyd:

Observe, Orient, Decide, Act

Finishing strong is about more than crossing the finish line. It’s about the grit and determination needed to not only reach the goal, but to blow past it.

You go past the goal instead of to the goal because that’s the only way to maintain your momentum right up to the end. If you start thinking you only have to reach the goal itself, you’ll start slowing down before you get there because the end is in sight.

Choose to finish strong. Don’t try to coast your way to success. Instead, choose to put in the effort, discipline, and intentionality needed to finish strong.

When it comes to competition, the main thing is to win the game. It’s why you fight hard and sacrifice more. It’s why you keep score. At the end of the day, the main thing is to win the game. That doesn’t mean each play doesn’t matter, but it does mean that you can’t let the terrible plays, or the great plays distract you from the main thing.

As long as you major in minor things, it’s going to keep you from achieving the main thing. Minor things only matter so long as they contribute to achieving the main thing. Once they stop moving you forward, they no longer matter.

There’s a difference between hard work and working hard. We can work hard at something we’re good at (like playing a specific position or making a specific shot), but that’s not the same as hard work. Hard work happens when we work hard at things that we aren’t good at—things that don’t come easily. It is through doing that hard work that we grow and become better.

Working hard at things that don’t come easily to us requires courage, humility, and vulnerability.

Hard work and working hard are not the same thing.

Hard work takes working hard at things we aren’t very good at. Over time, we’ll become better at it, and in the process, we grow, learn, and become better.

You have a lot of teams, though you may not think of them that way. Aside from the obvious sports teams, your family, friends, and classmates are also your teams. The type of teammate you are impacts the people around you. So the big question to ask is: What kind of teammate are you? Regardless of what team you are on, there are four answers to this question: content, complicit, committed, compelled. Let’s dive in.

What kind of teammate are you? This questions impacts you as an individual, but it also impacts your team. How you answer this question makes all the difference both on and off the field.

Bad days are guaranteed to happen. What’s not guaranteed, is what you do when it does. The way you respond to a bad day determines your success for that day and the following days. Don’t sit and wallow in self-pity. Instead, choose to view the struggle as an opportunity. Bad days will come. When they do, instead of thinking “It shouldn’t be this way,” think “This is a GROWTH day.”

To change your bad day to growth, focus on shifting your mentality. Remember that you are still learning, but you are still accountable for your actions.

The first five minutes after waking up set the tempo for the rest of your day. It works the same way for the first five minutes of practice, the first five minutes of class or family time or hanging out with your friends. If it’s worth doing, it’s worth bringing the first five mentality to it. That means preparing well, arriving well, and doing your job.

The first five minutes set the tempo, not just of your morning, but of everything you do. Whatever you’re doing, the first five mentality can improve it.

Often unseen and unpraised, nuts and bolts are responsible for holding together a lot of the items that people rely on, such as vehicles, cooking appliances, and indoor plumbing. There are areas of life that are like those nuts and bolts: unseen and unpraised but vitally important. A few of those areas include: being a great follower, seeing the best in others, and knowing how to lose well.

Like the often overlooked nuts and bolts throughout the world, skills like being a great follower, seeing the best in others, and losing well are often unpraised or unnoticed. Still, they are incredibly important for leading a successful life.

The YAC stat in football tells you how many Yards After Contact the receiver made it before going down. The goal isn’t to stop as soon as you get hit; it’s to keep going as far as you can after contact, after the point of resistance. The same applies to your personal goals. There will always be resistance on the path to your goals. That resistance is what helps you to grow; it’s what tells you that you’re going in the right direction.

Resistance isn’t a sign that you should quit. It’s your cue that you need to push even harder to see how far you can go. There are three things that will help you keep pushing after contact: self-discipline, humility, and preparation.

There will always be resistance on the path to your goals. When you make contact with that resistance, the difference between reaching your goal and missing it lies in what you do after contact.

Everyone loves celebrating the big things, but people tend to forget all of the little things that had to happen to make those big things a reality.But, because the focus is so often on celebrating the big things instead of the little victories, we sometimes buy the lie that it’s only important to be successful in the big things.

That if we’re excellent on game day, we don’t have to work as hard in the off-season, or excel in the classroom. It doesn’t work that way, though. How we handle the little things expresses how we’ll handle the bigs things.

If we want to find success on the field or court for the big wins, we need to commit to giving our best at the little things first.

When we refuse to give up at the end of our first wind, a second wind rises up and we discover that we are capable of more than we ever believed. Most people never experience that realization because they are too quick to throw in the towel. But, if we put in the work long enough, hard enough, our perseverance is rewarded. We live in a world that is quick to quit. A lot of people are willing to quit as soon as whatever they are doing becomes inconvenient.

They think it should’ve been easier than it was, so they just walk away. Those people are unsuccessful because they aren’t willing to persevere through their first wind to get to their second wind.

We just have to remember that it’s not always easy to tell when we’ve hit the end of our first wind. The only way to really know, is to keep going.

How we respond when we get called out will tell us more about our future than anything else because if we are unwilling to accept correction, we can’t grow. There are two reactions to correction: we either reject the person’s comments as unnecessary criticism or we accept that the person is offering a potentially valuable alternative perspective.

When we look at advice or criticism objectively instead of personally, we are separating who we are from what we do. And by doing so, we are better able to accept personal responsibility when we really did mess up. If we can’t or aren’t willing to make that distinction, we end up feeling attacked and may lash out at the other person instead of accepting that there may be value in what has been said.

When we get called out, instead of throwing out an excuse or rejecting it as personal criticism, we should view it as an opportunity to learn and grow.

To be a champion, you need both internal and external accountability.

Internal accountability is the standard you set for yourself based on your own integrity. It’s what makes you take ownership for your actions. It pushes you to prepare to the best of you ability and to put forth your best effort. It drives your commitment to your goals.

You have to hold yourself to your own highest standards. Nobody can do that for you. Without internal accountability, you’re more likely to make excuses for why you lost a game or didn’t finish the assignment that was due today. You’ll be less likely to own up to your mistakes, and if you don’t own your mistakes, they will start to own you.

When hard times come, the most important question you can ask yourself is a simple one: So what?

Not “So what? I don’t care…your pain doesn’t matter,” but “So what am I going to do about it? Something has to be done, so what am I going to do about it?”

Consider this: when you focus on things you can’t control, it negatively influences the story that you tell about yourself. And the story you tell about yourself, determines the choices you make.

But when you focus on what you can control, it positively influences your story. Rather than a woe is me story, you start to tell a story that sounds like, “I can’t control what happened to me, but I can control what I do with what happened to me.”

This week, and every other, let’s commit to steady, consistent, incremental growth. To the Plus One.

Successful people are always OK with, and made better by, the uncomfortable. The friction of discomfort moves them forward. That’s because they understand that perseverance in trial develops character, and that character leads to a competitive advantage.

When we do something new, seemingly impossible, or hard, we receive a make-you-better-gift! If we can learn to be comfortable in the uncomfortable, then we can learn the power of delayed gratification– saying no to comfort today, to receive greater reward tomorrow. Our lives will be changed, and we will have the power to take on whatever comes our way.

Make no mistake, life will be uncomfortable. Grit helps us get through. By choosing to do the difficult and hard things, we become better. GET UNCOMFORTABLE!

We live in a world that is obsessed with proclaiming all that they’re going to do. What they want to do. Our world loves the “gonna” and the “wanna.” They talk non stop about their goals, so much so that they begin to be praised for it because they talk about it so much that people believe they’re getting something done.

You see thunder in the weight room. People who show up so they can post that they were there. People who spend more time trying to get the right angle for their selfie than they do actually working out.

But as it turns out, that old Chinese proverb is true: “Mere talk does not cook rice.”

When you’re willing to do the work no matter the praise, you’re suddenly qualified to do the work.

Total effort requires totality.

There are a lot of things, when it comes to finding success in the game of life, that are optional. Whatever you might find on that exhaustive list, the one thing you will not find is sacrifice. Sacrifice is required for reaching your goals as an individual and as a team. As challenging as this concept is, it is worth every painful moment. When you learn how to use sacrifice to your advantage, you unlock a door to success that few people are ever willing to walk through. The reality of sports and of the game of life, however, is that if you don’t sacrifice for your goals, then you will sacrifice your goals.