Bet on You — How to Make Every Decision THE RIGHT CALL — Sally Jenkins

Are you thinking about how to grow your business with near and offshore staffing, but you're also wanting to make sure that it's reliable, cost effective and really well done. I think docsa talent is the way to go. Here's why. They don't just fill your jobs. They bring integrity, top talent and a people first approach that's hard to find. I've known the people at Doxa talent for over 20 years now and I say that you can count on them. I have. Talk to Docs of Talent and you won't be disappointed. Go to docsatant.com Bill G. Again, that's doxatant.com Bill G. One more time. Doxatalent.com Bill G. Check it out today. Oh yeah, there we are live once again. We're talking about Making the Right Call. The Right call. What can we learn from the world of sports about making the right call? Everyone. I'm Bill Gallagher, your host, Scaling Coach, host of this Scaling Up Business podcast. And our show comes here every week with something to do with leveling up your business and your leadership. So all the things that you might want to know, lessons, examples, stories, messages from other coaches we recently had burn harnish on like all that. So all the shows and more wherever you're getting this right now, YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, Spotify, Apple podcasts, wherever it is like it, subscribe, you know what to do. Turn on your notifications if you don't want to miss an episode. But we love to to bring a show, at least one show every week. You'll find all our back catalog as well as information about our programs, our public workshops, our coaching offerings, all that and more@scalingcoach.com ScalingCoach.com is where you'll find all the groovy stuff that we have and in all these years of working with clients all over the world in growing their businesses. So if we can help you go there. So I'm joined now by Sally Jenkins. Sally Sally's an all around badass woman in the world of in particular in sports journalism. But she's a Washington Post columnist, she's been a featured writer. She's got a new book out the Right Call that we're talking about today. But she's written other New York Times bestsellers like Sum it up written with Pat Summitt, and she's going to share some of those stories with us. But she's been featured in Smithsonian, gq, Golf Digest, ESPN Tennis Magazine. She's in the National Sportscasters and Sports Writers hall of Fame and she follows her father in her father's footsteps in that regard. So welcome to the show, Sally.

Thank you for having me.

Really glad to have you on. So you. Oh, why is that? Music's coming back around. We can't get enough of our music.

The theme song.

The theme song. I'll kill that. So you're in a hotel today, right. And I'm in a temporary studio. Our. Our viewers and listeners may be used to hearing, seeing us in a little bit different place. I'm in a different place for the next few months. And you're somewhere. Where are you today?

Today I'm in Columbus, Ohio.

I'm sorry.

No, Columbus is cool.

I'm joking. I'm joking.

Ohio State University is here. And so I'm.

I'm up in Seattle for a few months. So tell us a little bit more about it sounds like you followed your dad, but why did you come to the world of being a writer, in particular in following sports and share a little bit, maybe add some color to the things I shared.

My father was a sports writer for Sports Illustrated magazine for well over 20 years. And in the summertime I got hauled along with him to various golf tournaments and other assignments. And basically it was osmosis, you know, it was what my father did every weekend and I was sort of tagging along and so I picked it up naturally the way a lot of people pick up their parents profession and you know, some kids of actors become actors themselves and some children of writers become writers themselves. And so it was what I knew best, to be quite honest. You know, I've been at sports events literally since I was, you know, six years old. And if you want to write, they say write what you know. And that's what I knew best.

It's so funny. I think many of us, we follow in our parents footsteps directly or sometimes indirectly. We think we're off doing our own thing and then we wake up and realize, oh, look at what I do for a living.

And some of those things start flying out of your mouth that, you know, when you were a kid you rolled your eyes and now you hear yourself saying the notes coming out of your own mouth. My father really made it look like a very glamorous life. I mean, to me, growing up being a sportswriter meant you got to go to Europe. It meant that you got to go, you know, all kinds of places, you got to travel and stay in hotel rooms and other people picked up the tab for that and you got to go to the world's greatest sports events. And sit in one of the best seats in the house. And that's why I wanted to write the right call, because it's been a very privileged seat to watch how people make decisions under pressure in real time on athletic fields. And most deciders in your world, they sit in hermetically sealed offices. And we don't really watch them work, we read about them. Like a Bob Iger might tell you a little bit later some of his process that he went through in trying to make a decision. But we don't really get to study, really studied leaders live in real time, but we do on the sports field. And it's an opportunity. And so I wanted to just put together, you know, all of the things I've seen and see if there were commonalities and a thread that you could follow as far as effective decision making. And the answer is yes, you do find commonalities, whether you're talking about a big wave surfer like Laird Hamilton, or whether you're talking about a Pat Summit as a basketball coach or a Mike Krzyzewski or an Andy Reid in the NFL, you know, or Diana Nyad, you know, trying to swim from Cuba to Florida, all those people follow some common methodology. And I just wanted to put that down on paper for people.

You know, it's interesting. Our clients over the years come from so many, like every walk of life in every level of education and that kind of thing. But if I look at some of the really great clients who have the rigor, who scale well, they have great athletic backgrounds in their upbringing and often some team sports. So a little more structure, I have, you know, background more in like, things like surfing and that kind of thing that are not team sports. A little bit of team sport background, but very, but not a whole lot. And I, I find that it definitely impacts that the, the ones definitely have an advantage in understanding the team dynamics and the communication, the give and take with a range of people and not losing their cool over something like that. And they also are focused on bringing out, like realizing people who are currently not performing could perform at a higher level with some support, maybe a change in role, some coaching, things like that. And then there's that personal rigor that runs through all of it. And I know you're going to talk to us, you're going to share some examples of that in a minute talk. I love to feature the stories most of all because I think we, they, they learn things from them. So you can start with any of them. I know we, we identified a bunch in preparation, but what's your favorite?

Well, I mean, I think what you're talking about is method. You know, one of the things that all athletes and coaches have is, is at least some sense of organizational method. And a lot of us drift through our days, right? We're not always that conscious of making the best plan for ourselves. That's one of the things Tom Brady observes in the book is athletes don't drift and successful coaches don't drift. And even a Laird Hamilton in the water doesn't drift. A surfer, a great world class surfer does not drift. Okay? Right. They. They're making decisions. And one of the first things I would say, even if you watch a, you know, a Steph Curry or a LeBron James, those people are making micro decisions every single second. And those micro decisions are based on a lot of methods. One of my favorite stories that's in the book comes from Peyton Manning. And Peyton Manning told me that when he was with the Indianapolis Colts, Tony Dungy about once a week would spray all the footballs with a garden hose and make Peyton Manning and his senator, Jeff Saturday practice with wet footballs. And Jeff Saturday said to Peyton Manning at one point, he's like, you know, this is really stupid. We play in a dome, for God's sake. Like, why are we practicing with wet footballs? And, you know, Manning kind of rolled his eyes and said, well, you know, I don't know, Jeff, maybe there could be a leak in the roof someday. Well, they go to the super bowl in Miami, and there's a historically unusual rainstorm on the day of the Super Bowl. And Manning wakes up that morning and opens his hotel curtains and sees it's a monsoon outside. And he realized, this is why we've been practicing with the wet footballs. And basically that day, Manning and Saturday managed to run their entire offense without fumbling the football. The Chicago Bears, their opponents fumble twice and it's in the game. And, you know, so that's an instance of. Manning was very big on understanding that preparation diffuses pressure. And what Manning says in the book is, pressure is what happens when you don't know what the hell to do. And the fact that he knew that day when he saw the weather outside, he felt comfortable that him and Jeff Saturday were going to be able to run their offense without worrying about mishandling the football. Really gave them an edge in the game.

You know, there's so many good things about that that come to mind. But immediately I think about with our CEOs is preparing for maybe something even worse or different than you are expecting. And I've done a number of times where I'll, I'll invite a CEO or some other leader in, in the company to role play with me, right? And then I'll play their counterpart or whoever they have to negotiate with or pitch or whatever, but I'll play it like, in the very worst way possible. Like, whatever you're worried about, like, I'll just be that, you know, again and again and again until you're so loose with it. Like, and then of course, you get in the day and it's, it's a whole different thing. Right. And, and presidential candidates do that kind of work when they, when they prepare to debate someone. Right. They have somebody play their, their opponents and play them in an obnoxious fashion. Right.

Well, I, you know, I think this is a big point in the book also. Most people don't practice in the conditions they're going to be asked to actually perform in. And that's one thing that elite athletes and elite coaches understand. And again, that's why Tony Dungy was throwing wet footballs at them, because it's an eventuality that could happen. And, you know, golf is a perfect example. Okay, how many of us go to the driving range and we beat balls into the distance? You know, if you play golf or you play tennis, you get a tennis lesson and the coach is just pitching tennis balls at you and you're not really practicing in the conditions you're going to encounter on the golf course. There's never a level lie on a golf course, is there? You know, there's just that the driving range is not real good preparation for what you're actually going to have to do. So a lot of us, you know, if you're preparing for a meeting, you know, we spend a lot of time maybe memorizing, you know, thinking about the points we want to get across. But what we're not doing is thinking about how we're going to feel when we don't have much time, make a presentation. So we should put ourselves on the clock more. You know, the kind of thing you're saying we should practice in more adverse conditions in general for what we do every day.

Well, the other thing there is just practice, practice, practice, right? Practice this way, practice that way, practice a whole bunch of different ways, right? Keep like, vary at the stress things. That makes a massive difference.

A massive difference. And you know, there are, I think there are instances in sports that you can watch where you understand that, you know, athletes practice deliberately in a way that the rest of us do not. Most of us like, if you play guitar, you practice guitar until you're pretty good, but you're not going. To the extent that great athletes and coaches are going, they actually begin what's called deliberate practice, which there's been a lot of social science about. And deliberate practice is a much more refined practice. There's a lot of criticism involved and a lot of critique from outside expert eyes. And so Steph Curry for the Golden State warriors spends a lot of time working on his non dominant hand, for instance, on his left foot. Very small incremental improvements that I describe in the book that athletes. Tom Brady put seven more RPMs on the ball at the end of his career. He was a much more accurate quarterback at the very end of his career than he was on the front end of his career. And his throwing coach, Tom House told me Brady was willing to work for the 1 or 2%. The rest of us are looking for big percentages, magic bullets. We don't understand as well as we could the incremental improvement, you know, 1 to 2% over several years, that's a 10% improvement. That becomes a big number. But it takes some years of incremental improvement to get there, which Tom Brady was willing to do to an almost obsessive degree. He would go to Tom House in every off season and literally go over frame by frame pictures of his throwing motion. He was so meticulous about his throwing dynamics and throwing a clean football with a clean motion. And so that's something that the rest of us, we're not lazy, but we're not as well informed about our practice habits as we could be. We don't examine them as closely as athletes do. And the big question with athletes, athletics in general is what is exportable? You know, what can we really import from people like Tom Brady and Peyton Manning that's useful for us? And that is one thing. You know, there's a lot we can't imitate in them, but there's a good deal more than we think that we could.

Well, right, I don't need to, you know, perfect my throwing mechanics because I don't ever really throw a ball. But.

Right, but there are other things.

But the notion about preparation, about rigor, about rest and recovery, about using a coach, all of those things I think are so, so useful that, that like I, I was talking with a friend recently who was getting ready to, was developing and going to start delivering a new workshop and I'm like, they were asking how to prepare and that kind of thing. And I Talked about all the different components and then what to go through. And I said, you know, one of my favorite things to do is learn from acting is mirror work. So you got a new thing, you're going to give. Give it to yourself in the mirror like 10 or more times, and it'll seem tedious and repetitive and irritating, but at some point in the process, you want to get good at connecting with the other human being in the mirror. Like being able to deliver your lines with intention, with clarity, with connection and humanity. Right. Like, that's really, really powerful. And at some point, you may have a fairly emotional moment in something like that. But like that, like, get that. Especially the key parts of something. Right?

Right. Well, we don't really. We don't really practice talking in front of crowds, do we? Or talking in groups. You know, we. You know, mirror work is great, but at a certain point, other people are your mirror. Right. And all of a sudden you're in front of a group and you're speaking, you can sense what you're getting back from them. And coaches, what's really interesting, if you.

Have the bandwidth to pay attention to them versus be in your own head. How am I doing? Did I get that right? What am I supposed to say next? Right. That's when you go off and people will say, well, I'm not present. Right. Is a way of saying that that means you're somewhere up here in your head. I'm pointing my head, and you're not actually out connecting to that person.

Yeah. And there's a great. Steve Kerr, the Golden State warriors coach, has a great drill. It's called the Silent 10, and it's based on the fact that communication is more than just speaking. Right. And so what he has is he has the warriors go through 10 minutes of up and down drilling on the floor without saying a word. They have to make eye contact and they have to read body language and they have to run all of their stuff, all of their sets without saying anything, with hand signals, eye contact and reading each other's bodies. It's a great.

A huge amount of communication is not verbal and is subtle and nuanced. There's eye expressions and mouth and body posture. But I also think there's a danger in something like that of being too certain. Like, oh, when somebody crosses their arm, like you'll see in business communication skills training. So people like, well, if you're across your arms, you're not open. It could be. Or it could be your back hurts. And you can have an expression because you've got some health condition or you're exhausted. So you can't just read it in a surface fashion. But the same is true of our words. Right? Somebody says, I'm fine. And I don't know if you've ever been in a long relationship when, when somebody tells you they're fine, it usually means the exact opposite.

That's right, yeah. You know, Steve Kerr is a really interesting guy to study about this because his body language and his demeanor is so sort of laid back. I mean, he. He has a. Habitually, he has a listener's pose. I like to say he's not. The first thing Steve Kerr did when he took over the Golden State warriors in 2014 was not say, I'm going to teach you guys how to win a championship. And the fact is that he had more championship rings than anyone in the room who'd never won a single championship. But what Kerr really laid back, and he said, you know, I'm just here to help you guys take the next step. And the first thing that he did after that was he went and visited each one of them individually at home, including Australian Andrew Bogut. And Kerr flew all the way around the world to have one night of dinner with Andrew Bogut, and then turned around and flew back to California. And basically that was a statement that said, you know, the players come first in this organization. I'm willing to inconvenience myself to communicate with our player who lives in Australia. He made a lot of very early statements that were, I think, listener like statements. You know, I'm here to listen. I'm here to do what you guys want to do together, not to impose on you what I want to do or what I think is going to get us there. And one of the things I think Steve Kerr would say is that real leadership is about collectively taking people where they want to go together. That's real leadership. It's not leading from in front. It's asking people, what do you guys want to do together? And I've seen more coaches. John Harbaugh of the Baltimore Ravens said that very thing on the sideline last year in the last minute of a very tight game. And they had a choice whether to kick an extra point or go for the two point conversion. And. And Harbaugh calls the Baltimore Ravens together, and he's mic'd up and you can hear him say, guys, what do you want to do? What do you want to do here? Do you. Do we take the point and play for the tie, or do you want to go for the two, you know, and when the team decides, I mean, leaders essentially enable success. They don't create success. They enable the conditions that allow other people. In my line of work, that's what a great coach really does. He enables people who are already self selected hard workers to then put it all, all the pieces together.

You know, it's, it's funny you said that leaders don't produce anything so much, but they enable things. And one of our past speakers, General Stanley McChrystal, said, you know, a farmer doesn't grow anything. Yeah, farmer creates conditions for growth. Plants do the growing.

Yeah.

And it's a good reminder, right. As a, as leaders, many of the people that we work with, they started something with their speaking generally. They said, hey, I want to do something like this. And people gave them money or gave them orders or like that. And then other people joined their team. They said, work with me, follow me, we're going to go here. But at some point you really start to level up your leadership when you aren't leading always from the front. And there's value in taking the first step and in being out there, but then there's also something really in creating the whole conditions for a whole team, for eventually a movement to rise up. I think about some of the coolest things I've done and they got way, way bigger than me and, and the people that I've coached the same thing. They created things that got way bigger than them. They couldn't possibly lead from the front on all of those things.

Well, I mean, and the practical fact of the matter is that organizations are too complicated for one person to, you know, they have lots of moving, moving pieces. Particularly an NFL team has 53 players, you know, 16 opponents. You know, it's played outdoors quite frequently. So there's wind and rain and, you know, leaders. I think there's some things they can't affect. You know, there's some, there's a lot of factors that are simply beyond your control, including the level of competition that you're facing sometimes. And so.

Yeah, you don't know who you're up against.

Yeah, exactly. Sometimes people are simply better, you know, faster and so what a leader. I think the good temperate leaders that have real longevity understand the controllables versus the uncontrollables. As Steve Kerr, you know, was very eloquent in the book, talking about the fact that the right call in some ways is too simplistic a phrase for a process that's really very gray, can be very gray. You can make a great call And a guy simply misses the shot or Steve Kerr said, I can really butcher the call. And Steph Curry bails me out by making three straight threes at the end of the game, you know, and so it's very, very gray area for coaches under the fire sometimes to define exactly what they, you know, what they decided correctly and where a great performer simply bailed them out.

Yeah. So we're talking a lot about team sports and competitive sports where players are facing off against each other directly. You also have some examples in from this, some of the kinds of sports that I've done more of. Laird Hamilton and Diana Nyad talk about some of those individual performers and, and what you learned from them. Maybe start with Laird.

Yeah, yeah. Laird Hamilton might be the most fascinating athlete I've ever talked to. He's, he's, he's very eloquent about subjects like fear and risk. And one of the things that Laird really explains in the book is that your body doesn't know what's stressing it really. Your body doesn't know whether you're having anxiety because you're in the ocean with a really big wave coming at you, or if you're having anxiety because your 16 year old daughter left with the car keys three hours ago and hasn't come home yet. Your body doesn't necessarily distinguish between those two things. Laird is very clear that you can actually train for stress. You can conduct condition yourself to behave better under stresses and you can do it with things like heat and ice. One of the most interesting things that Laird does is he trains himself to deal with his physiological reactions to stress with ice baths and saunas. Because neurologically your body is responding in the same way that it's going to respond when you're stressed. And so Laird actually trains a lot of different types of performers with coping with neurological stresses, from NBA players to Hollywood producers out of his home in Malibu. And I think that Laird's wisdom about fear is something that anybody can borrow from. I mean, one of the things Laird says in the book is that it's not the high performers who have the most to learn from exploring dealing with fear better. It's really the rest of us who have so much room for growth in that area. We spend a lot of time seeking comfort. And comfort is not the only thing worth seeking is what Laird would say.

I love, love, love that. Right. Like there's a time when you want to sit on the couch, when you want to do something nice, when you want to have a glass of wine, when you want to seek some comfort. Go take care of yourself. Get a massage, have a good night's sleep, right? Get the best mattress you can get. Like, you know, there's plenty of room for comfort. But if all we lived was, like, coddled and comfort, like, on the couch, then you just die of a heart attack, right?

Right.

When your fat body finally gave out. But, but like, going into something like exposing yourself to cold water, super empowering. I. I swam for quite a bit in the San Francisco Bay and, and have done the swim from Alcatraz a whole bunch of times. And, and I remember very well the first time I went in, my feet were icy. And then, though, as I waited deeper, the water got up. Finally it hit my, My. My genitals. Like, what am I. What am I going to say, right? And that was like, whoa, that's cold. And then I'm like, oh, my God. And then. So now I'm tensing my body, and then finally I immerse fully, and then eventually I stick my face in. But when you stick your face in cold water, in particular, you hold your breath, right? And you can't really swim well if you're holding your breath, right. You need to pause and breathe. So forcing yourself to accept the cold and breathe again is like. Is a big, like, reflexive kind of thing to train, to get used to, right? And. And then that translates because after a while, then now I'm. I'm just driving across the Bay Bridge in a very comfortable car, and I look down at the water and I know I have swum out there in the middle of everything with jellyfish and all kinds of crap, and who knows, you know, there are definitely sharks out there. I haven't seen one, but. But. So you're out there, and sometimes I can't see anything because there's fog come in and that kind of thing. But then you know yourself as that person. And then you go to a meeting with a banker, and you're. You have some steely resolve because you're like, yeah, I was swimming out there. I know that's who I am. And I can deal with this conversation. Right? Sometimes that adapting to that stress gives you some personal power.

So Jimmy Johnson, the race car driver, you know, makes a really fascinating point. This actually doesn't wind up in the book, although I talked to him for it. But Jimmy Johnson said, look, you know, you have to condition yourself to speed. Like, if you're used to driving 60 miles an hour and you get in an indy car going 200 miles an hour, your synapses won't be able to cope. Right. And so it's important to subject yourself to a certain amount of conditioning for stressful situations, because as one of the neurologists that I quote in the book says, stress is nature's way of helping us rise to a moment that matters. Okay. And so it's not just that you'll be coddling yourself and you won't have much of a sense of accomplishment. Your body releases chains of incredibly helpful chemicals to help you deal with it, sharpens your senses, it makes you more acute, more focused, all of these things. And so what a Laird Hamilton would say is we're meant to experience a certain amount of stress and a certain amount of fear and a certain amount of anxiety because it's nature's way of training us into resilience, and it's nature's way of helping us make decisions under pressure, learn how to make better decisions under pressure, manage ourselves.

Yeah, it's outstanding kinds of thinking. Like you could take stuff from one realm and then apply it to a whole other. And you'll see those benefits show up later when you need to do something and in ways that I think are hard to predict. Right. Being a dad or a mom, like taking care of a child, taking care of a sick person for a period of time. Then you go put yourself in a business situation or something else, and you'll be surprised that you didn't develop some capacities and some character in that moment that are so, so useful.

Yes. And like, one example that Laird Hamilton gives in the book is he says, you know, my body doesn't know whether I'm anxious because I'm in the ocean in some dicey wave conditions, or whether I'm standing in a room talking to a bunch of business people who don't respect a surfer. Again, your body doesn't necessarily know to differentiate. And so Laird's experiences in the water have helped him certainly cope with becoming a businessman, becoming an entrepreneur, sticking to stand up paddleboard surfing when everyone in the world was laughing at him and saying, oh, that's, that's a ridiculous endeavor. And now there's hundreds of millions of those things around the world. Another example I'm working on right now, a story about Martina Nevradilova and Chris Everett have both been dealing with cancer in the last year. I've talked to both of them about it, and I said, did being number one in the world help you deal with cancer? And they Both answered, Absolutely, 100%, because of all the things we've been talking about. Method or an organization that you learn in athletics, but also understanding setback and reversal and that, you know, you don't win outright. Each and every situation, you lose points for setbacks.

Yeah. And, you know, inevitably you're going to feel sorry for yourself in dealing with anything. Right. But how much time you spend there in that mental space, in that psychological space is really up to you. And I think you see leaders from the sports world move through things like embrace defeat, suck it up. You can tell that they're suffering in a moment after a bad loss or a screw up of some kind. You can tell them feel it. But then they show up a week or two later and. And they've sorted themselves out. Right. They've moved through it.

Right. And they sort themselves out in more systematic ways than the rest of us. Sometimes they understand how to deal with failure partly because athletes understand that failure is an essential precondition for winning anything.

We'll talk about Diana Nyad then.

Yeah. So Diana Nyad failed in three previous attempts to swim from Cuba to Florida, which is one of the most dangerous swims in the world, for a lot of reasons. In fact, no one had ever been able to complete it without a shark cage. First, she got blown so badly off course by the weather that she ended up swimming towards Brownsville, Texas, rather than Key West, Florida. And she came back in her 60s to try it again because she was very aggravated by the notion of premature people. We tend to prematurely age athletes. We prematurely age. All of. We're very ageist in our, I think, approaches to, you know, physical wherewithal. I mean, everybody wanted to force Tom Brady into retirement years before. I mean, he still has a lot left in his arm, frankly. So Diana was partly aggravated. She wanted to show that a woman in her 60s could do this. But, you know, the realm of problems that had to be overcome logistically in that swim, from box jellyfish that stung her in the face in the back, to currents that would blow her off course to storms in the middle of the night, to literally having to have a shark patrol circle her in kayaks to ward off sharks. I mean, the range of problems that she overcame was truly monumental. And she couldn't have done it if she wasn't reconciled to the fact that failure was at least a significant possibility, if not probability. You know, it was the endeavor for its own sake that really interested her the most. And her swim director, Bonnie Stahl, who was a close friend of hers, by the fourth attempt was really afraid. Diana was kind of crazy and tried to argue her out of going for it one more time because as Bonnie put it, she didn't want Diana to look like the crazy cat lady, you.

Know, and she often does. Right?

Yeah. You know, she was just beginning. The whole thing was beginning to look pretty nutty. Right. So she said, you know, Diana, like what if you, what if you don't make it this time? And Nyad just looked at her and said so, you know, she was willing to put up with it. And so athletes are a bit like engineers or entrepreneurs in the sense that they understand that stressing something is the only way to improve it. Right, yeah.

You know, the other thing. So I watched the documentary of her swimsuit and I was struck by. It's so miserable through so much of it. I mean the point of that exhaustion, the exposure to salt water for that period of time, the jellyfish stings, the night swimming, just the massive range of conditions and she's sobbing and she's exhausted and she's like, okay, I'm going to keep swimming.

Well, you'll understand this better than anyone because you're a cold water swimmer. Athletes have a central perception or insight that any of us can borrow from any of us, which is the worth of an activity is not how it feels while you're doing it, it's how it feels. Athletes focus on how they're going to feel when they're finished. Right. And any of us can make that essential mindset shift. And it's a critical one. Dana Cavaleo, who's the performance coach for the New York Yankees was very eloquent about this and he basically said, look, you know, most of us like eat the donut and then feel bad, like it tastes great while you're eating the donut and then afterwards you just feel terrible about it. You feel terrible about yourself. It doesn't make you feel great, doesn't.

Certainly doesn't help you almost any addiction. Right. It's kind of like that.

Or even just any sort of short term cave. Right. You cave into an urge. I mean there's a mountain of literature and you may be familiar with some of it that shows that what they call delayed reward gratification makes for better decision makers.

Yes.

People who can hold off on that instant gratification tend to save more money, tend to make better business and banking decisions. You know, again, a wealth of literature that, that shows that you can learn and not only that, but that you can train that habit into yourself and that it acquires. Athletes are eloquent at describing this too. There is a kind of A something almost like compounding interest. When you can build a good habit, it makes it easier to do the next time and then the next time and then the next time and you become more disciplined and a bit more habitual in everything you do across the board. And so good habits and delayed reward. Tom Brady is willing to work two or three years for the 1 to 2%. That really does compound over time. And that is one thing we can all take from them is that mindset. Don't focus on how it feels right now in the moment.

Focus on how you're playing, the gratification, thinking about the end result. I think there's, there's something though to be enjoyed. Like when I have any time I've done a longer base, actually any base swim or other place, I'll pause in the middle. Now if you're in a race, you might not pause, but, but any other time I'll roll over on my back, I'll stop a minute, I'll look around, I'll take in the scene and I'll think about like, what is this thing? The same thing. True. Like running. Right. The first 30 minutes of running for me are always pretty miserable. But then I start to get the endorphins. I start to feel kind of good. And then after a while I kind of feel like in a couple hours in, I generally don't want to stop and I'm like, this feels really good. And I'm just, I'm kind of in a rhythm here and look at where I am and oh, I'm coming downhill. I'm going up a hill. Like there's, there's something about being in that. Like, well, here I am. And sometimes it's appreciating the power of doing something that really sucks. Like being swimming at night in the cold, like that kind of thing. And you think, wow, this is scary, cold, uncomfortable like everything else. But isn't it cool that I'm here now? So let me just take in just how much this sucks.

Yeah. And what Diana Nyad would say is that it's self defining because A, you're the guy who can take it.

Yeah.

Which is a really good helpful mindset in anything you're doing. But B, you know, one thing Diana Nyad said is there's something incredibly powerful about getting somewhere under your own power. Right. And that's another secondarily beneficial mindset. Dana Cavalleo, who spent a lot of time as a performance coach for the New York Yankees, you know, he has said that he cross trains CEOs like he, he's the kind of guy, he can train the New York Yankees and work with a Derek Jeter for years at a time. But he also works with CEOs and he tries to help them get more in command of. It's basically sort of training CEO fitness, not for endurance swimming, but just basically for good decision making, for dealing with all the stresses they have to deal with. And one of the things he finds is that the hard chargers and the real Type A personalities train terribly, right? They, they work way too long hours, they eat terrible, they don't get enough sleep, they're not real systematic in their habits. And the first thing he has to teach entrepreneurs or CEOs is getting command of their schedule and approaching things with a better, more systematic method. Derek Jeter didn't work 18 hours. That's not what made him the greatest statistical ball player in New York Yankees history and an 11 time captain. What made Derek Jeter was his day after day after day routine. And tedium is not something people want to talk about developing a tolerance for tedium. But as Dana Cavale says, you know of the New York Yankees, what makes a great ballplayer? It's not who you are today, it's can you be that guy the next day and the next day and the next day and the next day?

Yeah. Let me tell actually about the flip side and then let's do a little some of the takeaways from this. Before we do that, let me just shout out a couple of people. First of all, my friend and mentor, Vern Harnish, who created the Rockefeller habits and the whole scaling up framework of which this show and my work is a part. I want to give thanks to Verne Harnish and then to my producer and assistant Wanda Mitchell in the background, who gets our, our guest and our show ready every week. The folks at Podfly Productions who put out our show each weekly and get our show notes prepared and get everything out. It takes a team to put this thing together. I just get to do the fun part, this part, the part that I love to do. So it takes a team to put all that together. And if we can help you in any way, a good email for us is infocalingcoach.com if you want to send us a note, if you want to give us some feedback, if you'd like to hear more of something. We got some feedback last week from a couple of listeners, viewers about some of the topics that they'd love to hear more of that we've covered before. Before. But they feel like there's more more ground to cover there. So I love to get that. If we can help you find a coaching resource or something to deal with something in your area and of course you could find our website@scalingcoach.com if you want to do something nice for us a solid then give us a review on whatever platform you you get the show from. So give us a like a thumbs up. But the reviews if you're on a place like Apple podcasts are really helpful for the show. So that's the shout out to all of those folks. And then so that a couple of things I noticed one of them is like the negative examples. When I think about the people, the leaders that I've really watched struggle that have, that have screwed things up, that have turned, that I've worked with along with the ones that have been really great. The ones who've sucked have tried to be Superwoman or Superman. They've tried to do too much of it themselves. They've tried not to take care of their sleep. They focus only on the new things and the leveling up. They they. They're like focused only on the problems and they're charging into things and there's no cowbell. So they are not celebrating the wins. They are sending people emails at 3 in the morning. They're trying to get by on two to four hours of sleep a night. They're got their hands in everything. These are leaders that don't do well again and again. So and we've been talking about the opposite side of it, but I want to tell you I've watched a lot of it go the other way and sometimes people catch themselves and then make a shift and start to put in the routines and the discipline and the boring recurring kinds of things and the rest and all the other pieces, the family time, the thinking time and not just more doing super powerful. So some of the things that you've called out that we heard is like regular conditioning, regular practice, having discipline to do these kinds of things, building the culture within the team of it, taking advantage of the down the mistakes as well as the others, learning from all of it and bringing the intentionality to it. So the stuff, some, some of the things that I think that we heard the book is out now or shortly. It's out by the time you listen to this on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. But it's the right call. So wherever you get your books, Amazon Bookstores, etc, the Right Call by Sally Jenkins Sally, thank you for joining us on the show.

Thank you for having me.

It's been a real pleasure.

It's been pleasure being here. Enjoyed the discussion.

Are you ready to turn your goals into daily wins? You should check out our Scoreboard software powered by Align. It's the official software for scaling up. With Scoreboard you'll get an AI driven coach for priorities and KPIs and it'll help keep your team focused on what matters most. With Align you can track your goals in real time and you'll even see results on the go. With their mobile app. You can rest easy knowing that Align has world class onboarding and support to set your team up for success. This is really more than just software, it's what I actually use to manage growth in our scaling up client teams. Unlock clarity and results with Scoreboard by Align to try it now go to aligntoday.com Bill Gates one more time aligntoday.com Bill G that's aligntoday.com Bill G check it out and try it now.