Legendary Coach's Leadership Lessons Apply to Advisors, Too

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If you want to reach the pinnacle of performance, you have to work hard. But there's a big difference between forcing yourself to work hard and wanting to work hard. Hi everyone, I'm business coach Steve Sandusky for Barron's Advisor, and welcome to Actionable Intelligence. My guest today is Valerie Kondos Field, also known as Miss Val. By her gymnasts. As head coach of the UCLA women's gymnastics team, Miss Val led the team to 7 NCAA championships, 22 regional championships, and 18 Pac-12 championships. She's also the 4-time National Coach of the Year. In today's conversation, we discuss how she crafted a legendary coaching career, not by focusing on winning and losing, but by keeping a vision in mind for her gymnasts, which was to develop these young women into champions in life through sports. Her philosophies are timeless. Her coaching style is unorthodox. And what you'll discover in this conversation is when you as a leader focus on the whole person instead of just the business side of what have you done for me lately, you're going to end up creating a high-performing culture filled with people who want to work hard, who perform at their best, and who go home at night with a great feeling of satisfaction that I left it all out in the arena. You are going to love this conversation with Ms. Val. So let's get to it. Let's go back to 1990. You were an assistant coach at the UCLA women's gymnastics team. I think you were a choreographer, and then you get called into a meeting with Dr. Judith Holland. What happened in that meeting?

My whole world changed in that meeting. I was called into her office. She was one of our senior associate athletic directors. And she very simply said that we're going to be making a change with our head coach, and we would like for you to be the new head coach. And as I remember it, I laughed out loud immediately. She says I was catatonic for a good 30 seconds. And then I laughed out loud and I reminded her that I didn't know the first thing about gymnastics. I was a ballet dancer growing up as a, as a dancer. And I was at UCLA. Yes, they called me an assistant coach, but I was just the choreographer and the dance coach. I wasn't a gymnastics coach. And she said to me, I've noticed how you work with the student athletes and I love how you are firm. But you are compassionate with them. And then she looked me in the eye and she said, and I trust that you'll figure the rest out. And that's all I got. Yeah.

And that's what I find really fascinating about you among many things is that you became the head coach, super successful, multiple national championships, Coach of the Year many times and so on and so forth. Yet you had never done a roundoff back handspring.

I've never done a cartwheel, Steve.

A cartwheel. Yeah. Let alone a back handspring. So I really want to dig into what it means to be a coach. How did you learn how to be a coach? And then how can you coach something that you had never done yourself? So I think there's a lot of juice in there. So let's just start with how do you define what a coach is?

I love that question. Well, and I've done a lot of thinking about this, obviously, over my career, and I've come to realize that the only reason someone needs a coach in their life is to be able to achieve something that they cannot achieve on their own. And the second thing that I learned, thankfully, early on in my head coaching career was that there are a few different ways to quote unquote coach someone, to lead someone, to think about what you're trying to do as a coach or a leader. You are trying to instill change. In someone. So in my world, if an athlete is falling off the balance beam, it's probably because she's not pushing through her legs. My goal is to get her to jump through her legs. How am I going to do that? And the old style of coaching, the old style of leadership that we had accepted up until, I don't know, 15, 20 years ago, was a dictatorial, authoritative style of coaching. And it was, do it because I said so. Don't question, trust that I know what's best for you and just do it. And while that has proven to develop good loyal soldiers, it doesn't accomplish, in my opinion, the true essence of coaching someone. I very quickly understood when I was thinking about this in those terms that a coach's job isn't to dictate change. Someone, it is to motivate them to want to make consistent change. When you take the time as a Coach, as a leader, to truly find that motivation in helping someone make change, the results are so much more impactful and long-lasting. So, I think one of the greatest gifts that I had as a coach was I knew nothing, literally nothing. And I did not only know anything about the X's and O's of gymnastics. Did you like how I mixed my football and my gymnastics metaphors? I'm married to a football coach. So I didn't know anything about the skills, how to train a gymnastics skill. But what I quickly realized was I had no idea what a healthy team culture looked like. 'Cause I grew up on stage and the theater culture is far different from that of an athletic team. And that's where I really, really struggled with what's it supposed to look like? What is the foundation for this team? So is it because the role models that I had had were Eastern European style of coaching, Bella and Marta Caroli. They were the king and queens of the gymnastics universe. And quote unquote, they were successful because they won. And that whole question of, is all winning success, really rings true to me. And I think that it's something that every human being needs to ask themselves. Parents need to ask themselves, every business person needs to ask themselves. Just because your child wins a meet, a golf tournament, whatever, gets an A, is that truly success? Because if that child is miserable, I would not count that as success.

I want to keep going down the rabbit hole a little bit here on this idea of coaching, because you read about some of the most successful coaches, a lot of them end up writing a book and they talk about my philosophy as a coach. So you coming from the, the ballet world, I believe it was, now you're in the gymnastics world, you're a choreographer. How did you develop your coaching philosophy over time?

I had a wonderful aha moment that was serendipitous that changed the trajectory of my development as a coach, and that was I literally understood that my job as a coach was to win. Coaches are hired to win, and so that really didn't resonate with me, that win-at-all-cost mentality, because I didn't grow up with winning in the dance world. My definition of success as a dancer was to be thoroughly prepared mentally, emotionally, and physically. When I was waiting in the wings to go out on stage, I was calm and confident. To me, that was success. And it wasn't even whether I got applause or a standing ovation. And I was walking through our student store one day. I was actually on my way to resign because it had been about I think it had been 2 years, and our team was horrible. They were extremely talented, but we did not do well nationally. And they were horrible because I was horrible. It wasn't because of them. It was because I knew nothing. I didn't know what I was doing. And I literally was on my way to resign, and I happened upon— in a student store, I happened upon Coach Wooden's book on leadership. And as I'm glancing through his book, it magically opens up to his definition of success. And I'm sure you and a lot of your listeners, you know, have read Coach's work and understand that his definition of success is success is simply peace of mind in knowing that you've done your best. And I read this definition over and over and over again because here was the greatest coach that had ever lived. He had won 10 national championships in 12 years. Coaches are hired to win. Why hadn't he mentioned winning in his definition? And I literally had the biggest aha moment of my professional career, and that success is simply peace of mind in knowing you've done your best. And I didn't resign, and I went back to my office and I thought, okay, so What does success for me look like as the head coach of the UCLA gymnastics program? Mind you, because we're at UCLA, we can recruit some of the best talent in the world. So what does that look like? Is it just about winning? And putting all those little pieces together, I literally, I can remember my mind just becoming so clear. With the fact that athletics is one of the greatest masterclasses in learning really, really, really tough life lessons. And I was going to take the gym and our program and use that as the classroom to develop these young women into champions in life through sport. If I did that well enough, they were going to go out in the world and they were going to make the world a better place. And because I had talent, if I did that well enough, I knew it would translate to the competition floor. And it did. And I remember going to my athletic director and saying, I just want you to know I'm not focusing on winning. I'm not talking about winning. I'm not going to do any of that. I'm going to develop champions in life through gymnastics. And thankfully I had an athletic director that said, fabulous. That sounds awesome. And didn't ever talk to me about my win-loss record. Ever, ever. I did not know Coach Wooden at that time. In fact, I met Coach Wooden about 7 years later. He actually became my mentor. We became extremely close. And his definition of success changed my trajectory as a professional.

One of the things that I often see, whether it's in the business world or the sports world, is we'll see someone who's super successful, and then other people will say, well, I want to do everything that that person is doing because it's working for them, so therefore, it must work for me. And I'm wondering if you have any thoughts on that. Is that something that maybe early in your coaching career that did you look around and try and see, well, what are other people doing now that I'm the head coach? And is that a good strategy? Because in our business, we call it best practices. And I guess in the business world, it's like, I want to copy best practices. And I'm not necessarily a huge fan of that. I think there's fundamentals that work across, but ultimately, and I think what you're saying is, We each have to find our own style, what's true and authentic to ourselves in our coaching and our belief system. And then that is when we can ultimately reach a high level of success, when it's about our definition, not some external definition that's out there. Any thoughts on that?

I absolutely agree with you. And I think that the mistake that so many young leaders make in particular is they posture someone whom they feel is successful They act like them. They, they do everything that they do. They eat like them. They work out when they do. They talk like them. They use the same little quips that they do. I did that before I happened upon Coach Wooden's definition. I postured like Marta Caroli, Eastern European Romanian coach, zero compassion, zero empathy. And I just thought, well, she's successful. She's winning. Nadia Comaneci, Carrie Strug, Merrilee Retton. Hello. And I was not only horrible, I was miserable. I had no sense of self. Then I read Coach Wooden's book. I meet the great John Wooden, and he's like a saint. And so my pendulum swings the opposite direction. I start trying to be like Coach. Why wouldn't you? It's like all those shirts. Say, what would Jesus do? It's like, what would Wooden do? And it's like, why shouldn't I try to be like John Wooden? And it was 2004. We had won 4 championships in 5 years. And Coach Wooden and I were both being interviewed for an article in the LA Times. And the reporter said to me, you're becoming the next John Wooden. And before I could just say that is blasphemy, Coach Wooden, with his little arms folded and his blue eyes twinkling, chuckled, and he said, "Why would she want to be another John Wooden when she can be a great Valerie Kondos Field?" And I remember, Steve, I remember feeling this pressure, this stress of having to live up to John Wooden release. And it was such a gift that he gave me in that moment. To figure out how to be the best me I could be. And I share this with so many of the people whom I speak with, especially young people. I love it when their eyes get really big when I talk about the fact that— think about how many billions and billions and billions of people have walked planet Earth. And of all of those people, there's never been another you. And when you're gone, there never will be another you. You're here for a reason. You are unique. Your DNA is unique. That spirit and that light inside of you is unique. You are not meant to mimic someone else. You are meant to take everything that we learn— because let's face it, everything we've learned, we've learned from someone else— and let's take that and develop into our system of lightness and our spirit and how we're going to share that with the world. That's a big part of my book. And I know you said you read my book and it's like, my book was just showing that this dancer choreographer that really coached really with unorthodox ways figured out in my unique way how to be successful in the world of athletics that I knew nothing about. And you know what, my co-author of my book said to me, because he had been a part of UCLA Gymnastics as a fan for 20 or so years before we wrote the book. And he said that he noticed when I was shedding this persona of the, the posture syndrome and imposter syndrome, and it started becoming myself. And he said to him, he really felt that the fact that I was able to bring fresh eyes to a problem actually helped me develop my coaching style. Instead of coming to a gymnastics coaching problem from a gymnastics athlete or an athlete's position or a gymnast position or a coach, I came about it with truly fresh eyes to just figure it out. And he said he feels that was part of the brilliance of, of how I was so successful.

I think this is such a great point that you're making here in that we have this tendency to try and idolize these people that are super successful, and they say, I want to be just like them. And what you're saying, what Coach Wooden is saying— this may be a phrase from you, or maybe it's from Coach Wooden— that rather than being a second-rate version of someone else, you want to be a first-rate version of you. And I think it's such a great point.

But think of that, Steve. If you're trying to be someone else, you will never develop into all that you can be because a part of you is being untrue to you by trying to be somebody else. Yep.

You also talked about the Caroleys. You talked about coaching through fear. We see that in sports. We see that in the business world. Do you feel like that's changing? Because I think we need to be honest in that You can get great results through intimidation and through fear. Now, maybe they're short-term results, maybe it's long-term damage, but do you see that changing? Obviously, you changed over time and had amazing success. As a society, do you see that happening more in sports, more in the business world, where it's more your kind of what you're doing? It's like whole-person coaching as opposed to fear and intimidation.

You know what's interesting? And this is a question I'm going to throw right back at you. That thankfully there are these icons in the sporting world that are talking about mental health, that are talking about, you know, Michael Phelps' documentary, "The Weight of Gold," that are talking about the mental aspect of that. I'm very close with Simone Biles. And when she pulled out of the team competition and I had a ton of interviews and, you know, that there were so many people that just said she quit, she quit on her team, she quit on her country, she quit on blah, blah, blah. And I was just like mama bear coming at them. And I was like, it's very arrogant and it's very dangerous to assume someone else's mental health. And that portion of it was never taken into consideration in the decades before the coaching— in the coaching world. Coaches didn't really care about athletes' mental health. Their job was to get them to be the best, what they could be. And are there icons in the business world that are speaking up about this?

I think there are. And I think one thing that is happening is for several decades in the business world, the main driving force of, let's say, a publicly traded company was your sole objective is to maximize shareholder wealth, is to make as much profit as you possibly can. In recent years, that's actually started to change. And actually, the Business Roundtable, which is one of the main organizations, kind of a blue-chip organization of some of the leaders of the largest companies in the United States, they've changed their objective for what a corporation is designed to do to encompass a wide range of things. Things like the impact on the community, the impact on the environment, the impact on the employees. And certainly shareholder value is an important part of it, but they've expanded the definition of all the constituencies that an organization needs to take into consideration as you run your business. So I think that's all very positive. So yeah, I would say I'm starting to see that in the business world. And we are seeing that, as you're just describing, in the sports world. And I think the tennis player, I want to say Naomi Osaka, if I'm pronouncing that correctly, a similar situation with her. I think she withdrew from some things and wanted to sort some things out. And it seems like, yeah, there may have been some blowback. But I think people are starting to understand that as well.

You know, I think that what you just said is so true with every human being on the planet is that when we realize the humanity in each other, you're gonna get a better result in the end. Instead of just focusing on the bottom line as a coach, instead of just focusing on the win, if you treat your athletes as whole human beings and not just an athlete or a commodity to help you win, when you coach them and fortify them as a whole human being, you're actually going to get a better end result. That's exactly what you were just saying. In the business world, instead of just focusing on the bottom line, when you bring the humanity into the picture, you're getting a better result.

To get the level of success that, that your gymnasts achieved, they obviously had to work hard. And when I look at some of the videos of the gymnasts from the UCLA women's team, that have gone viral, it's pure joy. So what I want to know is, how do you get them to want to work hard as opposed to make them work hard?

It goes back to what we were talking about beginning. When you dictate to someone what to do, it's not very fun. There is no joy. They're simply doing it because you told them to. But when you motivate someone, why do they want to put in the extra work and conditioning. Most gymnasts hate conditioning. Why should they do that? And when you explain to them how it's going to translate to their gymnastics, it's going to translate to them not getting injured, it's going to translate to them tumbling higher. They go, oh, so every time they're doing those reps, they have the understanding of that and they are motivated to work smarter, not just harder. It all comes down to motivation. I had a fabulous one-on-one about our conversation with Kobe Bryant a few months before he passed. And he had just seen our latest athlete that had gone viral, and that was Katelyn Ohashi, her floor routine. And for those of you that are listening, if you haven't seen it, go check it out. Katelyn Ohashi, 2019, '18, I'm sorry, she went viral both years. So, and he said, he comes into me, he had, he had 3 daughters at the time, the youngest one hadn't been born yet. He goes, Miss Val, I don't know whether to be angry with you or to thank you. I go, why? He goes, because we have had Caitlin Ohashi's video, her floor routine on replay for like the last 3 weeks in our house. That's all that's on every TV in our house. And I said, well, you're welcome, Kobe. And we had this wonderful conversation about how important it is to infuse joy in the process of doing anything. And that whatever you're learning, whether it's math, whether it's basketball, whatever it is, studying for the SAT, when you infuse joy in the process, again, you're gonna come out with a better, richer result. And the problem is when we first started talking about joy in the world of athletics, the diehards were thinking that we were just talking about fun and recess. And it's like, no, you know, people that just saw UCLA gymnastics having fun. And I thought, how do they do that? It's like, no, no, no, because we work really, really hard. We just infuse joy in the process of working hard. And Kobe said his joy came from the pride of getting up at 4:30 every morning, getting in 2 extra workouts before the rest of the team showed up, and knowing that regardless of how he played that night in the game, regardless of whether they won or not, That sense of pride that comes from a job well done, that joy, nobody can take that away from you. No score can take that away from you. No bottom line can take that away from you.

There's so many things I want to talk to you about. So we're probably going to be all over the map here. So since you mentioned Caitlin Ohashi, I want to go there. I think there's, there's a great, lots of great stories with her, but in your book, you tell a story about how during a team meeting, she said, I just don't want to be great again. Tell me about that.

Yeah, we were in a team meeting. It was her freshman year. Now, Caitlin, mind you, is the last gymnast that have ever beaten Simone Biles. And she'd just come off winning the American Cup. And she comes in her freshman year and gets out of shape for an athlete. And she was, you know, maybe giving us about 60, 70% of the gymnastics she was going to be able to do. And her body was hurting, which is always an issue of not being in shape as an athlete. And we were in a team meeting and our sports psychologist was going around one by one to everyone and asking them, what is the anchor inside of you that is holding you back from being your best? And a lot of the girls said, you know, I don't get to bed at night. I can't put my phone down. I can't, you know, and there were all these other reasons. And When it got to Caitlin, she very unapologetically said, I just don't want to be great again. And I felt like I got sucker punched. And my first thought was, then what the heck am I giving you $60,000 worth of a full scholarship every year? And thankfully, that thought passed through my brain quickly. And the next thought was Caitlin doesn't want to be great again because every single thing she associates with being great is painful. The work ethic, the mental stress, the emotional stress, everything. And I remember when Caitlin— I was recruiting her, she was, I don't know, 15, 16 years old. And I said, Caitlin, when was the last time you loved gymnastics? And she said, when I was 11, before I made the national team. And right after that, it all went to— it was a business and it wasn't fun and there was no joy. And at that moment that we were in that meeting, I realized that there's no— there's nothing I can say to her to make her be great again. There's no gymnastics punishment, there's no go run more, there's no anything that I can say. It has to come from her, and I have to help her find her joy as a human being. And how am I going to do that? Well, okay, she's got the gymnastics down. Let's start fortifying the rest of Caitlin O'Hashi. And it was really cool, Steve, that it was literally a few days later, I had read a statistic that girls are on their phones an average of 8 hours a day. And that was just horrifying to me. And we were on balance beam and I asked her, I said, what do you think about this stat? That I just heard. And she goes, oh, I totally agree with that. I said, why are you on your phone? She goes, because I'm bored or I'm stressed and I'm just numbing out. I said, okay, why don't you use your phone for something good and go look up TED Talks? And she didn't know what a TED Talk was. So she comes back the next day, her mind is blown, and it changed her life, her trajectory of her life from that moment. She said, Miss Val, I spent 4 straight hours on my phone last night. I'm like, well, this isn't good. She says, she goes, Oh, I got in this rabbit hole of TED Talks and I realized I'm really, really passionate about the homeless and why are they homeless and how can we help the homeless? And I got really, really passionate about the effects of bullying and body shaming. And that has been her platform now. She's 25 years old and that's what she speaks about. And that's what all her interviews are about. And she says that once she started fulfilling the rest of herself and fortifying the rest of herself and not just focusing on being a gymnast, she says that's when she found her self-respect and her self-love. And that translated to her gymnastics.

And as a side note, you mentioned the TED Talk. So you, Valarie Kondos Field, have a very popular TED Talk, I think with multi-millions of views. So those of you watching this should definitely look up Valarie's talk. Now, what you're talking about here, I think, is another great point in that I think we're talking EQ here. So as a leader, so for you to hear what Caitlin said, and not to just jump all over and say, well, I'm gonna, you know, crack the whip, and where I'm gonna make you work hard. It's like, okay, well, let's dig a little deeper here. Let's try and understand, well, where is this coming from? And you, like you said, she was associating being great with pain, with no joy. And yet, and so you were able to figure that out and work with her to help her find the joy. And then I think sort of the ultimate manifestation of that was this viral video of just pure joy on the floor and hundreds of millions of views.

You know, I'm teaching a graduate school class at UCLA called Transformative Coaching and Leadership. And all the students in that class are either fifth-year student athletes, men and women, or they're graduate assistant coaches. And a lot of football, basketball players in there. And we study a different coach every single week. Coach Wooden, Bobby Knight, Phil Jackson, everybody, Pat Summitt. And the underlying book that we read every week throughout the course is Brené Brown's book, "Dare to Lead." And for those of you that know Brené Brown, she's all about the first step to courage is vulnerability and humility. And at the end of the course, every time I've taught this, I ask the class for a debrief. You know, what's like the one thing that resonates from you from learning? And you would think that they would say something they learned about Coach Wooden or whatever. And across the board, I'm going to say 95% of the students say I never thought of vulnerability as a strength. I grew up in the world of sports being taught it was a weakness, that humility was a weakness. And I love the fact that we're living in a time where those characteristics that used to be called soft skills are no longer being called soft skills. They're life skills, they're power skills. And we have the research that shows us that when you embrace, like you said, your EQ, that starts with your own humility and your own vulnerability, it's actually, it's your superpower.

Yeah, I mean, like humility, it's the ultimate strength.

Right, exactly.

So you have, you had another gymnast that you coached. Her name was Jeanette Antolin. And in reading your book, one day you're in the gym and she said to you, "Miss Val," I don't ever want anyone to tell me what to do ever again. So how do you deal with something like that? Because if we're a leader and we've got someone on our team that we just can't get through to them, what do you do in something like that? What did you do with Jeanette?

I, uh, read the book Good to Great. Thank you, Jim Collins, for writing that book. And he talks in that book about when you're leading a team, you need to make sure you have the right people on the bus. And then when you get the right people on the bus, you need to make sure they're on the right seat on the bus. And sometimes you need to realize that you're doing the person more harm by keeping them on the bus if they're, they're not the right person for the bus. And so when Jeanette Antolin said to me, I don't want anybody to tell me what to do ever again. I said, well, honey, you need to go live on a desert island then, because that's not how the world works. And she just continued to violate team rules, one rule after the other. And after, I mean, I just, I feel like once again, like when I said Coach Wooden gave me permission to be myself, reading that chapter in Jim Collins' book, it was like, okay, I'm not being a horrible human being if I kick her off the team. I'm actually doing something that's going to help her. And she was so miserable daily. She was just, there was no joy in her at all. She was doing horribly in school and I called her in the office and I said, "Jeanette, this is not working. And so we're not going to renew you next year, which means you're not going to have a scholarship." And she looked at me like she couldn't believe it. And I finished talking and then I went, I needed to go to the gym and she followed me in there sobbing, holding onto my arm, sobbing, sobbing, begging me not to do this. And I remember with every fiber of my being, looking at her in the eye and knowing that this was gonna be the best year of her life. And because she had no one to fall back on, and because she had no one to fall back on, she couldn't be a victim. Nobody would rescue her but herself. And she ended up getting 2 jobs. She found a way to stay in school. Her GPA went like from a 2-point-nothing up to a 3.5. She went back and she started training in, in recreation gym at night at UCLA because she realized she actually loved it. And she ended up making her way back on the team. And she has said that that moment, that year, was the first time in her life that she had nobody to rescue her but herself. And that whole chapter in my book is called, you know, Being in the Desert. And the important part of understanding the analogy of the desert is we don't just end up in the desert once in our lives. If you're a human being, you're going to end up in the desert multiple times in your life. And the question is, how long are you going to walk in circles in a desert before you start figuring out how to take the next right step to get out of the desert? And that's what Jeanette did. Quickly, she figured out that next right step. And she was one of the gymnasts that came forward early on and made her impact statement against Larry Nassar for the sexual abuse that he did to her and about 400 other young gymnasts. And she said the strength that she had, that she learned, that she could count on herself through that time when she was kicked off the team and had only herself to rely on, was the strength that she tapped into in that courtroom to look her abuser in the eye and tell him what he did to her.

So it sounds like you're talking about tough love here with her. And I want to read a quote here that you have in your book related to the story that you're just telling here. You said, quote, "We all need to be able to recognize when we are in the desert and to embrace it. Our next choices will either lead us one step closer to changing and eventually emerging, or result in us digging deeper into the depressed misery of desert life. So, um, that again, get back to this EQ idea, that you were able to see what she needed most. And what she needed most was that tough love where she had to rely on herself, find her way— she was in the desert— get her way out of the desert, have that strength. And ultimately, as you just mentioned, it gave her the strength to give her testimony in the Larry Nassar case.

And she said to me, because she was 19 at the time, she said— I was just talking to her a few months ago— she said, I'm so thankful that my parents didn't rescue me, that I had to do it on my own. She says, because had they rescued me, I would have just gone from one situation where everything was done for me to the next, and I wouldn't have learned to rely on myself.

Yeah, and having 3 kids, and I can tell you as a parent If you have a child who is going off the deep end, to know that maybe the best thing I need to do is to let them figure it out without going in to try and save them, that, that's a difficult thing to do, but sometimes that's the best thing to do. So we're talking about some heavy stuff here. So, so let's talk about something else that I think you're doing with your team that I think has a lot of applicability outside of the sports world, and that is I read that you have your gymnasts take an assessment each year. So tell me more about the assessments and what kind of outcome you were looking for by having your team take these assessments.

Yes, personality assessment. There are many good ones out there. We settled on the Enneagram. And the reason why I feel so strongly about personality assessments isn't because it's It's not to put you in a box. The last thing I want to do is put anybody, myself, in a box. Personality assessments, what they do is they show you— usually they're spot on— where you go to when you get under stress. And they teach you that if you don't take the time to choose your response, you will be reactive And 9 times out of 10, when you react to something, it's the wrong thing to do. Another great book we're talking about, Man's Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl, little thin book. He was a POW. He talks about stimulus and response and how all of us have a choice when life happens to us to either react or put space between the stimulus and our response and choose choose our response wisely. So I felt it was really, really, really important for all of us, but especially I coach 18 to 22-year-olds, to really practice self-assessment. And Socrates said the unexamined life is not worth living. And to really self-examine every day what you've done, the choices you've made, and the repercussions that you've had with those. And That was a huge part of, of the assessment. The personality assessment is really showing, like putting the mirror up and showing yourself where you go to when you get under stress. But I think almost the bigger bonus that we get as a team from doing the personality assessment is we get empathy for our teammates and our coaches. And we would put that— the results of the personality assessment, the Enneagram, up on our board every year And when someone was butting heads with another teammate or a coach, they learned to take a pause, go look at the board, and try to figure out why is that person acting that way, or why am I acting that way, what is triggering me or triggering that. And it's— it was just such a wonderful lesson in once again talking about humanity and giving the other person the benefit of time and space and benefit of the doubt and understanding them. You talk about the EQ a lot and it's like, let's talk about understanding why is this person acting that way? What has triggered them to act that way? And do I really just wanna react in the same manner or do I wanna put some space and figure out my response? I just feel like that was such a wonderful life or relationship lesson. For these young women and our coaching staff, everybody involved with our program to go through.

Yeah, and I'm a fan of assessments as well. A lot of people in our industry use the DiSC assessment as well. Also, as I was reading your book, I came upon a line that was a little curious to me, and you said that the balance beam is the event that most translates to life. What did you mean by that?

Well, mind you, I've never been up on the beam. So when you're on balance beam, it's literally less than 4 inches wide and you're doing very, very difficult skills and you're expecting yourself to have the courage and the trust to throw yourself in the air and twist and flip and land back on this very, very narrow surface. And the reason why I love the analogy that it's the most— it reminds me of just living in life. Is because so many times in life there's all this stuff that hits us, whether it's someone that's verbally attacking us, someone attacking us online, someone physically attacking us, or getting in a situation where we want to react and just blow up at someone. And to be able to learn how to figure out how to be confident and calm and trust in your preparation is exactly what balance beam is about. Because on beam, if you hold back, you're gonna fall off the beam. The only way you're gonna stay on that 4 inches is if you confidently execute your skills with 100% of your ability— mentally, emotionally, and physically. And that means the power of your mind. I have seen athletes that are flipping on beam and they're perfectly square to land on the beam and they fall off. And I asked them, you know, what were you thinking before you went for the skill? And they would say, oh God, I hope I don't fall. So the best beam workers are those that have mastered the mental game, the power of the mental game. I got this. And it's so cool to watch beam from the end because there have been I mean, so many great athletes that are flipping and their feet are nowhere in line with the beam. And like a cat, they just pull themselves back on. And I'll say, you know, what were you thinking before you went? They said, I got this. The power of the mind, the power of positive thinking. It's like I said earlier, it's just a masterclass in learning really, really, really tough life lessons.

You're talking about, I got this. So you've also talked about this idea of having a cue. And so as a coach, I think oftentimes you would go up to your gymnast before they were about to perform. Tell me about this idea of a cue. What is that?

I think anytime that we get in a stressful situation, if we overthink it, we're going to get tight. And if you're able to prepare yourself to have a cue, that's going to automatically click in your training that you've had before that. So I think about like, if I'm going to go speak And if I'm speaking in front of 1,000 people, and I gotta tell you that the times that I get the most nervous is when I'm speaking to financial people or bankers, because I know nothing about your world.

Well, you got a big audience here today.

And I have to tell you, the last group I spoke to, there were 900 bankers, all in suits, probably 95% of them men. And I entered the stage and I got them all up and dancing with me. For the first— oh yeah, it was— they were so great, I have to say that. Anyway, but as I'm waiting in the wings, you know, and I'm thinking, if I'm— my cue now, if I don't have my cue, I'm gonna go over my speech over and over and over. Okay, I've already gone over my speech, I've already prepared. If I have not prepared by then, then I need a different profession, but I've already prepared. So what's my cue? My cue has to be very simple and it has to be a mnemonic device that's going to flood me with positive thoughts and positive chemicals and all of that, and endorphins in my brain and the whole bit. So for me, it is gratitude. It is literally, I am so incredibly blessed to be able to come out and share my story with these people. That's it. That's my cue is gratitude. And You got to think about this. Your brain is not capable of thinking of opposing thoughts at the same time. And so I always talk— when I talk to kids, it's like thought bubbles enter your brain when something's happening. Like, if I'm waiting in the wings to go talk to 1,000 people out there in suits and I have all these thought bubbles like, oh my God, don't screw up, you're going to forget your lines, you're going to— okay, choose the thought bubble that's going to help you be your best and and starve the rest of the thought bubbles. And so my thought bubble is always gratitude.

We talked a little bit about some of the obstacles that your gymnasts faced, but then you faced one as well. In the spring of 2014, you're driving, the phone rings. Tell me what happened there.

Yes, I am driving and my, the phone rings and my doctor says to me, can you pull over? Which I'm like, well, this is not good. And she says, you have a very aggressive form of breast cancer and I need to seed you immediately.. And I hang up and my mind goes into this cacophony of screaming, fearful noise. How much time did I have left? Is there a treatment? How painful is it going to be? Am I going to have to quit my job? How do I tell my family? How do I tell the kids? Like all this noise in my head. And in the middle of all of the noise, I hear very clearly, be anxious for nothing and grateful for all things. Now, you and your listeners, you may translate this to the universe speaking to me or cosmic energy. To me, my story, it was God speaking to me. And I got a little snarky, I have to admit. And I looked up and I said, I don't know if you heard or not, God, but I have a potentially fatal disease. And this be anxious for nothing thing is not sitting well. And I heard it a second time. And I went home and my husband— I told my husband about the breast cancer, and then I told him about hearing, be anxious for nothing and grateful for all things. And he said, it's from the Bible. Well, I had never read the Bible. And he goes, go look it up. So I went and looked it up, and sure enough, in Philippians, it's right there. And I knew at that moment it was a commandment, and I knew that I was going to obey, but I didn't know how I was going to obey because I was scared out of my mind. I went to my doctor the next day, and with a big smile on her face, which I thought was very odd, she tells me about my breast cancer. She says, "I have to tell you, if you were diagnosed just 10 years ago, we had absolutely nothing for you. But if you choose to get chemotherapy and if you choose surgery, we know it's going to work." In that instance, I understood how I was not going to be anxious was through gratitude. I didn't have to get chemotherapy. I got to get chemotherapy because I lived at a time that had the chemo, and I live in a country that has chemo, and I have a job that's going to help me to pay for the chemo. I was so appreciative and grateful for being able to have a year of chemotherapy that I actually called it going to my chemo spa. I just felt like a spa is someplace you go to feel better. I not just carried that thought process through my entire cancer experience, but switching the word "have to" to "get to" in every single aspect of my life has changed every moment of my life for the better since then.

Well, first of all, I'm glad that you survived and not only survived but thrived after that. So, so we're happy you're still with us. It was interesting that your doctor said, "If you choose to," and I know this idea of choice is a major theme throughout your book. Tell me a little bit more about how choice has played a role in your life.

Yeah, if there's one thing that I wanted my student athletes to get being a part of our program is that every single thing you do in life is a choice. And every choice you make is gonna have numerous repercussions. And the choices you make will dictate the life you live. And the hardest part for most of us, especially an 18-year-old young woman, is understanding that every action you make, every choice you make, starts with the thoughts that you feed in your head. And unless you're mentally impaired, you can choose your thoughts. And that's really hard. And I gotta tell you, so many of my freshmen would come to me and say, Miss Val, this life is about choice. Choice thing and I can choose my thoughts. I have to say, I just can't help it when my mind goes to Mean Girl. And then you can imagine the field day I have with that, right? And it is so cool, Steve, literally about halfway through their sophomore year, that's like the average, about 16 months later, as they're ruminating on, on this thought about choosing your thoughts, their minds will be blown and they will get it. And they will realize that they do have control of their thoughts, which will then in turn— your thoughts dictate your emotions, which will dictate your actions. And once they do that, they are no longer victims in life. When they get a bad grade, they don't blame the professor. When they get a bad score, they don't blame the judge. When their boyfriend or girlfriend breaks up with them, they don't blame them. And it's, it's, it's such a liberating thing to take responsibility for your thoughts.

And maybe that ties right in with something else that I read that you talk about, this phrase: say it, know it, own it.

Yeah, say it, know it, own it. Say it to yourself enough that you're gonna know it. And once you know something there's no way you can't believe it. And then once you know it and believe it without any doubt, that is when you own it regardless of what anyone else says or thinks about you. And it's, it's such a liberating feeling of just being good to yourself.

But I just want to wrap up here with two more questions. So one is, is it harder to get to the top or is it harder to stay at the top? Because you won multiple championships, so you know how to get there and you know how to to stay there?

What's harder? I would say it's harder to get there because you just, you grind and you grind and you do everything you're supposed to do. And you literally, you see other people winning and you go, you know, what's the secret sauce? What's the magic formula? And you don't get it. And then you win your first championship and You know, you self-assess and what worked, what didn't work. And that I think a lot of coaches would say staying at the top is harder, but I personally feel the only reason that I would say that is because I would listen to the naysayers or the fans. It's like, you know, Coach Wooden decided to retire because he won his last championship and the fan Avis Bruin said to him as he was walking off the court, "Good job, Coach. You really let us down last year." It's like he was done. And so I think that, you know, it's really hard as a coach or an athlete not to listen to the noise, but that would be the only reason why I would think it's harder to stay at the top.

Yeah. And I think Coach Wooden, so you mentioned he won 10 national championships over the course of 12 years. But didn't it take him something like 17 years or 20 years to win that first championship? And then it snowballed.

And how sad is that, Steve? Because what coach nowadays gets even more than 3 years, you know? Yeah. I mean, it's— if you're one of the premier sports, you don't.

Yeah. And Coach Tom Osborne from the Nebraska Cornhuskers, similar story where I think it took him like 22 or 23 years for him to win his first national football championship. And then he won, what, 3 or 4 in the next 5 years. Same thing.

You know what happens? When your team experiences success, they are infused with this belief that they can, that winning is not elusive to them. And that is the swagger that is infectious with the younger classmen coming in.

Well, that is a great segue into my final question here, which, which is really, I want you to share a story. So we're gonna go to the final day, 2018, of the NCAA Women's Gymnastics Championship. I think they call it the Super Six. Yeah. It's the final day. You guys are not in the lead. No. So tell me what happened that final day that year.

I just am signing a contract 'cause we're making this championship into a movie. Oh, awesome. Into a documentary. And okay, so we were, Oklahoma had won 2 back-to-back championships and everybody knew they were gonna win their 3rd.. And we start off and we were just having an okay day. We weren't having a great— it's like, I literally was thinking, okay, this isn't our day. And we were in 4th place the entire meet. And there's a lot more that goes into this, but we end up finishing on balance beam, the make or break event, like the event. And what we didn't know, so we're in 4th place now and our team just has decided, let's just leave it all on the floor. And maybe we can finish in third, you know, that'd be nice. We didn't know, but people in the stands knew and the commentators knew that for us to tie Oklahoma, we had to average a 9.95. So 6 athletes up, you take the 5 top scores. There had not been one 9.95 on balance beam the entire day from any team. We gotta average 5. Okay. Thankfully I didn't know that. And I gotta tell this story and it's really important. Every single one of my athletes, I would have a cue for them, a different cue for them as they were going up on beam. And it was a short cue. And I went up to my first student athlete and I was ready to give her her cue. And she grabbed my hands. She looked me in the eye and she smiled and she said, Ms. Bell, I got this. And thankfully, I was wise enough to back off and shut up and just look her in the eye and say, you got this, and move away. And she PR'd. Next girl goes up, Olympic gold medalist falls. Next girl up after her is a transfer from Southern Illinois who's never competed at the national championships before in her life. And she is following a gold medalist who bell. And I go up because I'm the coach, right? I have all these words of wisdom. I got to give her the words of wisdom. And I look at her and she's dancing to the background music. And again, I was smart enough to shut up and just give her a wink and a fist bump and not mess with her mojo. She PRs. And one gymnast after the other, when I went up to give them their cues— and they had not planned this before. They were just in such a zone. One after another grabbed my hands, looked me in the eyes, and said, "Miss Val, I got this." And our last student athlete up, she was a 6th year because she'd had so many injuries. She does this beautiful routine. Our team's sobbing, crying, and we're thinking— and the only reason they're sobbing is because we left it all on the floor. We accomplished our goal to leave the arena with no regrets. And her score comes up and it's a perfect 10. And once again, and I've asked every one of them, did you know that would be an opportunity to win? They said, oh heck no. We were like, let's finish third. That'd be fun. We can end up on the podium. And one by one, they start pointing up to the leaderboard and you see UCLA go from fourth, third, to second, to first. And it's like, how did that happen? And I do have to say, as a leader and just sharing what I learned from that. Had I gotten my ego involved and felt that I had to coach them and remind them of their cues, there is no doubt in my mind they would have played tight and we would not have won that championship. We ended up winning by the smallest margin in gymnastics history. But think about that. Had I reminded them of their cues. They would've been thinking about their cues instead of going with the flow and feeling that joy and pride that we were talking about earlier with Kobe.

Yeah, that is such a great story. And this thread, I think, that's permeated our conversation and obviously your coaching career is this idea of bringing joy to the athletes. And I remember back, I wanna say it was, maybe it was 1992, but it was in the Winter Olympics. Sarah Hughes, figure skater. I don't know if you remember that. She was not expected to win the gold medal, but she went out on the ice and in her routine, it was just like your gymnast. It was absolute pure joy on her face, total freedom, and everything was amazing. And she surprisingly won the gold medal. And I think that was probably my first time when I really thought about just the pure joy of performance and sports was watching her win that gold medal. And you, you know, practically perfected that coaching at UCLA and bringing that out in your gymnasts.

Think about every athlete you've ever seen in any sport who is just on fire. They are glowing with joy. And it's intense. It's intense. It's not fun. It's not recess. It is joy that is invading every cell of their body. And that's when you get in that zone. You never see an athlete in that zone that's miserable, ever. Right. So as a leader, why would you want to make the people whom you're leading miserable? That doesn't make any sense.

You're not gonna get the best out of them. Yep. Gets back to that. I'm not making my people work hard. They want to work hard because it comes from within. It's not this extrinsic thing where I'm doing this because I wanna please that person over there. I'm doing it for the pure joy and the satisfaction of giving it my best, of leaving it all out on the floor, as you just described here. Well, Ms. Val, this has been fantastic, and I want you to talk about your book here. So tell me about your book. And like I said, I've read it. I think it's a great book. I certainly encourage folks listening to read the book.

Well, my book is Life Is Short, Don't Wait to Dance. And the title is an homage to Coach Wooden during his later years. Whenever somebody would ask him if he had any regrets, he actually would get teary-eyed and he would say, I do have one regret. My wife loved to dance and I never danced with my wife because I was shy and not a good dancer. And he said, I know now that had I danced with my wife, people would not have made fun of me. They would have seen a couple deeply in love. So if I have, if I have one regret and if I could do it all over, I would dance with my wife. I can't tell you how many times when I've told that story live, and then I'm doing book signing, older men will come to me with tears in their eyes and they'll say, Miss Val, I'm going to go home and dance with my wife. So the book, Life is Short, Don't Wait to Dance. Dance is a metaphor for anything that makes your heart sing. Life is too short not to do those things that fill you up with joy. And it goes into a lot of what we talked about, just how a dancer choreographer figured out how to be one of the most winningest coaches in athletic history in the country. And all the mistakes I made along the way is in the book. I mean, I share, I just put it all out there. And if you would like to buy the book, I would love for you to go to my website, officialmissval.com. You can buy it on Amazon, but if you go to officialmissval.com, all the proceeds, every dime that I make from the book go to helping young girls in a community outside of Austin that have been rescued from sex trafficking. And you can buy my swag. You can buy the t-shirts, you can buy the sweatshirts, you buy the hats. They're super awesome. Life is short, don't wait to dance is all over them, and every dime goes to help these young girls.

I love it. All right, well, Miss Fowl, this has been fantastic. Uh, thank you for taking the time to be with us today. Congratulations on not just your success, but just the impact that you have had on your student athletes and the inspiration that you have been literally to millions of people. Around the country and around the world. So it's great to have you on the show here.

Thank you, Steve.

This has been fun. My key takeaway from my conversation with Ms. Val is the importance of coaching the person, not the position. You can train a person to do a job, but if you stop there, you may get only 70, maybe 80% of what they're capable of. But if your leadership focuses on the whole person, on helping them find their joy so that they want to work hard, then you'll get 100% performance and 100% commitment from everyone on your team. All right, that's all for today. Make sure you like and share this podcast through your favorite social platforms. And for more great podcasts, visit us at barons.com/podcasts. Take care and be safe.

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