In this motivational "Moment of Yes" delivered on Monday, June 6, the speaker addresses a soccer team preparing to travel from Kansas City to Austin for their first Nations League match against Grenada. He references a recent guest speaker, John McGraw—a former ten‑year NFL player now focused on leadership and mental skills—who shared a martial‑arts story about the "white belt mentality." McGraw explained that belts originally kept uniforms up and that the color of a belt indicated how dirty (and thus how experienced) it was; a black belt is essentially a heavily dirtied white belt, symbolizing years of gritty practice, failure, and learning. The speaker emphasizes humility, curiosity, and continuous improvement (kaizen) as essential, even for seasoned players, urging the team to adopt a beginner’s mindset for the day and the week ahead. He ends with a reflective question prompting each member to consider where they may have become complacent and how to re‑engage the white‑belt approach.
Chapters
Good morning, everyone. Here is your Moment of Yes for Monday, June 6th. Getting ready to leave Kansas City. We had a big tie yesterday, so we've got a win, we've got a tie. Now we head to Austin to prepare for Grenada for our first Nations League game. So getting ready to go. So we had a guest speaker come in and speak to the team the other day. His name is John McGraw. He's a former, I think, 10-year NFL player. Really great guy. He came and spoke to the team a year ago during Gold Cup, and his focus now is on leadership, mental skills, similar to the work that I do. And he shared a story which I hadn't heard before, but I think it's fantastic. So he was talking about martial arts, and many of you know about the idea. We may have even talked about it here. about the idea of having a beginner's mindset or a white belt mentality, right? A white belt mentality— obviously, when you start off in any martial art, your first belt is a white belt. You're a beginner. And so having that beginner's mentality means there's humility, you're open-minded, you're curious, you're able to take instruction, right? We always want to have that mentality no matter how good we become, because it's that humility That allows us to grow more. And so he's talking about this white belt mentality. He said, and actually, he said, you know, at the beginning of martial arts, this whole, the whole colored belt system that we have, he says the reason they needed a belt was to keep up their uniform. And so the reason they wore a belt was to keep up their uniform, to keep up their pants. And the way that you could tell who the more expert martial artist was, was how dirty their belt was. Think about that— how dirty their belt was. If you were new, your white belt isn't going to be very dirty. But if you've been doing martial arts for a while, your white belt is probably going to be black from all the dirt, or a shade of brown. Therefore, the black belt is based on this idea of The dirtier the belt, the more advanced you are. Isn't that awesome? So the black isn't from black. The black is from the, the years and the years and the failures and the learning of getting dirty and grimy and gritty, which has given you that experience, thus the black belt. But it's the white belt mentality of constantly learning, kaizen, always learning, always learning, always learning. Always learning. So that's your moment of yes for today. What are you working on, or what do you— or what have you gotten trapped into thinking you're an expert and there's nothing more to learn, right? Sometimes that happens. What do you need to bring a white belt mentality to today on this Monday? Maybe for the week, but especially for today. I love that. That's your moment of yes for today, everybody. I'll see you from Austin.
