Slappin’ Glass sits down this week with the Co-Founder of the Mission Critical Team Institute, Dr. Preston Cline! In this highly entertaining conversation with one of the world’s best leaders when it comes to working with teams in high pressure situations the trio dive into Dr. Cline’s thoughts on managing uncertainty, assessing risk, and discuss humor as a leader and being “robust” during the always fun “Start, Sub, or Sit?!”
Transcript
Dr. Preston Cline 00:00
So there’s this great firefighter named Chief Pfeiffer from the FDNY. I followed it into burning buildings for about three days around New York City. And one day we arrived this fire and he says to the fire chief, hey, what don’t I know yet? Or what am I missing?
And then they proceed to tell him and I asked him, why do you lead with that question? And he says, the key thing about firefighting is you want your guys managing the fire, not managing you. And if I walk in and go, hey, why didn’t you do this or how come you have all of a sudden they’re managing me? But if I say, hey, what don’t I know, then they could look around, realize that they’ve missed some steps and then they can tell me and then I can say, I’ve got some free hands. I’ll take care of it. So the point is you want to create a dialogue so the players are managing the game, not managing the coach.
Dan 01:26
And now, please enjoy our conversation with Dr. Preston Kline. Preston, really excited to have you, a ton of stuff that you do for your profession that is transferable to coaches and all that we do here in the basketball world. And so we’re excited to have you on today. Thanks for making the time for us. Thank you guys, thanks for having me. Absolutely. So Preston, the thing we wanted to start with in this conversation is something that I know you work in and around a bunch with teams from the military all over. And that’s skills that coaches in this situation or leaders can have in navigating uncertainty. And obviously, in basketball and coaching, we’re constantly trying to navigate risks and uncertainty of personalities and time and score and all those things and a lot of stuff that’s transferable. And so I wanted to start broadly with you and just your opening thoughts on skills that leaders can have in navigating uncertainty.
Dr. Preston Cline 03:22
A couple of things actually, and thanks again for having me. I would say the first thing is, in the world that I deal with, all of our research, the Mission Critical Team Institute is focused on decision making environments of about 300 seconds or less, about five minutes or less. And the reason for that, is that’s about how much oxygen you have in your brain right now. So if I close off your windpiper, you start bleeding out, you got about five minutes for us to solve that problem or it turns into a different problem. So if you look at trauma nurses or hostage rescue or military special operations or fire, they’re all training in that five minute window. And I want to say that to start off with, to give you a sense that when you’re talking to me, you need to think about time a little bit differently.
And that’s time in the everyday world or the routine world and time in the critical world or the extraordinary world, as anthropologists will call it. And so in basketball, I assume that’s not during games and during games. And so it’s this question of who owns the clock. During the game, you don’t own the clock, the game owns the clock, but all the other times you own the clock. And so being able to shift back and forth your own sort of pacing and that of the athletes to understand there’s a time in which we have to train where we don’t own the clock. And there’s a time we need to train where we do own the clock. And so when we’re looking at developing people, there’s things that we need to do around urgency, things that are gonna be about habit development or habit correction, but there’s gonna be other things. For example, the ability to reset after a mistake, right? We know that baseball is doing a lot of work on that. Psychologically, how do players recover after they screw up? Especially if it’s really public, especially if they’re embarrassed or they know they shouldn’t have done it, those sorts of things. When you’re fixing that, you gotta take the urgency away, right? You gotta relax a little bit, understand that’s a problem that you will not fix by applying urgency. It’s counter indicated because it’s an emotional problem as much as it is an intellectual or physical problem. So that’s the first thing I would say is just sort of better understand your relationship with time as to when you’re in urgency and when you’re not, and really own that when you’re not.
And the second thing I would say, and we’ll come back to this a few time, and I say this to all new coaches, but also to older coaches, is ultimately you’re gonna be judged a lot more by your questions than you are by your answers. And so being in a place of inquiry and not being afraid to ask the dumb questions, really important. And I think great coaches are not afraid to ask the dumb questions. And I think that often leads to the most important sort of conversations.
Dan 05:49
Great stuff. I love what you said about time in the beginning. I think that, you know, for Pat and I, and I think those listening, that’s a really good line of demarcation of like game coaching first practice and training and all that. And I’d love to go back to maybe game coaching and the psychological stuff that happens to people when there is a clock and you mentioned the 300 seconds coaching basketball game, we’re not life or death situation, though it feels like it maybe to coaches, but we’re not in the same situations that you are. What’s going on, I guess, in people’s brains when that clock is ticking and things are critical that starts to affect us physiologically in these uncertain moments.
Dr. Preston Cline 06:30
So a couple of things for our listeners, you should know, I know almost nothing about basketball. I’ve worked with the NBA a little bit, and I’ve worked with other professional sports teams like the All Blacks and the NFL and some other teams and mostly those coaches, but really when I’m talking to coaches, I’m talking to coaches around human development and learning, I’m not talking about the game. I’m talking about how to get somebody to optimize their own performance and how you as a coach can also be a teacher, an educator, a mentor, like how you can do all those things for people.
And what I would say is a couple of things. And I would say people watch more than they listen. And what do I mean by that? I mean that role modeling actually matters as a leader because people kind of want to know what they can expect. And that’s the other big thing is what you don’t own owns you. And what I mean by you don’t own owns you is that during game time, there’s a lot of like passion, right? And there’s a lot of emotion, but if you don’t own it, it owns you. And what happens is it’s not so much for you and your inability to maintain your working load memory and your ability to maintain situational awareness and all of that, but it also messages to your players inconsistency of behavior. So they don’t know when to approach you. They don’t know which Preston’s gonna show up. They don’t know if I’m having a bad day, if I’m gonna freak out. And so people in high performance in flow or in synchrony, depending on what research you’re using, one of the things they need is consistency of interactions. And so what I would suggest, if you’re a trauma surgeon or anything else, or if you’re in a call center, talking to people in crisis, your ability to control your cadence volume demeanor, your kill faces, we would say really matters, right? And I will tell you that some of the most extraordinary and famous trauma surgeons still say please and thank you during times where people are dying. And that’s the difference, right? The difference is being able to maintain your own behavior while still demonstrating passion and care and support and all that stuff, but not losing your mind.
Pat 08:30
Building off that consistency of behavior with communication, specifically looking at communication, what should a coach be aware of when it’s in a critical environment versus the routine, a practice, a controlled environment, and how they approach, speak, communicate with players or whoever they’re leading.
Dr. Preston Cline 08:50
Yeah, so just to give you some background on this concept of critical versus routine communication, we published this paper in Journal of Orthopedic Surgery a while back, and here’s what we found. We found that if you ask a group of people how to communicate in a routine environment, they’re going to say things like courtesy and respect and active listening. Put your phone away, focus on the person, be respectful, right?
But if I put you in a crisis environment, somebody’s dying, and I ask you, hey, what are your principles for that? It’s going to be like brevity, direction, being authoritative, being directive, speaking loudly and sort of monotone without a lot of emotion, sort of provoke people. And everyone’s going to nod at that, right? But then if I’m in the supermarket, listening to Celine Dion, right, sipping my coffee, and somebody shows up and starts talking to me like that person in that critical communication, I’m going to label them as drunk or aggressive or angry. And so the question then, and this is to answer your question, is that when a coach is seeing a threat of some sort, and they move to critical communication, but the players around them don’t know that. They don’t know we’ve gone from routine to critical. They’re just seeing it as we’re making the donuts right now. They don’t see the criticality. Then they’re not able to hear the urgency in the coach’s voice. They’re just like, oh, coach is in a bad mood. And that misalignment between what you’re trying to transmit and what people are trying to receive from a demeanor and expectation. And the coaches will say, well, they should know. They should figure it out. They should know from my body language and my tone and our experience together. And the problem is, in many teams, you don’t have players that long for them to build up that. And also, that’s a lot of waste of time. And so you need to spend a little bit of time beforehand with your players to say, hey, look, I’m going to talk to you this way and practice and grab lunch, whatever. And then if you see this or you hear me do this or I say this, you should know that I’m going to now go into data transmission. You shouldn’t hear any feedback from me. You should hear direction from me that you need to acknowledge. Don’t fight me. Don’t get bent out of shape that I’m hurting your feelings. I’m not. I’m giving you cues. I’m giving you direction. I just need you to do those things. If you’re not able to do those things and we have time, explain it to me briefly. But if we don’t have time, then expect we’re going to have a difficult conversation afterwards. All that makes sense. So in other words, you have to create an environment where your players know when you’re in a routine environment and when you’re in a critical environment and you have to set some expectations. But my answer to you is is that once the players know that you’ve moved from routine to critical and that may just be you say, hey, the whole game, we’re going to be critical. OK, let’s practice how that conversation is going to happen.
Dr. Preston Cline 11:25
And the reason for this, the reason this matters is because going back to this working load memory problem. If I’m a player and they’re responding to what I think the coach doesn’t like me or hates me or thinks I’m an idiot rather than the words he’s actually using, then you’re losing performance.
So there’s this great firefighter named Chief Pfeiffer from the FDNY. I followed it into burning buildings for about three days around New York City. And one day we arrived this fire and he’s famous. He’s the one that made the 9-11 movie about because of that. He’s famous in New York City. So everywhere he goes, even during fires, people are like, hey, chief, how are you? They want to shake his hand and stuff. He’s like trying to fight a fire. But when I’m following him, he’s going in and he’s a very high level chief and he has what are called battalion chiefs where these guys actually fight in the fire. They’re telling firefighters where to go and all that stuff. Right. So he arrives and he says to the fire chief, hey, what don’t I know yet? Or what am I missing? And then they proceed to tell him. And I asked him, hey, why do you lead with that after the fire was over? Why do you lead with that question? And he says the key thing about firefighting is you want your guys managing the fire, not managing you. And if I walk in and go, hey, why don’t you do this? Or how can you have all of a sudden they’re managing me? I know there’s stuff missing because it’s a fire. It’s chaos. Right. But if I say, hey, what don’t I know? Then they could look around, realize that they’ve missed some steps and then they can tell me and then I can say I’ve got some free hands. I’ll take care of it. So the point is, is what I’m trying to get at here is you want to create a dialogue so the players are managing the game, not managing the coach.
Pat 12:56
Preston, within this critical communication, as a coach, when you choose your vocabulary or your directives, is it kind of like know thyself or is it know your audience and how they’re going to best comprehend or retain the information?
Dr. Preston Cline 13:11
A couple of things. The research shows that if the players know that you care about them, they can take a lot of stuff. They can take swearing and abuse and all that stuff. And they’re like, gosh, emotional, we want them emotional. But if the players don’t believe you care about them, then that stuff is just distracting. So the know thyself part is really important. You got to know where you sit in this. Just because you’re the boss doesn’t mean you got buy in, right? That’s true with any team. And then secondly, the players kind of have to know. So there needs to be a dialogue. And it doesn’t have to be this long thought out kumbaya moment. It literally is me. Hey, as we’re talking, you should expect that when I’m talking to you, this is how you can pay me respect. This is how I play you respect in normal times. That’s how we’re going to do 90% of the time. However, during game times, especially in crunch moments, I’m going to switch. We don’t have a lot of time. So I’m going to do away with the niceties. And I’m probably going to be amped up. So I’m going to come off maybe a little aggressive. Ignore all that. Just listen to the cues that I’m telling you. Don’t worry about me and my emotions. I think you’re awesome, right? Just listen to what I’m telling you because maybe I can see some stuff you can’t see.
Pat 14:11
Preston, does a coach do his critical communication disservice when it leads into a routine environment
Dr. Preston Cline 14:18
Yeah. So the big mistake that we see with surgeons and other people is that everything’s a crisis. And the truth is, everything’s not a crisis. And you end up looking like a drama queen. You got to actually pick your fights. It’s that famous adage. I’m a big believer in leaders. Don’t yell a lot because when you need to yell, people need to be like, whoa, this is the thing you’re yelling all the time. Then when you really need to yell, everyone’s like, that’s a Thursday. So you really want to be really thoughtful about an intentional about the way that you’re engaging. That’s my big message.
And you see this. The teams that I work with were exceptionally intentional about tone, tempo, volume, demeanor, all that stuff. It’s very thoughtful. It’s very intentional. It’s not by accident. If people get jacked up, if people want to come rip your face off, sometimes it’s performative, but it’s meant to be performative. It’s meant that you should know this is the thing you’re not going to ever do again or you’re not going to be here anymore.
Dan 15:14
I think Pat and I both love the tone, the tempo, all that stuff. Could you go a little deeper on those things you just mentioned about communication, the tone, the tempo, like all the cadence of that? Because I think that’s really interesting.
Dr. Preston Cline 15:25
We have a professional storyteller on staff, a woman named Claire Murphy. And the reason that we have that is because in my world, for example, in special operations or tactical law enforcement, typically what happens is you’re an operator one day, and then you become, in your world, a coach the next day or an instructor cadre the next day. In professional sports, the research we’ve done, that’s actually very rare. So we interviewed Justin Longer, who was the famous Australian cricketer, who became the famous coach. And we spent a lot of time with him sort of talking about why he was able to do that. And it was a certain amount of IQ, it was a certain amount of he loves the game, and he loved the guys. And so he was able to have some humility to go, yeah, I was a top ranked player, I’m not anymore. Now I’m a coach. Now I’m trying to help not make you guys better versions of me, but better versions of you. And so when we talk about tone and tempo, you have to understand that the reason I bring up storytelling is because when you tell a story or you listen to people tell a story, good stories versus bad stories, if you just watch that, just be a student of people, you’ll notice that storytellers will use pauses, they’ll use volume control, they’ll go up and they’ll come down and lean in. They will be really thoughtful about the way in which they use their voice, the way they use their body language, the way they use personal space, what are called proxemics, personal space, intimate space, lunge space, fleece space, these things all exist deep in your brain, you’re not even aware of them. And then you talk to some coaches, I’m sure you and your people listening are familiar with this, but this concept of anchoring that we’ve learned from sports, this idea that it’s not enough to tell people what they’re doing wrong. If you don’t have a center line of what right looks and feels like, it’s a very inefficient learning process. So one of the old coaches have taught me is when you’re getting somebody to perform like a free throw or some thing that you have to do repetitively, you want to give feedback for a while, but every once in a while you want to get into their personal space, put your hand on their shoulder when they do it correctly and say, that’s what right should feel like. Remember that we’re talking this kinesthetic, it’s not an intellectual thing, there is some intellectual stuff, but it’s a combination of feels as well. And so knowing when to come in and be like, mark that inside of your body, that’s what right should look and feel like. That’s what you’re trying to get back to. I’m adjusting you to try to get you back to that. And so that’s what I mean about tone, tempo, volume, personal space. It’s all very intentional and thoughtful. What I see with coaches, and I’ll be critical here, and this is on any sport, is that often coaches are often a student of the game who get promoted, but not a student of the athletes. And there’s a difference, right?
Dr. Preston Cline 18:10
Because a student of the game is interested in all the things to put the right pieces together. A student of the athlete is a person of what makes this person tick and what levers can I pull to get the most out of them in a way they know I’m on their side, not from a Machiavellian place, but from a place of like, I really want them to be the greatest athlete ever.
Dan 18:31
Preston, if I could follow up on that, because in your work with situations that are critical, going back to the 300 seconds in time, and we’re talking about coaches and knowing the game versus knowing the athlete, and I assume that there’s a lot of work that goes in with you on knowing the people that are in your units because of when these 300 seconds are coming, the types of bonds and communications that has to be in place. I wonder if you could go deeper on that for us on just knowing people, why it’s so important in these critical situations.
Dr. Preston Cline 19:03
Yeah, so this is where my world and your world, I think different a little bit. Certainly what I’ve seen in professional sports. So I got my start as a wilderness guide. I’ve led expeditions on all seven continents with every kind of person from juvenile delinquents to corporate CEOs. And I have this personal little principle called distance to puppy pile. And I’ll explain it to you. If I take you guys on an expedition with a group of strangers, when you first meet, we’re doing gear check and all that stuff, you’re gonna be about hands distance away from everyone. Unless I force you together, you’re physically gonna be separated by about an arms distance or just a four arms distance physically from everyone. But once I get you cold, wet, tired and hungry, once I get you to pull off some things, once you live through a storm or have to get up early or all be super tired and support one another through agony and shared suffering, all of a sudden what will happen is that distance will start to close. And by the end of the expedition, if I take you into a big mess hall or a big restaurant or a staff lounge or something where there’s only one couch or one table, the whole group will all stuff into that couch. They’ll physically wanna be touching me. There’s a big room, but they don’t care. They all gather chairs. They’re all gonna be physically close to one another. They’re gonna wanna feel each other’s bodies around them. There’s a level of comfort and understanding and intimacy that comes with that. And so in my world, because of the nature of what we do, we’re trying to get to puppy pile. In your world, there are times where, in many times where you have athletes competing against each other for jobs. So you have some structural barriers to building the kind of cohesion that is required for true high performance. Where this is becoming a modern day kind of strategic threat actually is research we’re doing on a thing called tactical swarms. So for the last 50 years, if you look at the teams I work with, they all work on intact teams. Everyone can finish each other’s sentences. Everyone gets the joke. What we’re seeing worldwide now, or we’re seeing in tactical sort of trauma resuscitation is if you’re in a hospital right now, you’re wearing a beeper or a phone, the thing goes off and you rush to a room to resuscitate a patient. The people that you’re gonna be working in that 300 seconds, you might’ve never met before. And so these are called tactical swarms. People who don’t know each other, don’t have cohesion, coming together rapidly to try to execute against death. And we’re doing a lot of research to understand how do we accelerate cohesion in those environments? And it’s very difficult and we’re early days quite honestly.
Pat 22:35
If we can just kind of build off that. I know it’s early research, but what are we finding out about rapid cohesion? It’s interesting in the modern game of basketball with constant roster overturn, and this is a challenge of an uncertain challenge for coaches of how to build cohesion. So what are the early research showing in rapid cohesion?
Dr. Preston Cline 22:56
People are going to laugh at this, but the research on this is that you can look it up. It’s called the Surgical Scrub Challenge and what it was during COVID because everybody was so masked up. No one could see each other’s faces, which means I didn’t know your name and social anxiety is real. So what they found was by just writing their name on the top of their surgical scrub hat, they decreased social anxiety and increased performance. Even though we had worked together last week, I’d forgotten your name because I can only see your eyes. And I’m like, I’m sorry, I forget your name and you’re Patrick, you’re like, what do you mean? We worked together all last week. And so all we did was we put their names on their cap. I didn’t do this, but others did. And we supported it. And so what I would suggest and people will laugh at this, if you’re in that kind of a situation, everybody in your building has to put their name on the front of their shirt, their first name, their nickname, whatever they want to go by. That’s ridiculous. It’s not it’s not because people have a lot on their minds, they’re learning, they’re coming together. And the fact that I don’t know your name creates anxiety for me. And it’s not means I’m distracted for something else. It’s the lowest hanging fruit is the thing that has the highest return. It’s the dumbest thing ever. And it really works.
Dan 24:03
Makes sense. I guess a slight pivot in this. When we’re talking about navigating uncertainty, the other part is risks that are all around us and that a coach perceives all the time and just leaders in general. And I’d love to ask your thoughts on risks as it pertains to navigating uncertainty.
Dr. Preston Cline 24:22
The danger here is you’re asking me something. I wrote a master’s dissertation on so I’m gonna try not to spend the next four hours Dorking out on this. I’ll do it this way. Let me just ask you in your audience this Do you think it is reasonable and ethical don’t want to keep your family safe? Yes. Yeah. Yeah, right pretty straightforward Okay, can you name for me or anybody on his name for me a time in your life that you’ve been free and secure From danger harm injury and risk. I’ll say it again Have you ever from the Latin cell this which is the earliest definition of the word safe? Have you ever been free and secure from danger harm injury or risk you name a time probably not? No, you can’t so what we call safe is a metaphysical impossibility.
It used to be an old English a prayer It wasn’t until modern times that we become so arrogant that we think we can actually make things safe. We can’t that’s why there’s still incidents That’s why there’s emergency rooms. So what do we mean by that? We’re like well present. That’s ridiculous I obviously want to keep things safe. Of course you do But what you really are saying is you want to keep things secure Meaning free for anxiety and worry. That’s what secure means from the Latin secure press You don’t really want to keep things safe. You can’t do that What you want to do is keep things secure so that you’re not worried about it. This car. I’m driving is secure enough Right. And so what that gets at is not actual sad, but it’s feels So how do you feel about it? So when you talk about risk you mentioned the word perception risk is 100% about perception Because it’s the prediction of the future which we suck at now. I know that we’re any good at it We’d all be at Wall Street or Vegas, right? So if you’re not at Wall Street or Vegas is a billionaire you suck at risk just like everybody else All right, if you’re not predicting the outcome of your games 100% of the time take a deep breath You suck at risk. Welcome to being human. So what I would say is Understanding that truly understanding that taking a wrap off of it We would say taking a deep breath and being honest about yourself. What are your perceptions? What are the risks? What are you worried about? I would argue in professional sports that people are worried about the games but often as a proxy of worrying about their career because You guys eat your own on a pretty regular basis, right? And so what you do is you worry about if I don’t get this game I’m gonna lose my job and that fear is supposed to make you win the game What I would suggest the people win the game give up the fear, right? So you got to get away from fear
Dan 26:49
I found in preparing for this conversation, this part of your work, definitely very interesting. And when it comes to decision making and risks and the other thing I thought was interesting in your work was the amount of information needed to make a decision and we’re going in this uncertain moments and all that and how much leaders really do need or do not need when it comes to information in order to make decisions.
Dr. Preston Cline 27:15
So, there’s some neuroscientists that disagree with me on this. So, full disclosure, this is debatable science, I’m about to tell you, okay? So, I’m going to tell you my experience with it and my research, and I’m going to tell you what the opposition would say. What I would say is that your brain is actually much like what Common talks about system one or system two, fast and slow. What neuroscientists will tell you is the brain’s never doing, not doing something. So, it’s not a binary one or two. It’s a continuum. So, think more of center of gravity, like blood flow is going more to system one or system two. It’s really misleading because it’s not like there are two systems. But for our simple conversation, we’re going to call them system one and system two. What I would argue is that when you’re in a fast system, when you’re in a system one system, you’re not making decisions like you would to buy a car or to get toothpaste. You’re doing more of triggering pre-built heuristics and algorithms and habits. So, the problem with using the word decision-making is that there’s a couple of different ways to think about the brain. One is the brain is the same brain and has speeds, like making a cars or negotiating for a house is a slow speed, and then deciding a play in the finals is fast speed. What I would argue is that actually they’re two different systems and that you’re building your ability to navigate uncertainty in 300 seconds or less, but it’s not in traditional decision-making. That’s misleading. You’re not making decisions. You’re choosing among some pre-populated algorithms. You’re not introducing the zombie apocalypse. Like, there are no knowns, right? And then you’re deciding amongst them based on your historical understanding. When you have unconstrained time, temporarily unconstrained, where you’re deciding on a car, well, then you can introduce zombie. Well, maybe I don’t want a car. Maybe I want a motorcycle, right? Maybe I want a spaceship. Maybe I’ve got to design a spaceship. You can’t do that, that kind of ideation during the game. There’s no time. Brains not working that way. And so when we talk about decision-making, we have to be really thoughtful as what kind of time, again, we have. And if we’re in urgency to get away from this idea of decision-making and ask a different question, which is what are the variables that you want to engage with? And there’s a woman that we work with called Anne Gibbons, who works in a company called Matri Designs, if you look it up, M-A-T-R-I, and she’s doing what’s called data visualization using glyphs. So basically what’s happening is that she’s building maps for teams that show you a series of shapes and colors indicating every individual player, but also all the players together. So it’s a way to see complex data in a snapshot. Think of a map that moves with the weather. And so this will enable you, based on your existing experience, to take in trends, because that’s really what you want. You want to know what’s the trend in the game?
Dr. Preston Cline 30:09
What do I need to influence that trend? And so where the problem is, there’s going to be a long-winded way of coming back to your question is you don’t actually want to stop and try to take in a lot of information because you’re going to get at a flow state to do that. So you want just enough information that can give you just the amount of information you need to keep your momentum. If you’re going to stop and read War and Peace, the game’s over. So it’s both quantity, but also how it’s presented. I would be spending more time on data visualization than trying to analyze big data.
Dan 30:43
Following up on that Preston because I think in our world you’ve got depending on your level a number of assistant coaches and staffers behind you during a game in this sort of critical situation in a game you know as a head coach trying to stay in flow state but what is information that assistant coaches or say staffers should or could be giving to that coach that’s actually helpful and not taking them out of potential flow states of watching the game like what is a helpful staffer or assistant coach giving to the leader
Dr. Preston Cline 31:14
I am going to answer that in a roundabout way. What we’ve seen in the last five or ten years from special operations is this movement from leadership and followership to membership. So when we look at the evolution of problem sets, whether you use David Snowden’s Keneff and model or others, this idea that when things are very temporally compressed, constrained, when things are moving fast, it’s very inefficient. Me as the boss to be like, I need this or you do that, right? That’s a leadership followership. I’m waiting for the need. That’s super inefficient. The better model is one of membership, which is I own my problem and the boss’s problem. And the boss understands that. So I’m going to anticipate what the boss is looking at and I’m going to know when do I need to step in and when do I need to step back. And so if you look at a surgery of fluid surgery, like a trauma surgery, is the surgeon in charge? Of course they are, but they don’t have time to tell everybody what to do. So what’s happening is you’ve got scrub nurses, anesthesiologists that are working around that surgeon that are doing the things that have to get done without the surgeon telling them, but they also are watching the surgeon’s hands to know when to get their hands out of the way. They’re sequencing. So they know, when do I get in there? When do I get out of there? If somebody else is not able to, but I’m right there, then let’s say you, Patrick and Dan and I are working on a team and Dan, it’s really your turn to go, but you physically can’t get there. And Patrick’s right there. Then because he has what’s called shared situational awareness, he might glance at you, you nod, and then he sorts your problem. There’s no dialogue. It’s just an understanding that the mission comes first.
And so this idea of fluid behavior, fluid systems that allow for flow take over. So to answer your question, if the assistant coaches or whatever are asking themselves, I wonder if I should interrupt, don’t. In other words, if you’re not dead sure this is helping everybody and stay out of his way or her way.
Dan 33:07
You’re mentioning the surgeons and you mentioned a lot of work with that you said something earlier about communication in the middle of the surgery and you said that the top surgeon still will say please and thank you in the middle why is that important to the overall mission or two overall success of the surgery.
Dr. Preston Cline 33:25
Because you have to remember that in surgery, you have people from many different levels of experience. That could be your first day on the job as a doc or as a nurse or as a paramedic or as an anesthesiologist. And you’re freaking out inside because somebody’s on the table dying. You’re partly responsible for that life. And you don’t wanna be in the room to go tell somebody’s parents, their kid’s not coming home ever again. You’re emotionally amped up. You’re in the flow space, but you’re trying to figure it out. And it turns out that the manner in which I speak, highly controlled, and I learned this from Dr. Bill Schwab, one of the famous trauma surgeons in the world. And he basically said, listen, I am transmitting to my team. I got this, you guys, just do your chops. We’re working through this. And if you screw it up, I’ll try to fix it or you, and then we’ll have a conversation later about it. But this is kinetic, it’s scary, it’s whatever else. I’m not gonna add drama because all I’m gonna do is provoke your drama. What I’m gonna do is say, you’re part of a professional team, just dial it down, get some throttle control over your emotions and your adrenaline, all that stuff, you’re gonna burn yourself out. Breathe, right? Do parasympathetic breathing or box breathing or whatever choice you have, and then get it together and stay in the game. We need your focus here. And again, managing the problem, not managing me. And the tone and tempo has a lot to do with that. And please and thank you is a great way to transmit. This is just a Thursday for me. I know you all think this is the worst day ever, so it’s a Thursday for me.
Dan 34:49
Preston, thank you so much for all your thoughts on all of that. We want to transition now to a segment on the show that we call Start, Sub or Sit. We’re going to give you three choices, three options around a topic. Ask you which one you’d start, which one you’d sub, which one you would sit. And then we will discuss your answers from there.
So Preston, if you’re ready, we’ll dive into this first one. Bend it. This first one has to do with overcoming obstacles as either a person or as a team. And these are three different ways that a person or team can overcome an obstacle. So option one is by being robust, being able to take the punch, that option two is by being resilient, able to get back up. Or option three is by being mindful and dissipating the problem in the first place. So Start, Sub or Sit, those three different ways you think people in teams overcome obstacles.
Dr. Preston Cline 35:47
We started first working with teams. We came up with this because of the generational divides. That’s where this research came from. And so we talk about robust, take the hit, not fall down. Resilient, take the hit, get right back up because the guy was bigger than you. And mindful as you get older, get out of the way of the hit because I don’t need to be in this bar fight. So the challenge with answering your question is that it’s about knowing which of those to implement at certain times. There are certain times we see this at NASA Mission Control and others where a lot of drama is going on. And the boss needs you to shut up. At that point, take the hit and shut up. It’s not your job to argue your point. There’s too many things going on. So to be able to take the hit and shut up. However, at the end of that, I have to be mindful enough to come back and check in with you and go, hey, appreciate you stepping back there. I know you had some good points, but on our priority list, you were below the cut line. I’m not saying what you’re saying wasn’t important. It is, but it wasn’t important in 300 seconds or less. It wasn’t gonna be the differential. Resilience is this idea that there’s gonna be times where you lose, right? And you gotta get back in the game, especially first half, second half. You were gonna come in and maybe you’re not doing so well. You gotta like get out of your own way. And so in professional sports, I guess what I would say, if you look at baseball, because they have such a long season in so many games and they’re gonna overcome obstacles, you have to have kind of robustness built in or you won’t make the season. You gotta be able to just take the abuse of a long season and the physicality of that. And there’s gonna be good days and bad days because there’s gonna be resiliency because you gotta get up when you lose and celebrate. But overall, if you look at that long time horizon, you have to be mindful. So I guess if you forced me to, in that context, I would say you’d have to want to start, number one would be mindful because you gotta think about the whole season. You gotta know your rhythms, your ups and downs. Where do you prep? Where do you execute? Where do you recover? And how do you get in that sine wave? You have to know that ahead of time. Then you gotta be, two would probably be robust. You chose this life, it didn’t choose you. So they’re gonna have some bad days. You’re gonna be sore. And I don’t mean to say suck it up, but I mean, make friends with it. That’s gonna be part of it. And the last one, it’s gonna be resilient. Don’t be taking hits that weren’t aimed for you, first of all. Don’t be in bar fights you shouldn’t be in. Don’t be involved in stuff that’s not to do with you. But if it is involved with you and it was your time coming, don’t spend your time on the ground. Get up and get back after it. Now, one caveat here, there are gonna be times in your career, my friend Coleman and I talk about the difference of being tired, smoked and hurt.
Dr. Preston Cline 38:17
You can be tired, that’s part of the game. Smoked is, somebody needs to help you get up off the ground because you are smoked. Hurt is, don’t get up off the ground. Don’t be an idiot. And knowing the difference really matters if you wanna stay in the game for any important time.
Dan 38:32
Great answers there. We know it’s kind of an impossible question in a sense, but fun to hear you think through that and talk through it. I think in a lot of higher level sports, there’s a lot of talk and research on mindfulness piece and what it looks like for a high level leader coach to use mindfulness for high performance. And I guess what you’ve seen, whether it’s surgeons or in the military, that it’s effective outside of saying, Hey, taking a yoga class and doing a lot. But like in these critical situations, what that looks like.
Dr. Preston Cline 39:04
So now I’m going to say something super controversial. I’ve interviewed a lot of coaches around the world because I get called from them pretty often. We don’t really work with a lot of sports teams. And one of the reasons for this is this, I’m going to tell you as follows, with some exceptions, and there are some extraordinary exceptions out there, right?
Chip Kelly, I think is amazing. I don’t think the Eagles were the right place for him, but I think Chip Kelly in front of college students, maybe you’re not going to do better in football, quite honestly. And there’s some other coaches like that around, right? Justin Longer in cricket and others. And the reason I’m telling you this is because I’m not super impressed with most coaches for simply the way you got to be a coach is that you are assistant coach under somebody who won. It isn’t because you’re the best in the world at knowing how to develop other people. And so what ends up happening is that I’ll be talking to a professional coach and I’m an educator. That’s what all my research is in. So I’ll be wanting to talk to them about their theories behind human development. And they’ll just stare at me and it’ll be awkward.
And so what I would say is that mindfulness, one of the reasons we don’t work with professional sports a lot is because we’ll get a call and say, we want to reinvent baseball. We want to reinvent basketball. No, they don’t. That’s a nice thing to say, but basketball is basketball. No one’s changing the rules on that. You want to reimagine some things because you want to break some old patterns. I get that. That makes a lot of sense, but there’s no clever way to do that. It’s messy because we’re dealing with humans. So if you want to be mindful, that’s awesome. If you want to be the next cool thing, that’s awesome. But I promise you, if you want to improve your game, go have lunch with your players. Sit down and ask about their kids and get to know them. Find out what their goals are, where they want to go. Find out what they want to contribute, what they want to try, what they want to risk, what you’re willing to risk with them, be honest with them, be on their side, advocate for them, but also hold them accountable. Be tough, but accountable.
And so I’m saying all of this because mindfulness is often the latest thing that everyone’s going to get distracted by because they don’t want to deal with the messiness of the actual thing. The actual thing is people with emotions, better players and have egos that need to perform so you can all get paid. And I don’t mean to be like brutal about it, but we overthink this in our peril. And I think you can never forget that if you want to be mindful, be mindful towards the needs of the people working for you.
Pat 41:14
Preston, what you hit on, how important is for a coach to know people and to develop people? I know you’ve talked on this before, but what should a coach or a leader kind of know about the young athlete or the young recruit or the learner that we’re seeing come out of this generation, especially with COVID?
Dr. Preston Cline 41:36
Again, this research is just emerging, but I will tell you some things. Here’s what we know. Do you guys, let me ask you a question. Do you guys answer your phone when it’s an unknown caller? No.
Dan 41:47
Why don’t you? Don’t know who it is. Don’t trust who it is. Don’t trust it.
Dr. Preston Cline 41:51
So you have to remember that and most of the time the reason you don’t do it is because it’s a scammer It’s a ad if somebody trying to take your money these kids grew up in a world where they’ve always had a phone They have always had people trying to steal from them Always on the internet on the phone and their text everything. There’s always a scam So the thing is what they say is there’s no more country kids anymore.
There’s no longer any innocent like country bumpkins Everybody’s a city kid. Everybody knows the world’s out to screw them And so what that means is is these kids come in inherently mistrustful because they know the nature of the game the nature of the game Is to maximize their performance while they can to get the most amount of money out of them by paying them the least amount of money possible That’s the way the game was. I’m not being critical here. I’m just explaining how it works So what you’ve got to do is you’ve got to build up some level of trust with them because they’re coming in because they’ve Been taught from birth not to trust anybody in authority The second thing you need to understand is that when I was growing up if we went on a family road trip That meant sitting in the car being bored because there wasn’t anything to distract us on eight hours to go in a Michigan or whatever Now a kid growing up has always had stimulus always had a phone a tablet a computer Audio something and what that means is for a neurological point of view They have an underdeveloped default mode network, which is the ability or you’re the internal supercomputer to get activated when you’re bored So you ever had that problem you couldn’t solve and then you solve it the morning and then your shower it just comes to you That’s the default mode network. So this generation some postulate have an underdeveloped default mode network They don’t know how to be bored Why that matters is because when we see selection and elite teams like military teams We’ve always known that kids quit when it’s calm not when it’s busy so you can be stun They can do that all day long. You can you know, make them physically suffer. That’s not when they quit They quit when they’re sat down staring at a wall with nothing to do in their brain eats themselves And so what ends up happening is we need to start teaching these kids how to just manage their own brain their own inner monologues Right their own social anxiety all these things were like I’ll just work out. It’s not working out We have to be much more intentional about it
Pat 45:15
Even a move in here, we’ll move to our last start subset. This one is traits of a successful team. Option one humor option to their review process or option three weaponizing curiosity. That one’s easy, but.
Dr. Preston Cline 45:32
Then I’ll come back and explain it. I would put humor number one by a clear winner. Weaponizing your curiosity as a number two is a clear two, and then reviewing your events, learning from your mistakes. That’s a distant third. Reason for that is because, and I’ll explain each one of these, every team in the world, believe it or not, elite team selects on humor, even if they don’t talk about it. And the reason is you have to have a mechanism to soften the ups and downs. You have to have a way to build camaraderie and cohesion. It’s just super critical that you have humor and I can’t emphasize that enough. Weaponizing your curiosity, I will tell you again, I think I said this earlier, young coaches, the mistake that you’re making right now is that people ask you a question and you’re giving them an answer. Stop doing that.
When people give you a question, you answer with a question. And you can start by this. The way I understand what you just asked me is this, is that true? What have you already tried? Lead with inquiry. The best coaches in the world, if you watch them and listen to them, they ask questions more than they give answers. It’s the act of getting you to work the problem rather than rescuing you from the problem is make great coaches different than amateur coaches. Just watch them, you’ll see this for yourself.
And weaponizing your curiosity is that, it’s just always being curious. Don’t be afraid, no matter where you are, to ask the dumb questions. And for bosses, protect the people that ask dumb questions. Reviewing your process. Here’s the short answer to that. If you ask me right now if you’re to come to my house and I’m gonna give you directions from the airport to my house. So you’re gonna go on the highway, you’re gonna take this particular exit, you’re gonna make it right to the big tree, you’re gonna make a left. You’re gonna go down past a red house. By this time, you’re reaching for a pen because I’ve exceeded your working load memory. Now, if I tell you a story, you’ll remember that story next year.
And the reason is your brain encodes story different than encodes data. The mistake that people are making in their after action reviews and debriefs is they think that they can transmit data and people will learn from it. That’s not how teams or organizations or tribes learn. They learn through the narrative. So one of the things I would say, and this is the article we wrote in the Harvard Business Review and After Action Reviews, is as a coach, you should be less interested in what lessons they’re learning and more interested in what story are there telling themselves in the locker room on Monday.
Pat 47:38
A ton of good stuff there. I’d like to start first with humor, your start, and what role does the coach play in that? Meaning the coach and infusing humor versus just allowing the humor to naturally develop, I guess, amongst the athletes, the group.
Dr. Preston Cline 47:54
You know, I think we’ve all had archetypes of this, but what I find is a coach needs to be, especially a head coach, needs to be withdrawn and reserved and a little bit outside of the team. But I think every once in a while to show some humility and laughter and a little bit of self-deprecation goes a long way for the boys and girls to be like, my God, did you hear that? Right. And I’ll talk about that forever. So sort of picking your moments to be human is really important. In terms of humor, humor should always be self-effacing. It should never be humor at the cost of others or scapegoating or making fun of or demeaning. That’s why I have an especially dim view of practical jokes. Practical jokes is a very specific weapon and it’s a weapon. If you’re not careful, it’s an abuse of power. It’s a thing that’s excluding, but at other times it can be a thing to help somebody embrace some humility or take a deep breath in a tough time. You’d be really thoughtful about practical jokes. I don’t use them. I don’t allow for them, but there are times where I can see the logic in them. That’s how I think about humor.
Dan 48:52
I wanted to follow up on something you just said, what I found interesting was that the head coach probably should or is a little bit outside the group. Did you go a little deeper on that if that’s something that should happen or that just naturally happens or why that head coach should be a little bit or is a little bit outside of the whole group? Yeah, it’s because I think this is true with military commanders or surgeons or whatever. You got to remember that the coach is charged with one particular mission, which is winning games. His mission isn’t about making your career better. And so if he has to choose between winning games and bettering your career, he’s going to choose winning games.
As a result, there will always be that obvious boundary. And so what I would say is don’t let that boundary be an 80 foot tall fence you can’t get over, but also don’t pretend like it’s not there. It is there and everyone knows it. So finding a way to be respectful, but also being human and balancing that is both tricky, but possible.
Dan 49:49
Going back to the question two is your sit, which was the after action review. Obviously still super important.
I think I’ve seen you write somewhere that that separates good from great or bad from great teams is that they will review all great.
Dr. Preston Cline 50:04
Do after-action reviews well all bad teams either don’t do them or do them poorly And so all three of those that you gave me you have to do, but you asked me to force rank them
Dan 50:13
Yes, I did and then I guess then the difference between the bad and the great teams in that after-action review What’s the difference?
Dr. Preston Cline 50:21
Telling versus listening. So the bad after-action reviews is the boss comes in, tells everybody what happened and what they need to fix and leaves. That’s a waste of everyone’s time.
What you want to do is you want to walk in, find the youngest player, make them talk first. Tell us how you think the game went. Tell us the story of this game and then have everyone go around. You’ll learn more then and more things will come out of that than anything else. Why would you start with the youngest? Because if you don’t, they will not talk. If they’re the person they look up to or the coach talks first, they’re not going to say anything that might contradict them. You need to get in the habit of getting the youngest person to talk first. And by the way, protect them because they’re going to say some stupid stuff.
Pat 50:57
As coaches we use film to teach and to review. What, if any, are your thoughts on the film and how coaches should maybe be utilizing the film to help tell the story or influence the narrative?
Dr. Preston Cline 51:10
Yes, so what’s really interesting is when I’ve spoken to coaches in NFL and F1 racing, there’s a slow but forward movement to replace films with video games. And the reason is, is that a film is you’re looking down on a play and your brain has to make meaning of it.
But it’s not that hard to get a video game where you put the person actually in the position that they were in. And then with a little bit of work, code the game so you can replay that particular play. And by doing that, or even as a video where they’re first person like the graphics, then you’re able to actually get into this place where instead of them trying to figure out like what was I doing, they’re actually doing it. And the reason that I’m saying it this way is that when you talk to the coaches, the quarterbacks and the drivers are getting better because of games, they’re smarter athletes. It doesn’t mean they have the emotional, they don’t know how to get hit, they don’t know how to run into a wall. That stuff has to be negotiated, but they’re better at understanding the mechanics of the game because they’re looking at through the eyes of the computer.
Dan 52:13
Preston, you’re off the Start, Sub, or Sit hot seat. Thanks for playing that game with us. We know those were tough questions to answer.
Preston, we’ve got one final question for you here to end the show. But before we do, thank you very much for coming on today and sharing. This was really fun for us. So we appreciate your time. No worries. Thank you. Preston, our last question that we ask all the guests is what’s the best investment that you’ve made in your career?
Dr. Preston Cline 52:37
Having the courage to ask dumb questions, quite honestly, the idea that you can weaponize your curiosity and just not be afraid to walk up to a team that’s disfunctioning and they all think they have all the reasons why and then walk in and say something like, describe to me the first 90 minutes of when a player or a staff member comes here. And they’re like, what do you mean? Who cares? The research shows that if you’re not controlling that first 90 minutes, you’re influencing how long they’re gonna stay with you.
Then we’ve seen that in a bunch, Adam Grant and others have written on this. And so you really need to be thoughtful on things that look like they’re super nuanced, like who cares? They actually matter a great deal. And so literally like how people enter the court, how people enter their locker room, what can be said and not said in the locker room, all this stuff in the transition periods between things, ask the dumb questions. Why are we doing it that way? Why are they wearing that? Why do we get this bit of kit? If you can just give yourself some permission to look dumb in a game that does not like that and actually gives ammunition to those that want your job. But if you can get to a place where you and your team get permission to ask dumb questions, you’ll be surprised how much you reveal very, very quickly and how many of those solutions cost pennies of gold.
Dan 53:55
All right, Pat. Wow. Yeah, that was really insightful. My brain is kind of going a mile minute right now trying to think about what to add to that, because it was just unbelievable thinking about all the things he said. Really, really excited.
We had Dr. Preston on today. We heard from people that connect us to him how great he was at what he does, and he did not disappoint. That was fantastic.
Pat 54:21
No, yeah, like I said, it’s kind of information overload right now. Maybe I’m trying to look for trends rather than much data.
Dan 54:27
Right that conversation for us was like mission critical trying to just keep up with him. Yeah
Pat 54:33
Yeah, I felt like I had 300 seconds of oxygen left the whole time.
Dan 54:38
No doubt. We’re going to do our top three or try to just do our top three takeaways here from the podcast. And so I will kick it off with my number one takeaway here. And this is difficult to pull one thing out of that first bucket for me, but I think I just really enjoyed the whole thing around time and the communication, the thought processes, the risks, everything that we got into around time. So we obviously aren’t in a situation where we have 300 seconds life or death, like what works with a lot of his teams. We know that.
But I think there’s a lot of learning that comes from studying those teams and obviously talking to someone like him about how that works in our minds and in-game coaching. It’s fascinating for us, the great in-game coaches and the difference between in-game and say practice and training. And I think that’s for us, like talking basketball now, I think listening, I was thinking a lot in my mind, kind of the differences between the two and what it’s like to be in a huddle in a time out, 30 second time out down the stretch, pack gym, tie, you know, all these things that are weighing down on us as a coach is much different than when you’re putting together a practice plan, you got a couple hours, you know, preseason, things like that. And I just found that to be super interesting.
And the things I took out were just the tone and the type of ways that you need to communicate in the critical moments, being different, but then also on top of that, the relationships that you have to establish beforehand to get to those points so that it’s effective.
Pat 56:21
What I really like, we talked about the distinction between critical and routine, but the importance to I think define it to your team so that in these critical moments in a game, the players aren’t looking at you like, yeah, coach is just like losing a shit, but they actually understand like, no, he’s trying to transmit a message because we’re at a critical phase of the game where it has to be direct, it has to be precise, but investing the time prior to with your team, making them understand this is how I’m going to communicate in these critical phases versus, yeah, in a practice environment with time, this is how I’m going to communicate. And it kind of dived into then knowing yourself as a coach too, and how best you can communicate and communicate in a consistent manner within this critical.
And then within the routine, I think is also the next key point being consistent and holding yourself to that standard. Also then being aware of not letting that critical communication bleed into maybe routine moments, routine environments that will then like adversely affect your ability to communicate within the game, you can’t just run hot 24 seven.
Dan 57:29
I think the work he’s done with like the surgeons and all that stuff is fascinating because how stressful that situation is and like how they have to communicate. But also when you talk about running hot and all that, you can’t really, like you talked about flow state in a game and try not to be pulled out of that. It’s not like you’re unemotional, you just can’t let those emotions, the peaks and valleys, if they’re too high or too low, it affects the mission. He talked about the mission and I thought it was interesting. We got the role of assistant coaches and staffers with the head coach. Everybody’s serving the mission and if everybody’s overly emotional or up and down or there aren’t processes in place, it can make it, it’s already messy, right? The game is just unpredictable and all that, but it can make it even messier and then the outcome more unpredictable.
Pat 58:14
So to build off your point that you mentioned with the staff and these critical moments, when you got into the conversation about the role of risk in these uncertain situations and how a staff should be operating, and he said, not as a leadership followership, but more as a membership and that you’re going to have more effective decision-making in how you’re processing these, what he likes, they’re looking for trends and working together rather than the head coach always having to give the orders or taking away from their flow state, but rather this assistance working around him and being able to have shared situational awareness he mentioned.
Dan 58:50
We could probably just spend another hour talking about that first bucket, but for time purposes, we should probably move on to the second takeaway, and so I’ll kick it to you now, the second takeaway.
Pat 59:00
Yeah, the second takeaway I had was we talked about a little bit in the first bucket. Then with our first start subset about overcoming obstacles, we dove into a little bit more. But on the topic of knowing the athlete or getting to as a coach, the importance of really knowing the person versus over knowing tactics or what was it I wrote down the being a student of the game. And I will say this reminded me to a little bit of our conversation with Peter Lonergan. And he said, like, all the young coaches, like X’s and O’s, technology wise, light years ahead of as, you know, coaches were, you know, in the past, but their ability to create relationships or understand people is where the kind of the gap is. I mean, obviously press and raise the importance of that. But then when we dove into what the current athlete kind of looks like on like a baseline level route, regardless of skill, talent, but just who these athletes are who these participants recruits in his case are and talking about the effect technology has had on them and their ability to form trust or that they’re just more distrustful of the world. And also their struggle with boredom. And I mean, I think we talked about through the mindfulness piece of the start-substick question, the importance of that place. But I thought that was a really important conversation. And we as coaches just being aware when we recruit these young athletes or when they join our team and building cohesion, all these variables that go into creating successful team before we even hit the court and start talking about pick and roll coverage and schemes, but just for sure, getting to know the athletes, but then also maybe just having this understanding of the background. What the current athlete has had to deal with coming out of COVID and in the new as the world continues to evolve technologically.
Dan 01:00:41
Yeah, I think that the question within this was the source of sit about overcoming obstacles and robust resilient or mindful and obviously all of those like he’s mentioned are needed and it depends answer obviously because it does of course and I think what’s interesting was like with the mindfulness piece like he mentioned how it is important but more important than all of these things per se was just go talk to your players go sit down and be with them and that’s gonna help you solve many of the issues because you’re gonna like any go went back to even his best investment questions like asking questions the best leaders in the world don’t pretend to have all the answers all the time but are always asking questions and I took that out of I don’t know if that was quite in that conversation but it just felt like a theme of the show today was just the great ones have more questions than answers and I would say you and I feel that way about the great coaches on this podcast some of the best minds we’ve had on the show in our sport after the show are very humble about their conversation with us and have more questions about anything I think that’s something you and I always take away.
Pat 01:01:49
Yeah. Your team is going to need so many different things throughout the point of the season. And if you don’t take the time to know them and to understand who you’re coaching, very often does it really actually probably boil down to like the X’s and O’s and just tactically, if you don’t consider who the person is, who you’re teaching, I just don’t think the true success is going to lie in like, well, we’re just going to hit the court and we’re just going to rep the shit out of our EHOs. Well, you should.
Dan 01:02:13
do that too. Moving on to our last takeaway, and I’ll take that one, and within the other start-sub-sit, the traits of successful teams, a ton in there, of course, as well. I just was really excited. We finally got someone that started humor. That was my takeaway too. We’ve sprinkled in humor as a coaching trait for four years, and it’s never gotten above a sub.
Pat 01:02:40
No one’s gave it like the, the time of day that we even wanted to ask like a follow up on it. It was so clear a set, but all right, we’ll hit on the other two.
Dan 01:02:50
But Preston started humor and I’ll just start with it there I think it was the way he talked about it was great and he made a differentiation of things like hey practical jokes or a No, yeah, I get that I think it is a long season for all of us and being able to I think what humor can have and the way it can Be portrayed is like a sense of humility about self-effacing about mistakes about getting through hard times and you know It is such a trait to be able to laugh together groups that have fun and all that They just bond and they get through stuff and even in times if it’s like at the expense of the coach being able to make Fun of yourself as a coach sometimes with the group like it just can ease the tension and the way he spoke on it was great And I was just so excited. I put exclamation marks by it, but we finally got humor to the top. Yeah
Pat 01:03:39
Yeah, I think it kind of bleeds into his point about like the social anxiety piece and the kind of the other point I did like in the first book was the name tags and I mentioned to you prior to we like, I like that idea of just reducing social anxiety. And I think the humor plays a role in that throughout the season, like we’re all going to do dumb shit at some point of the players coaches alike. And like you said, having the humility to self facing to take it like all yourself out allow, you know, to be part of the joke plays a huge role in just the cohesion and elevating the team spirit, but then relaxing the mood and there’s so many peaks and valleys in the season. And like, I just think you do yourself a disservice if you’re taking yourself so serious all the time.
Dan 01:04:19
This conversation I was thinking a lot about as well. Owen Eastwood, we had on a couple of years ago talking about psychological safety and how for groups to trust each other and move forward and go through all the hard times, like you have to feel psychologically safe. And I know Dr. Preston was saying, you can never be safe, you can be secure. Going back to that first bucket. But some of this stuff, the humor, the group dynamic element, Owen Eastwood was talking about, that was such a huge, important piece of high-performing groups is that they felt psychologically safe within the group. And the self-effacing part of yourself as a coach or the humor of a group goes a long way in helping with that for sure. I won’t go down the rabbit hole too much on it, but within that too, I just really thought the storytelling element was big too. And that people remember stories, your brain functions differently than if you’re just giving them stats and data. And I thought your follow-up was great about film.
Pat 01:05:15
To start with our misses, that was one of mine. I would have followed up more just on like the importance of a narrative and cohesion and after action reviews and storytelling and how we as coaches can be better at it and help try to form the narrative. And maybe when the narrative gets bad in the locker room, how to fix the narrative, I would have loved to have gone down that rabbit hole more. And then, you know, even as we were signing off with Preston, he gave you a great advice with like the first meeting and your first impression and what we as coaches can do to influence the narrative with just that first meeting. He gave some great advice to you about either catering it or being of service to them by bringing them some food, something to drink. And I think that all kind of led together with this, the narrative piece that we as coaches always got to be thinking about and understanding I think do like where we’re at in the season and the story of the season.
Dan 01:06:08
I agree. And I’m with you on that. I think we could have spent a lot more time on story narrative. My other thing for me was you just touched on a little bit too, but the after action review, I think he’s written about that and he had like the three questions that you have to ask in an after action review, the what happened, the why it happened, and then now what was part of like what he wrote about. And we touched on the review stuff a little bit and he mentioned how important it was, but I could have gone down that rabbit hole too of let’s look at an elite performing group and what does their after action review look like and trying to think about post practice, post games for us. How can we be elite at that stuff would have been fascinating too.
Well, once again, we thank Preston for coming on today and sharing a ton of great insight. Thank you everybody for listening and we’ll see you next time.