In this week’s episode of the Slappin’ Glass Podcast, we sit down with master storyteller and communication expert Clare Murphy to explore how narrative, connection, and shared experiences shape the cultures of high-performing teams.
Working with leaders across sport, business, and mission-critical organizations, Clare has spent decades studying how humans actually absorb meaning, build trust, and transmit belief. Her core idea is simple yet powerful: culture isn’t built through information—it’s built through story, shared experiences, and the everyday moments that shape how teams communicate and relate to one another.
“Culture is the water you swim in every day.” — Clare Murphy
Throughout the conversation, Clare helps coaches rethink how they approach team communication, leadership, and culture-building, from the stories we tell our players, to the narratives we carry about ourselves as coaches.
We also explore how storytelling can be used to accelerate cohesion within teams, why great cultures rely on flexible leadership and shared ownership, and how simple rituals, traditions, and reflection practices can strengthen belonging within a group.
Clare also challenges coaches to reconsider some of the most common communication environments in sport—such as the halftime locker room—and how leaders can better regulate emotion, simplify messaging, and transmit belief during high-pressure moments.
The conversation ultimately centers on a powerful idea: the stories teams share and the narratives leaders embody become the foundation of culture itself.
What You’ll Learn
- Why shared narrative and storytelling are powerful tools for building team cohesion
- How coaches can use stories and rituals to strengthen trust and belonging within their teams
- The concept of “membership over leadership” and how flexible leadership can strengthen team culture
- Why information overload often undermines communication in high-pressure moments like halftime
- How leaders can transmit belief, confidence, and clarity through presence and emotional regulation
- The role of co-creating team narratives with players to build ownership and accountability
- Why coaches must examine the stories they tell themselves about their leadership and identity
- How building a trusted peer network or coaching “tribe” can accelerate development and combat coaching isolation
Transcript
Dan 02:29
Clare, thank you so much for coming on the show today. We’ve been looking forward to this for a long time, so thanks for making the time for us.
Clare Murphy 02:35
My absolute pleasure, gentlemen, and thank you for inviting me.
Dan 02:39
Absolutely. We are really excited to dive in today. And I know there’s so much work that you do as someone that works with the power of story and communication and narrative for all types of organizations and teams. And so we wanted to start kind of right there and sort of a big broader topic at the top here, but that’s how to build a culture that’s centered around communication and cohesion and building that communication and cohesion, especially as basketball coaches, we’re in these high performing environments and the role that story and narrative plays in building that communication and cohesion.
Clare Murphy 03:13
Yeah, that is a massive topic. So the culture is the water you swim in every day. It’s all of these micro communications, the little meetings, the thing that happen in the hallway, the things that happen on the way to the meeting, what happens in the meeting, how long people’s days are, how vital information is shared on any given day, how you deal with failure after it happens, what leadership looks like both on the hierarchical scale, because I know you all have head coaches and there’s this real strict hierarchy, but there’s also the moving leadership that happens within a team and how mentorship happens. Culture is this phenomenally expansive organic topic that requires you to pay a lot of attention and to attend to it. You would attend to a garden, right? So if you attend to your garden, which I often don’t, it ends up looking like an absolute wilderness and all kinds of plants growing in all kinds of directions because I’ve just left it alone. I feel like sometimes in elite sports and it’s not just in basketball, there’s this tendency to attend to the outcome. How do we get them to the outcome, right? Because we’re dealing with these incredible athletes who have to be primed to get to this point and they’re vulnerable and all of that. But I also think about the culture of the coaches themselves, what they sacrifice, what they go through. So I’m going really wide at first because I think how we understand culture is really important. And I’ve talked to, I don’t know, at this stage, hundreds of coaches since I first entered your amazing world, which is only one of the worlds I walk in, right? So there’s people in other worlds that have similar problems, but the coaches have sacrificed a lot to be a coach. It seems to me to come from a real place of passion and everybody wants to get everybody else to that end goal. The way you feel safe, the way you stop someone feeling vulnerable and make them feel safe enough to want to share and communicate is for them to feel part of a tribe, a unit, a family structure. And that requires a lot of care and maintenance to make sure that all the ways and methods of communication are being looked after. And it’s not down to one person to do that. One of the negatives I see in your world is a really high attrition rate with coaches. And it’s often like, you know, if a head coach comes in, they want to establish their culture, a new culture. They want to bring all that with them. They want it to come from the top down, which is really, really hard because culture comes from the ground up, right? But then they’re gone in two years. And then the coaches underneath them are constantly dealing with power vacuum, power vacuum. So I think there’s a lot
working against you in terms of trying to build cohesion. And so I’m thinking about the coaches who are staying with teams and maybe no other coaches on that team. So they already have that level of intimacy and trust, which means they can try new things or they can establish traditions and conditions of safety that allow for good communication.
Pat 06:04
you raise a good point with the coaching attrition and that, you know, maybe we are just briefly in one spot before moving. And I think a lot of the basketball landscape too is starting to change where players are also moving quite frequently. So when you have a coach and player coming from different spots and they’re coming together for what can only safely say will be eight months, you know, before who knows what’s going to bring next month, maybe if I look at like hierarchical, we have to make decisions as a coach. We have to try to steer the ship, but how should we be thinking about hierarchy? You mentioned like a moving leadership versus the hierarchical top down, I guess. What would be your recommendation with coaches in this new environment that everyone’s kind of going to cross paths briefly before moving to create this cohesion and this belonging?
Clare Murphy 06:48
It’s a good question. There’s a lot of different ways to do it. The idea of flexible leadership comes from Preston, Dr. Preston Klein, who you’ve spoken with before. It’s the idea of membership rather than leadership. We’re looking at always the new edge of leadership. Is it empathetic leadership? Is it this kind of leadership? With membership, you get membership and followership. It means that on Monday in the middle of the briefing or in the middle of the training, Pat needs to be leading because he’s set this up and he’s got the plan. But halfway through, we hit a problem that is really more Dan’s world. Pat is able to step back in that moment. Dan’s able to step forward. That kind of flexibility, which is a flex of the ego of everybody involved, what are you in service to? If you’re in service to the greatest outcome for the team, not the greatest outcome for yourself. That’s the kind of cultural ideas that have to be sewn in regularly. In basketball, that’s going to be harder because the players have to be in a way thinking of their own career and trajectory. There are little things you can do. I think a lot about ritual, ritual and ceremony, which are tied to tradition. One of the ways we transmit culture is through story. The stories we tell, I’m happy to talk about that. But there are little rituals you could create as coaches. You don’t have to be big. They don’t have to be showy. They don’t have to feel a bit saccharine or twee, as we say in England. So this feels contrived and false and a bit folksy. But sometimes traditions just emerge. Everybody touches that one post, the one photo of the player that used to be there and had passed away, or everybody remembers that one coach who left that mark on the wall or whatever it is, and that becomes something that bonds everybody. You can create things like that, how you start meetings, how you end meetings, what you draw attention to, how you celebrate your wins, what wins look like on any given week. So there’s the win of the team. There’s how many points you score where you move on the table and all of that. But then there’s the internal wins, members of the staff that you celebrate. I remember a friend of mine who’s a coach in the NFL was talking about managing new players. And he was talking about them coming in from college football. It’s just enormous behemoth of an industry with all of this money in it. And then they come in to the NFL, which is very different. And they come in with a lot of expectations. And he was saying that one of the things they do on the first day is they gave them two jobs. One was to clean out the locker that they’d be using for the year. And the other was to go learn the names of all the cleaning staff in the building. And they gave that to everybody. So that’s a really small thing. But you see how quickly that would reset your expectation of where you are in the hierarchy, where you belong and who you owe a relationship to.
Dan 09:34
It reminds me a little bit of, I know you’ve done some work with the All Blacks and they have the sweep the sheds, I believe is part of their motto with some of their top leaders and things like that. It reminds me a lot of that. Could you go a little deeper on, I really liked the membership rather than the leadership. And when you work with what you would consider to be a great organization or culture that has this cohesion, how they handle failures, what that looks like on a day-to-day basis from the leader, from the other leaders within the group. I know everybody’s different, but what in general is happening with failure in good cultures?
Clare Murphy 10:07
I’m totally honest with you, there aren’t that many large organizations that are great.
Pat 10:12 Sure. Yeah.
Clare Murphy 10:13
Because the bigger the organization or institution gets, the bigger the culture, the more anonymous the people, the more
that gets lost. So how have I seen failure done well? I mean, mission critical for sure. The way Preston talks about failure handles failure. He openly discusses examples of failure from within his own career, but also within all of the mission critical teams that he works with. And he cites those examples not to bring shame or throw shade on anybody, but to say, this is what happened over here with this incredibly elite team, this is what they did. One thing Preston always does is he uses stories all the time, all the time. But he uses stories when he’s trying to teach something. And we forget that we’re living in such a time of information overload, this addiction to what we think of as knowledge, but it’s not knowledge. We think that if we get online and we read everything we can about basketball, we’ll know everything we can about basketball. But you two know that it’s the playing of it year after year, it’s the watching the teams, it’s the coaching the team. And you get what they call a mission critical task at knowledge, which is what everybody has. It’s the knowledge in your body. And we’re so addicted to knowledge and wanting to get better at things. We think that just putting in information will get there. The problem with that is we’re not machines. And we are interacting with machines as if we can cope with that level of information, but it never gets turned into knowledge. So what Preston does really effectively is he’ll say, OK, here’s a way to think about leadership. This is where the ego can get in the way. Here’s an example of it happening in real time. And what the brain does in that situation is you hear about the problem and you’re like, oh, I’ve got that problem in my organization. Then he tells you a really interesting story about a plane crash. And you see the whole story in your head because your brain is built for story. This is the great joy of my work, right? I’ve been saying for a long time that we’ve been telling stories for about 100,000 years, but there was some new archeological data came out a few months ago, which says that there’s a chance that we’ve been gathering around fires for 400,000 years, which makes a little bit more sense to me. Anyway, whether it’s 100,000 or 400,000 years, we’ll never know because we’ve no written records. We’ve been doing this for a phenomenally long time. And we know for sure that we’ve only been writing for about 10,000 years, but mass literacy is kind of only since the printing press. And even then we’re looking at only several hundred years really since everybody was able to read. So when present tells that story and the room is listening to it, everybody sees the story, but what kicks in in the brain is this incredible dance. You get your motor cortex lights up, your language cortex lights up. You get all kinds of neurochemicals, right? So you’re getting dopamine serotonin, oxytocin, a little bit of cortisol. What that starts to do is, well,
it does a lot of different things, but you also see the story in your mind’s eye.
Clare Murphy 13:03
And you’ve had this happen, right? You’ve been told the story and suddenly you’re seeing it play out. When you see it play out, your oxytocin is activated so you have empathy. So you start emotionally wrestling with it. So you’re already trying to figure out what would you have done that situation? So if you’re a player or a coach and you’re listening to that and you’re going, I would never put a player through that. Oh, but wait, that reminds me of this one time that I did do that. And your emotional intelligence goes through the roof because you’re, and this is why every religious and spiritual leader since forever has used story because you can’t give someone the truth, but a story gives you a vehicle by which the person listening to you can find their truth in it. And so in terms of communication and cohesion, you want to build culture. What are the stories you’re telling? How are you telling them? How often are you telling them? And I’m very aware, by the way, that you are time poor people. Pretty much everyone I work with is time poor, but when you don’t make room for storytelling and you rely only on information, I’m just going to download this into player’s heads. Then you’ll come up against blocks because their brain’s going to be taken so much. Also, how much are you telling them at the halftime? How are you telling them that at the halftime? I’ve got a whole thing there. But when you tell them a story, their brain attaches meaning to the information and decides that it’s significant and therefore lodges it in long-term memory. So a story you give a player or a coach can then be their teacher for like seven, eight, nine, 10 years, if it’s useful to them. And then they start to carry that. So if your story is about sacrificing yourself for the team and you’ve got a really good example of that, or a coach that went rogue and ended up, whatever the story is, the kind of knowledge inside of it then gets carried and that infiltrates the culture.
Pat 14:41
And you mentioned how often and if the story hits at Mark, do you need to only tell it once? And but you just need to keep telling different stories. I guess at the how often aspect of it.
Clare Murphy 14:52
So unfortunately, the answer is, it depends. It completely depends. And there’s no right length for a story. There’s no right time to tell a story. There’s no exactly right story for every situation. When I say, you know, make sure you read, like you tell stories, I want you to have as a coach, enough stories in your pocket that you could tell them at a moment’s notice, depending on the situation. Is this story called for or that story called for? If you tell it once and it lands, you might never need to tell it again. But with a turnover of players and coaches, that might be the kind of story that you can return to, or maybe it becomes a quick metaphor, where all you have to say is, you take an image from the story and you reference it
and it triggers that response in the person’s head. But stories themselves, some stories will fit really well into one minute, and some stories need four minutes for them to work. If you try and find the silver bullet, and there’s hundreds of books that’ll promise you the silver bullet, this is how you tell a perfect story, I’m a big disagreeer with that. Because like the way Patrick tells the story is going to be different to the way Dan tells a story. Some people are really funny, really funny. And a lot of your coaches listening are going to be sitting there going, yeah, but I’m not funny, so therefore I can’t tell stories. The truth is, there’s as many kinds of ways to tell stories as there are kinds of people. Every one of us can get better at it. Some people are born gregarious and extroverted and funny, and they can just be like, ah, yeah, yeah, and it’s that kind of down the pub storytelling, and that’s what most people attribute to storytelling, which is why they don’t want to do it at work. But if you look at something like, have you read Don Coyle’s The Culture Code?
Dan 16:19 Yes.
Clare Murphy 16:20
It’s crammed full of stories and from the elite sports world and those stories just continue to walk around my head and continue to give me knowledge. So when you make time for it, you’ll start to realize there are many kinds of stories and the better you get at telling them, the more adept you’re going to be like, okay, I’m standing in a hallway. This player is really crushed by what’s just happened. I’m going to share that story from 15 years ago when I was making something up there, but that can create a bond. So when you tell a story, you engender trust, you can create bonds. So that goes back to your cohesion and communication question. There was, you probably know this better than I do, but there was a coach and she did an exercise with a basketball team in the States. I can’t remember which one because I heard this through like six degrees of separation from a coach in England, but the three H’s. So she ran this exercise for the whole team. So players, coaches, everybody had to do it and she gave them several months to do this, but they had to do the three H’s. They had to each tell a hero, hardship, and highlight story from their lives. And they did a team meetings and things like that. Well, what ended up coming out was all these things nobody ever knew about the other people, people’s family members who’ve been in serious medical situations. You have people talking about their dads. And of course what happens when you disclose interesting things about yourself is other people are like, I mean, this is this incredible thing about storytelling, the universal currency, right? People start thinking about their dads, or they didn’t know you went through that last year and that explains your behavior. It immediately builds trust, which is why most religions have story at the heart of them. And like I did work with the NHS, the National Health Service in England, in the pandemic, right? They brought me in as their storytelling residents, which I was not for the whole NHS, just for a little section of it, because it’s enormous. But I was really honored because I was aware of what a difficult situation they were in. And I said, how much time can I have with them? And hilariously, they said 90 minutes with each team of 12 people. I was like, that’s what I get for the whole thing. I get 90 minutes with each team. They’re like, yep. I’m like, that’s great. Thank you. I’ll teach them as much as I can in 90 minutes. But in that 90 minutes with several teams, I played this little game. It’s really simple. Just called talk for one minute. Most facilitators know it. Get each person to speak for 60 seconds. And it’s similar to the three H’s. But you give them strict parameters, which are speak for 60 seconds about something you’re passionate about that isn’t work. They couldn’t talk about medical. 12 people, 12 minutes, stopped every three people to have a little kind of reflection on their storytelling skills. By the end of the 12 people, you’re looking at 20 minutes.
Clare Murphy 18:58
That’s 20 minutes of my 90 minutes. They talked about all kinds of things. They talked about cold water swimming as a coping mechanism. One woman talked about fixing up a VW van. And everyone was like, oh, yeah, I love VWs. You know, they were all smiling. And then she said, so I can park it in my dad’s garden because he has Alzheimer’s. And it means I can go look after him. And, and, and, and, right? So all 12 people spoke. We get to the end of the 90 minutes. They’re about to go back into the pandemic, back into a really, really, really challenging time. And I was asking for closing thoughts. And one person said, I’ve worked with this team for seven years. I learned more in that 12 minutes than I have in seven years. Right? So time poor, but if you coaches can find a way, which is hard, I’m aware. When you build that connection and cohesion, other things grow from that loyalty grows from that trust grows from that, right? It’s really hard to quantify. It’s going to lead to this. You have to be willing for it to be a little bit organic and slow, but the outcomes are incredibly positive.
Dan 20:07
A quick heads up for coaches, the NABC Convention is coming up April 2nd through 6th in Indianapolis. And no matter your title or level, if you’re a basketball coach, you belong at the NABC Convention. Develop as a coach and grow as a leader over five days of Exyno clinics, educational sessions, networking, awards ceremonies, and more, all alongside college basketball’s
championship stage in Indianapolis. This year is especially exciting for us, as the NABC is also our newest partner here at Slap It Glass, so we’re thrilled to be part of the convention in a deeper way. We’ll be there hosting a classroom-style film session, breaking down some of the game’s best trends from around the world. What we’re seeing show up across all levels, why it’s working, and how coaches are teaching it. You can register now for the convention at nabc.com slash convention. We’ll see you there.
Pat 21:00
Claire, at the beginning, before we started recording, you mentioned that reading, telling, or co-creating stories. And so far, we’ve been talking a lot about like telling stories and the power that telling stories has in communicating culture or loyalty. Maybe this ties back to when you talk about ritual ceremony, but how can coaches understand like when to co-create a story or do co-creation with their group and their team?
Clare Murphy 21:24
That’s really juicy, that question. Okay, so we have to give context. We were talking about Dan’s kids and we were talking about this is really important because generally we don’t co-creation doesn’t come up. So co-creating with kids is really fun. And it’s really, really good thing to do. Most parents worry about just not being clever enough or inventive enough. But what it’s doing for your kids brings amazing. But what it does for a team is really interesting. I don’t know if anybody’s looking at that. Now there are a couple of teams looking at it. Coaches are From what I’ve seen in the various sports in the UK, I’ve worked not much, but a little bit in the US. Coaches are obsessed with getting the right theme, getting the right story for a season, getting the right motivation. But co-creating the story of a team with the players is a phenomenally good idea, if you can make time to do it. It was done recently with, I think it was Gareth Southgate in football where they made a play of it, but he went and asked all the players what it meant to be English and what it meant to play for England, and then they made a play from that. So it’s exactly what you’re talking about. When you co-create, so storytelling is inherently an act of co-creation in the sense that if I tell a story and you listen to it, but you paint the picture in your head, which gives you ownership over the story. I don’t ever own the story. There’s a great Punjabi phrase. Once the story leaves the mouth of the storyteller, it becomes the property of the listener. But in the sense of what you’re talking about, if you were to co-create with the players and there’s a number of different ways that you could come at that, if you’ve got reticent players, when you use their words and their ideas and their images, and you build that up to make a story of the team, say after several weeks, folding in all the different elements, you start encouraging agency, responsibility, accountability, contribution, and then this idea, metaphorically of being a part of a larger whole, like a larger piece. It would have to be facilitated, you know? I get that it’s hard for coaches because they’re going in there every day and they’re having to show up with something new, some new way to motivate. So it might be easier coming from someone, not the main coach, because sometimes the players will have like certain resistance to that. So you might need to put it to a side coach who can be the kind of foil, as it were, in terms of clowning, right? The one who comes up with the wacky ideas, let them do that, but it’s a really powerful way also to make meaning. I’ve got a little story about this. It’s really short. It’s just about a friend of mine who was a nurse and she was serving in Kuwait in an army hospital. She told me this story. So you’re talking about a field hospital, planes going overhead, you got injured coming in every day.
Clare Murphy 23:57
She was the head nurse of her unit. There were three units of nurses. They worked 12 hours on, 12 hours off. When they landed, she made a leadership decision that she got a lot of flack for. She said, we’re going to meet every day at the same time. They were like, but like half of us are asleep. She’s like, don’t care if you’re in pajamas, don’t care if your hair’s not brushed. We’re all going to meet once a day, every day, all the time that we’re here. There’s a lot of pushback. The two other groups weren’t doing it. Her team went, ah, fine. So they showed up every day and they stood in circle. And on the first day she just said, right, we’re just going to do a check-in, tell me where you’re at. And, you know, fine, I’m tired of this, I’m not, you know. But by day three or four, she was getting a little bit more disclosure and she could start to tell by the tone of their voice and by what they said if that nurse needed an extra shift of sleep or that nurse had just seen a little bit too much and might need a little one-to-one. And she told me that on the last day, they were all leaving together. She said, it was really unusual, Claire, but we all got sent home together. So we had our last day together and she made them all stand in circle. And to your point, Pat, she asked everybody to give her a word or a sentence that summed up their time in Kuwait six months. And at the end of it, she spoke it back to them, weaving in what everyone had said. And she made a story of that group. And as far as she was concerned, when they got back to England, her group fared better than the other two groups. That transition’s hard anyway, that work is really hard. But when you allow yourself to make a story of your experience, you give your psyche time to reflect. When you reflect, your experience becomes a story, but as it becomes a story, you gain knowledge. So until you say it out loud, you don’t really know what it means to you. You hear it out loud. And then as you
carry that story and you share it with other people, you pass the knowledge on, it becomes wisdom. So you make meaning. And I feel like the amount of wisdom and knowledge being wasted in elite sports is phenomenal because you’re moving from place to place, place to place, place to place. You’re shifting jobs. No one’s asking you to reflect on your work. They’re just asking you to get to the next game. But the great coaches have spent time reflecting. Some of the great coaches across elite sports are the ones with the best stories, right? And because they tell those stories, they’re figuring out what worked and what didn’t work. So whether it’s at the end of the week, it’s generally associated with being down the pub, but I strongly urge your cohort, like that’s fine. But down the pub storytelling just ends up being competitive and one-upmanship, which isn’t great for developing your storytelling self. It’s great for developing your slam self, but it’s not great for you as coaches.
Clare Murphy 26:31
But if you set up, and I think this is really doable, a short way to hang out and just have everybody share, like, give me the worst thing to happen this week or give me, you know, whatever. If you have regular practice it just quickly become so much easier if you’re trying to do this alone in your room down into your phone much harder if you do it with other people. It’s much faster and then you end up like press dinner like the guys from the culture code somebody says something to you and you’re like did you hear that story from the olympics or whatever it is and it just gets easier.
Dan 27:05
We’ve been talking a lot about the stories and communication of a group and how they kind of feed into an overall culture. Sometimes I do wonder about the stories we tell ourselves, the narratives we have as people, as leaders, and how that also feeds into the group that we’re leading. And I guess ways that you think about we can accurately hold up a mirror ourselves at times too.
Clare Murphy 27:28
You’ve reminded me of something I haven’t thought of ages, but a teacher of mine back in 2012, Michael Murphy’s brilliant clown. Always work with clowns if you can. They’re phenomenal students of human behavior. He said something really interesting. He said, if you have any inner conflict about your show, about the story, about the audience, we’ll see it even if you never speak about it. On stage, things are really amplified, magnified by a thousand. It’s much louder on stage, but I think you’ve brought up a really interesting point, which is that narrative that you’re telling yourself, whether it’s I’m not good enough, or I didn’t save that player last year, or I’m never going to, whatever it is, or my way is the only way, whatever that narrative is that you’re carrying, people are picking it up even if you’re not explicitly saying it. Because there’s this incredible, which we can’t even dive into really, but transmission, this thing that happens with storytelling, which doesn’t happen with digital as much. It doesn’t happen when you’re reading as much. But when you stand in front of somebody and you speak, you’re always transmitting far more than what you’re saying. And we know this, right? We know this implicitly, but we kind of forget it as adults. We get told that it’s what you say that matters, but it’s what you say, it’s how you say it, it’s how your body is, it’s all of these things. And so I think you are transmitting the story that you’re carrying around with you. How do you change that story? Or how do you make it a catalyst rather than a paralyzing effect on your career as a coach? You’re not going to like the answer. One of the most effective ways to figure out what that story is, is to speak and reflect. One of the things I noticed in your world might not be true for you two, because you’ve built this amazing community, but a lot of people are working in isolation and it’s a highly competitive world. And the further you get into isolation, the harder it is for you to know where you are in your career and how well or how badly you’re doing. If you can’t find peer support within the world of your particular sport, go find people who have similar roles in other sports, because through talking it through with them, you will start to see, like they might be able to say back to you. Do you remember that six months ago, you were talking about this very thing, but look what’s happened. I think it’s impossible to do this alone, especially with as many things as you’re doing as coaches. It’s something I’ve heard quite a few head coaches talking about, the isolation. And that isolation exists across sectors. People get more and more and more hyper siloed. And you think you’re the only one with this narrative, but you will find quickly, the more you talk with trustworthy people who aren’t going to sell you up the river and all that stuff, but you will find you’re not alone. Then you’ll find there’s loads of other examples. Then you’ll find all these other ways forward. So either peer support or mentoring is a really effective way to basically cut the journey in two. Do you know what I mean?
Clare Murphy 30:17
Take you 10 years, but in a conversation you figure that out in a year, no problem.
Dan 30:21
Fast model tools have been part of basketball for years and now Fast Draw, Fast Scout, and Fast Recruit are integrated into Hudl’s full basketball system. You can move from play diagrams to film clips to player tracking all in one connected workflow. The tools you trust now working even better together. Check it out at huddle.com slash slapping glass to see what’s new. Claire, this has been amazing so far. Thank you for all your thoughts on that. We want to shift now to a segment on the show that we call Start, Sub, or Sit. We’re going to give you three options around a topic. Ask you to start one, sub one, sit one. So we’ve got one of these for you. So I’m going to throw it back to Pat for the Start, Sub, Sit. All right, Claire.
Pat 31:07
So, for this third subset, we’re calling it subtle but powerful communication techniques, storytelling techniques or skills, but subtle but powerful. Option one is the cadence of speech of the speaker. Option two would be understanding how to harness emotions or use emotions within your communication in your story or option three, mastering your body language, how you project yourself.
Clare Murphy 31:36
OK, easy. You start with emotions, but I’m not going to call it emotions. I’m going to call it presence.
Pat 31:42 Okay.
Clare Murphy 31:43
So when you are fully present and you know how you feel about something, and you can transmit that feeling, it will totally affect your voice. So the vocal range, which is cadence and pitch. But I think what you’re getting at with cadence is everything. So tone, rhythm, pacing, silence, volume, feed, everything. The more present you are in your emotional state. So my star is emotions, i.e. presence. Be in your body, stand there. You know, you’ve managed your nerves. You’re ready to talk about the emotional whatever. Then it’s the vocal. And finally, it’s body. Because if you do the first one, the other two follow. So everybody worries about body language, right? Am I allowed wax lyrical for a sec here?
Dan 32:26 Please. Yeah.
Clare Murphy 32:27
friends, body language is your first language. You learned it first. You learned it from your giants, whoever your giants were, your parents, your aunts, your foster parents, whatever, whoever you were raised by, right? You learn body language. As we get older and we enter the professional world of elite sports or the professional world of performance or whatever, we start to shut down our body language because we want to look professional so we don’t know what to do with our hands. We don’t know if they should be moving or in our pockets. We don’t know if we’re allowed to touch our nose, right? And you’ll notice you’ve seen my hands a lot during this video because I’m aware of the Zoom world. My hands are never this close to my face, right? I’m doing that on purpose. So we get really self-conscious about what to do with our bodies, but you know what to do with your bodies the rest of the time. And so there’s this thing that happens as you settle into yourself, when you work on presence, and I should point out to everybody, I get nervous every single time. I’m on year 20 now. I hit my 20th year
this month. 20 years as a performer. I get nervous absolutely every time. So if a coach is there thinking, I can’t relax and be present like she’s saying because I’ve got this big pitch to do, of course you’re going to get nervous. You manage that and you bring yourself into your body. And as you do that, your body then is going to change how you communicate. And as you settle into how you feel about the players, how you feel about the game, how you feel about all of those things, the transmission comes through your voice and you have an authentic natural rhythm. So you two speak completely differently. So in terms of technical skills as speakers, we all have a different range. Some of us are really good at speed or volume. Some of us are really good at cadence, all these kinds of things. But when you are relaxed enough, your voice naturally has inflections. And so when you do the first thing, the other two will fall into place. And there are tons of things you can do to make yourself more present, to make yourself handle your nerves, to improve your vocal technique, to get your body to relax. I’m not just saying, yeah, you just got to mindset yourself into being present. And then it all works out. There’s lots of things you can physically and vocally do to get yourself into that place. Before we got on this call, we had our little pre-chat and I was giggling and we were asking each other questions. And then you said, I’m going to hit record and you saw me start to tap, right? Because I’d forgotten to do it, right? Because I’ve been writing all day and all that. But I have a whole series of taps, like little acupressure points that will trigger not relaxation, but a kind of ease into the body after I’ve been
adrenalized. So adrenaline and cortisol, your people know this. You’re dealing with athletes all the time. But when it comes to yourself, if you have a big presentation or a big pitch or you’re meeting the founders or the CEO, whatever it is, the body is going to be reacting differently.
Clare Murphy 35:08
So I have all these physical things that I will do that will help me be more present. And the last trick is take up juggling.
Pat 35:15 Okay. Okay.
Clare Murphy 35:17
I know it’s weird, but juggling is this phenomenal, just three-ball juggling, it takes a little while to learn it, but you can learn it. It’s pretty easy. This video, it will center your mind, gets your left and right hemisphere of your brain talking to each other. You get really close to what they call in Buddhism, that no mind thing. It also gets the right and left half of your body
working because when we’re speaking, we often just use one hand and all these things. So yeah, what I used to do before a show would be I would either juggle or throw a ball and then I would hum or I would sing and all of those things would work to make me more present and then everything would follow from that.
Pat 35:53
Great advice. I like to continue to build off of presence and the triggers, but so often as me and Dan were working through this questions when we’re talking to our team, maybe like at halftime or I mean, even in practice things, but we’re passionate, you know, we love the game. There is an emotional component to everything. Of course, as you know, when we’re going to go, let’s say in a halftime, we’re going to know we’re going to deliver a speech with the motion. How much should be aware of maybe, I mean, I think you probably see it a lot with anger with coaches, but even like just vulnerability, should we be aware prior to like in terms of how we need to be mindful of how we regulate our emotion or just allowing the emotion to flow natural and be, I guess, lack of a better word natural in front of our team in the given moment.
Clare Murphy 36:37
I think I know what you’re getting at, but we’ve got to be really careful with the word natural here. We’re going to circle back because I really need to ask you some questions about the halftime. But natural is this idea that we are being totally ourselves, therefore, whatever happens is okay. We’re going to be natural authentic. That’s absolutely not what I mean when I say be present. Because if you’re like, it’s fine, I’m feeling this, so whatever I say is fine. No way. Absolutely not. Emotions are really important, but you’re the coach. You are leading them. You want them to get to a particular point. I would never go on stage. Let’s say I had had a really bad day. Let’s say a friend of mine had been in a car accident or something like that, and I was really tore up about it. I’m just going to get on stage and not attend to that emotion before I get on stage. That’s going to totally affect how I am on stage. Just letting your emotions run right, even though you’re very emotional about the game and you want to infect them with that emotion, I get that. That has to be done with intentionality. You have to contain the emotion. You give them enough emotion that they feel it and they know where you’re coming from, but it’s not untethered from you. Like, where does this guy go? How are they going to hide? They have to know that you’re anchored to something or there’s an outcome to that. But we’ve got to circle back. You’ve got to tell me. Because it feels like the biggest secret in the world. All the coaches know what it’s like. What is happening at halftime? You walk in there. I don’t know if you’re in the room before they get in there or they come into the room, but walk me through on any given big game day.
Tell me what happens at halftime.
Pat 38:07
Most time is you meet with your staff. So before you go to your players, I think it’s, you know, you’re looking at the stat sheet, you’re talking with your staff, just what are they seeing? What are we thinking? What do we need to improve and what happened in that first half? And how do we need, what message do we need to deliver to the players? Also giving them the players some time on their own to talk among themselves and try to figure it out and then coming in and addressing the group and how we’re going to move forward. I think that’s why probably anger is probably the hardest one that we have to be mindful of and regulate, you know, in terms of, you know, we do come up with like, okay, some here’s like moving forward, you know, process stuff that we want to do, but then you’ll see a lot of coaches, we start to relive the mistakes in our head. As we talk to the team, we start to get fired up like it’s happening again. And then that’s where the message loses its point because now it’s just, we’re just ripping players again, because we’re reliving their mistakes and all mad all over again. you
Dan 39:03
I’ll piggyback on Pat, this is just something for me, I’ve done at halftime this year and I stole directly from a coach from the podcast like a year ago is obviously players go in and we quickly, we meet as a staff. When we go into the room, the first
thing I ask every halftime is what do you guys see? I have the players talk first, they tell me what they’ve been talking about and then we go through what they see first. I feel like that’s helped me this year not be coming in, whatever it is. I stole it from the show, it’s helped this year and then try to just obviously go over one or two tactical things that we think we need to adjust or do better at.
Clare Murphy 39:40
What do you do with what they tell you, Dan?
Dan 39:43
I write on the board, you know, usually it’s one of our two or three captains are telling me what they saw and they’re going around and so I’m writing it up and then we’ll address it then. Okay. If it’s a question or if it’s a change or if it’s just whatever it is, I kind of am right on the board, what they’re telling me back before then we kind of dive in deeper on it.
Clare Murphy 40:01
How long is the halftime break?
Dan 40:03
So for me, it’s 15 minutes, Pat, you 15 minutes. 15.
Clare Murphy 40:06
How long are they alone before you walk in there?
Pat 40:08
Five to seven minutes.
Dan 40:09
Yeah, I’d say maybe less than five. I mean, because we’re trying to get them back up to the floor with three to four minutes to warm up. You know, it’s quick.
Clare Murphy 40:18
Yeah, so three to four minutes of the 15 is them getting back up to court side, right?
Dan 40:23
Yeah. So like just, or we want them to be back up on the court, Pat, I don’t know, three, four minutes so they can get some shots, get loose again before.
Clare Murphy 40:31
So like, so you’ve a 15 minute break, we’re gonna take away four minutes. Correct. So we have an 11 minute break.
Dan 40:36 Yep.
Clare Murphy 40:36
In the 11 minute break, they get about four minutes to themselves.
Dan 40:40 Yep. The US.
Clare Murphy 40:40
seven minutes to speak with them. How long do you spend talking in the seven minutes?
Dan 40:45
will go for me. So it’s like there’s say two minutes of them talking about what they just talked about. And then there’s four to five of us as a staff addressing whatever needs to be addressed. Please help us.
Clare Murphy 41:00
So what I’m thinking about is when I watch rugby and they’ve just given their all for however many minutes, right? The game times are different for basketball. They’re physically spent. They have been running non-stop. So that’s kind of what I’m getting at is there’s an altered state that happens when we are in that physical realm. And I’ve always wondered about how much talking really helps when you’re in an altered state. And I know that’s really difficult because you want to maybe
make an adjustment. I get this from speaking with a rugby coach once who was saying, well, I’ve only got them for 10 minutes. And this storytelling thing just doesn’t really work. And I was like, cool, yeah, that’s cool. I get you. I would never suggest anybody tell a story during the halftime talk. But I was like, so tell me about what happens. And he’s like, well, there’s three coaches. We all have to go in. We all have to say our piece. And I was like, how much do you say? And he said, as much as possible. And it’s that thing of dealing with what you think you need to land rather than what is physically possible in the situation in which you’re in. How much can they take in in the state that they’re in? I think starting with what they’re thinking is really good because it immediately switches over, it gets agency, it gets buy-in, gets responsibility, all of that. And they’ve been the ones on the pitch. I think it’s a really good what you’ve said as well around anger. Don’t re- inscribe the mistakes. Don’t bring those back in. But also I think, and I’m not a coach, we’ve got to remember this, everyone listening, I’m not a coach. Just strip away anything that’s not needed because they also need to drink water and do those other things and have that little one-to-one with all of those things. And how much you say, how much does that actually change what they do in the second half? Sure, with a strategy, do that, avoid that, do that. But in terms of overloading their senses, that’s what I wonder about halftime talks. Is it an overload of information because the coach is going, oh my god, we’ve got to change all these things. And it’s like, choose two things you could effectively change. And I’m happy to push back on that. I’m really happy to be wrong about that.
Dan 43:05
Like what Pat was saying, I know for like us as a staff, I know Pat, you know, we talked about is as a staff, we have three or four minutes while they’re talking to themselves in the locker room, we’re paying ideas off each other as a staff at a million miles an hour. And then it cuts down to right before we go in and address the team is, okay, what’s the most important of the nine things we just mentioned that we could do to win the game. Let’s go one or two things we can give them the players right now that they can actually retain. So it’s good to like, we kind of get it out of our system as a staff. And then when it gets to the players, we can just say, hey, here’s one or two. And because I think ultimately you want them to be in the right mental and physical state going back up to the floor for the second half.
Clare Murphy 43:45
Have you guys chatted with Russell Earnshaw?
Dan 43:47 No.
Clare Murphy 43:48
I’m going to have to send him over to you.” He’s a coach, former rugby player, but he told me this beautiful story. I think they were down in, I’m going to get this bit wrong, it’s going to kill me, but I think they were down in Australia and they were playing. It was the halftime talk and the coach came up to them. The game had gone okay, but the coach came up and he said, he got them all in the huddle and he looked at them all and he said, we’re going to win this. It was such a short halftime talk, but the belief that he transmitted into all of the players was so clear. Rusty was like, I just could feel it. I had all the buzz of having just played the first half of the match, I was like, we are, we’re going to win this. Then they went on to win it in the most extraordinary circumstances. You talk about carrying anger, but remember that when you’re communicating, you can transmit anything. You can transmit belief, you can transmit loyalty, you can transmit compassion, you can transmit fear, you can transmit all of these things. So I think your emotional state back to what Pat was saying, is really important what you carry into that space and how you transmit it. That is a hell of a contortionist job for you to have to do, given what you’ve just been through.
Dan 44:52
Yes, absolutely.
Clare Murphy 44:54 That’s over to you.
Dan 44:54
Thanks for watching!
Pat 44:55
Thank you. How would you think about transmitting belief if we look at cadence, presence, body language? I guess like when you see it’s done well or
Clare Murphy 45:03
No, it’s not in your cadence. No, you have to have it in you to transmit it. So we are totally allergic to inauthentic emotional states. You know this from looking at any politician ever. Politicians have trained themselves out of having authentic emotional states and they have to project a certain confidence even when they don’t feel it at all. No, the trick is to engender the belief in yourself. And this comes from telling stories of the team like reflecting on why you’re amazed by your players and then carrying that with you every time you go into the room. So that you’ve got these little stories. You remember two weeks ago when you did this, that really shows me that you’re developing this whole other side of yourself. So belief is something like I deeply believe in the transformative power of story. And that didn’t come out of nothing. That came out of the most bizarre series of proofs that I got given by kids, teenagers, adults, example after example after example of transformative effect of storytelling. Because I just used to think it was fun and entertaining. And it is. It’s great fun. But
then I started seeing all this bizarre stuff. So you have the same thing. There’s a reason why you’re a coach. Nobody would do that job. You’re mad. You’re absolutely mad. You’re mad because you love the sport. I’ve seen it in all of you coaches. Why would you do that to your life? Like you just want to be near the game. And that is a source of power for you. And so if you can reflect on your good days, your bad days, the worst players you’ve ever worked with, don’t just think about the worst player. Think about why they were the worst player. Break that down. Think about why they’re the best player. Or who was the best team player? Or what about that coach that wasn’t a head coach, but he just had all these strategies that really got you. You reflect on that and you make knowledge out of it. And then that leads to belief. So all of these things end up being tied together. You can’t manufacture belief. I mean, you can manufacture belief in the sense that that’s what a lot of people are doing out there in the world in terms of PR and stuff. But in terms of being in the room with your players, they’ll know if you’re true to form, right? Because they know you.
Dan 47:07
where you’re off the start, sub, or sit, hot seat, as we call it. Thanks for going through and playing that game that you crushed it.
Clare Murphy 47:12
You gave me an easy question though, technique, that’s my home zone.
Dan 47:18
Well, Claire, we’ve got a final question to close the show. But before we get to the final question, again, thank you so much for coming on, being so open, sharing. This has been so beneficial and informative and fun for us. So thank you very much. My pleasure. So, Claire, our final question that we ask all the guests is, what’s the best investment that you’ve made in your career?
Clare Murphy 47:36
the best investment I’ve made in my career is my tribe. I’ve got a group of artists scattered all over the world. Some of them are storytellers, some of them are comedians, some of them are visual artists, some of them are singers. Really early on when I got there, if it is a storyteller, I saw a lot of lonely storytellers, I saw a lot of bad storytelling, and I wondered how to be as good as I could possibly be, and I think to be excellent, can’t do it alone. I regularly meet up with my group online. I have several groups actually, I’ve got a group in the States, I’ve got a group here in Europe, and we make time for each other’s problem sets, and that person is just allowed to talk out whatever is going on for them. It might be making a new piece of art, it might be negotiating a new deal, might be dealing with doubt, imposter syndrome, just the myriad of things that are involved with being an artist, and inevitably, just the act of letting it out is amazing, but also hearing yourself reflected. As I was saying to you guys before, the story I’m telling myself is really hard to liberate myself from, but if my friend says, you know, well, two years ago, you were doing this and now you’re doing that. I would trust her more than I would trust my own narrative because I know she’s less biased than me. I had to work pretty hard to build that crew because so many people are used to going it alone and just suffering. You got to look out for the people who you really trust, and then people who share your value sets, right? And because they’re going to appreciate what it is you’re asking of them, but it’s always reciprocal. We don’t pay each other for our time, but we reciprocate like in a mutual aid, interdependent kind of way. And because of that, we all do better. And so that’d be the main thing I’d say to all the coaches out there is find a way to build that. It takes time, but it’s always worth it.
Dan 49:32
All right, Pat, hey, let’s dive right in. What a fantastic conversation. Tons of actionable takeaways for coaches and for leaders. And so it was just a pleasure having her on today.
Pat 49:43
Yeah, as advertised, I would say getting to talk with her and then obviously her background and getting recommended through our conversation with Preston Klein who recommended her and her work at Mission Critical. So Dan, let’s dive into it then and I’ll pass it to you for the first one.
Dan 49:59
I mean, just a ton in that first bucket, of course. Just a couple of like quotes that I liked off the top were that culture is the water you swim in every day. I thought was like just a fantastic quote. Also, she threw in there a certain point that the best cultures, it’s organic and slow, is like the process of building it. And I thought that was like a great point based off of some of our conversation that you had mentioned earlier about coaches are in for a couple of years in one spot or players are coming and going and just the sort of paradox of that that the organic and slow is the best way to do it. But how do you still add some of those elements in I thought was really good. Also on flexible leadership and membership or versus the top down hierarchical stuff. So I know it kind of threw a lot of things but those are just like a couple quick hitting things that I really liked off the top. And then just to sum it all up before I throw it back to you, just another really good conversation about how, and this is like you listen to someone on our show and you and I always steal ideas from someone on our show and we take it back to our groups. But like how much the culture really is what you’re doing every day, who you are, who your players are, what you’re doing. And it’s not just like one cool activity you steal. A cool activity could be helpful to building it but she mentioned it’s just in everything. It’s in the water, it is the water you swim in. So I took that on the overall takeaway from the first bucket is just the intentionality behind the stories and narrative, the communication techniques, all work together to build the cohesion of the groups and that just being so mindful of that as a coach is the most important thing. Who you are, who your players are, what you’re saying, what you’re holding up high for everyone is ultimately like how the best cultures get built slowly through time.
Pat 51:44
Yeah, I think this is a great rub, not necessarily with every coach, but with a lot of coaches in the game today with, as you talked about, maybe maximum you have a player for eight months or a group of guys for eight months and every group is different anyways from season to season. So how you go about creating this culture and building cohesion, I think we’ve had a lot of interesting conversations recently with how to establish cohesion as quickly as possible. And of course, storytelling and narrative plays a huge role in that. And I liked when she talked about, to your point, like the moving leadership and thinking about more of like having membership over leadership. And I think where that kind of then got my mind ticking, especially as we alluded to our conversation quickly before we started recording, like how you co-create stories as a team. Of course, challenging versus I think, you know, coaches that control freaks, we just, I mean, it’s to have great stories and tell great stories to just like deliver the culture, deliver the message, get it across and like keep it moving. But really to invest in like co-creating stories, you know, whether it is trying to build a ceremony, a ritual, or we talked with Phil whom over like a totem or, you know, some sort of metaphor that we can all attach to. And I think like co-creating probably plays a big role in that. And I thought that was just fascinating. And to your point, and to her point, like everything, it’s a time proposition. So how much time do you want to dedicate it? Now, on the back end of it, it could be powerful and really unify, bring a group together and hopefully, you know, exceed expectations. But to invest in like co-creating stories together to tell the story of a group, but it’s got to be done. She gave a great example of the nurse over in Kuwait. Like you got to, and it goes back to the how often it all depends, but you need to put time into it. And I thought like weaving in, she talked about to some other stories about the hero hardship highlight. And I think Coach Schmidt, who’s now with the Atlanta Hawks we had on, I think he also talked about in early preseason, he would have his players give. Sometimes they experience adversity, but like using those to help create your story, pulling from those. And she talked about one minute passion talks of something outside of, I mean, for all of us would be outside of basketball that we’re passionate about. And then you can pull from there to create a story. And I thought that was really powerful stuff.
Dan 53:56
Yeah, some great callbacks to some of those great podcasts. The other podcast I was thinking about during this conversation was Owen Eastwood belonging conversation from a couple of years ago and just the power of tradition and story and narrative that creates this feeling of belonging in a group. And when you start with people feeling like they belong, the trust gets built quickly and then you can layer all that stuff on top. So a ton of really great stuff in that first bucket, that first takeaway. I mean, we kind of circle around a couple of different things, but I’ll just keep it moving for, I guess takeaway number two, and I’ll throw that one back to you.
Pat 54:29
Yeah, for my takeaway, I’ll stay in our first bucket. And it had to do with your follow up question about the stories we tell ourselves and how coaches can kind of look internally and keep reflecting on who they are that help them tell a better story or transmit a belief or a value or build a culture. And the biggest takeaway I had from that was, you know, she said that players will see your inner conflict in a narrative if it’s a narrative you don’t believe in. And I thought that was really good advice. You can’t fake it with body language, with your tone, you can fake it with the words you’re saying, but they’ll see through that and she’s right. And we’ve heard that plenty of times like players have a great bullshit detector. And like if it’s a narrative you don’t believe in, but you think whatever you heard it from someone else, or you think it’s what has to be said in good culture, so I got to do it, but you don’t believe it and you’re not going to commit to it. It’s never going to stick. And I thought that was great advice. And then she also talked a lot, even in her best investment of just avoiding isolation. And it goes back to our conversation with CC Kraft, who talked about it is such an isolating profession. And that isolation actually hinders us from growth and development and to build that pure support group, whether it’s basketball coaches or people who are doing like minded similar things that coaches outside business for whatever it may be, but to help you regulate, then also your inner story, or what your beliefs are, because they’re always your soundboard, they’re giving you honest feedback. So then you’re more authentic true to the team you present. And I really like that conversation piece we had there at the end of the last bucket.
Dan 56:06
Yeah. Great with CC Craft for sure. Also, Alan Keene and Simon Turner a couple of years ago also talked about isolation and coaching and like those coaching groups. And then, because we haven’t mentioned a Van Gundy in a few episodes, Stan Van Gundy in his first episode with us, I think, talked about the value of having like coaching friends to really hold you down, to help you through those tough times. So just a couple of other really good ones that mentioned similar stuff. I’ll just add on to what you said about my follow-up with who you are and your personal narrative. That was both one of my highlights and also something I wish maybe we could have gone deeper on. And one of the things I was potentially going to ask her, but the conversation moved away was the notion or the idea of building versus revealing your personal characteristics or traits as a person and as a coach. So you see somebody else and you’re trying to build this in yourself versus self-reflection and like helping you reveal who you ultimately are. And it’s like stripping stuff away to then work from there. I want to build this trait of whatever it is, confidence, resilience, public speaking, or I’m like stripping things back to understand like, Hey, this is who I really am. And when I reveal who I really am, I’m more easily able to lead because I’m just more my authentic self.
Pat 57:18
Maybe another miss and not that it’s poking any fun, but she did mention to work with clowns and yeah, just in the spirit of, I mean, this is why we’re having Claire Murphy on. This is why we’re going to be pressing Klein. Like, you know, stuff like that does make us curious and interested. And I wish we had kind of followed up more. Just what is it about the profession of clowns that we can even as leaders take away or what do they do well that we can learn from? And it obviously caught my attention, was not expecting clowns to be referenced.
Dan 57:46
those clowns, there’s juggling, there’s tapping. There was a lot of really cool things maybe to talk about another time. We’ve been called clowns as coaches. I’ve definitely been called a clown. Yeah. Yeah. So I think it’s different. I want to know, are there other type of clowns that are out there besides this? Besides what I’ve been called by my parents. Clowns on the bench. Yeah. Yeah.
Pat 58:07
So, Dan, keeping it moving here, I’ll throw it to you to bring us home with the last takeaway.
Dan 58:12
Last takeaway, let’s go to the start subset. I’ll first start with the question we asked, but we got to talk about the halftime stuff as well. But you and I are talking beforehand about just things that were always in front of teams and people and how can we continually be better communicating. So the techniques of the body language, the emotions, the pauses, cadence, all those kinds of things. I thought she was great at flipping the emotions, the presence, and explaining the difference there and that. We had a really good conversation off air about the interesting part about coaching is she talked about transmitting belief and all those kinds of things. And you’re always in these situations where you don’t always internally feel belief or confidence, but you still got to project it. And it was just interesting conversation on air and off air, just about how presence plays into it. And she sat body language, not because it’s not important, but just something that we all instinctually can know. So I’ll throw it back to you. I thought that was really interesting just talking about the more technical parts of
communication, but then it obviously flowed into potentially what you might bring up, which is the halftime stuff too.
Pat 59:18
I would like to point out not all of our half times are panic and MFing players. I just thought that was the interesting conversation, like working in the extremes to exemplify how you handle emotions. When things are going well, we try not to panic too much as a staff and portray confidence.
Dan 59:39
Yeah, well, I was a real asshole. You go first. I’m like, well, we ask our players and we do some nice stuff.
Pat 59:45
Yeah, we do the Will Ferrell, nobody panic approach, uh, to our half-times. So no, we do most of the time try to convey level- headedness and even keel. But for the sake of this conversation, I thought it’d be fun to explore those emotions, two things I liked about this conversation, especially in the halftime is being completely like unfiltered is not necessarily like thinking we’re being authentic isn’t something we should actually bring into the locker room, being able to anchor our emotions. And she mentioned yours. I mean, she gave the great example of what she did, just the calmer nerves. And I think you and me talked a little bit before recording our wrap-up too. Just, I think that’s really important, whatever it may be, physical or just a question or just a breath to just quickly, before you go to your guys, like anchor your emotions, kind of reset to convey a message that actually is productive and your guys can take off to the court in an attempt to change the tide, continue the course, whatever it may be. And I did like to, one last thing, hearing her approach when we broke down really how little time we have with the team, you know, it feels much longer at times, but it is a brief window and understanding as we, as coaches, how much we can actually expect them to take from them, the information we want to give them, but also maybe just the importance of trying to convey an emotion or belief to your credit, maybe does that have more impact rather than yeah, we need to get our closeouts right on this guy or our coverage, right. But yeah, just like a belief, you know, a feeling, a state of mind. Is that really the most important thing going out to the second half?
Dan 01:01:22
I think that the halftime is so interesting, the belief tactically, how much stuff can you actually give them? And when you start breaking down the minutes, it’s quick. I know sometimes it feels longer. I don’t know. Sometimes for me, it feels much shorter because you’re trying to do a ton of stuff and then get back up there. And like you said, have that belief. There was another Chad Murray, Pacific Lutheran head coach, had some good thoughts a few years back too, just about like, I think they do some of the breathwork at halftime, just like another way to get his team’s emotional mental state back to a good place before going for the second half. Just another good podcast for other halftime stuff. Well, Pat, tons and tons of stuff in here. We both kind of talked about a couple of not misses from Claire, but places we could have explored more potentially or explore another podcast. Is there anything else from your standpoint we could have gone deeper on?
Pat 01:02:09
bit when talking about co-creating stories, but when she talked about like a ritual or a ceremony to build a culture or establish a tradition, I always find that really interesting, like just how successful leaders have gone about that. More specifically, when it’s the tradition of you touch a sign or a word, whatever it may be, just how to successfully do that. I wish I maybe had dug a little bit deeper on it. I think she talked about, of course, very well and the impact it can have, but like practices about installing that. Yeah.
Dan 01:02:39
I think interesting to have her back for a lot of reasons, but just to go kind of deeper on all that stuff would be really good So I know I gave a couple of stuff already so I won’t overdo it But this was once again, just a fantastic conversation. We really appreciate Claire for coming on She’s got a lot of great stuff going on in her world as far as what she’s working on So we hope people will reach out to her if need be afterwards, but we appreciate her coming on today Thank you everybody for listening and we’ll see you next time