[00:00] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Welcome to another episode of success for the athletic minded man, real talk on harnessing your athletic drive for clarity, consistency, and focus in business and life. This is your host, Jim Harsha Jr. And today I’m bringing you an episode where we went back. And when I say we, I mean, my two podcast assistants, Pauline and Michael, we went back through some old episodes for in particular with championship coaches and found just different themes of their conversations.

[00:35] Jim Harshaw Jr.: And I’m going to cut the clips of each of them. Talking about different themes like preparation and failure and other things that are really powerful lessons. I mean, these episodes were so good. So we’re going to have links to all these episodes. I’ll tell you the numbers of those episodes. You’ve won.

[00:49] Jim Harshaw Jr.: If you want to go back and listen to those. Um, they’re all from prior to January 1st, 2024. Uh, and part of that was a success through failure was the name of the podcast. And so some great episodes I’m going to do, uh, refer back to. And so who are these coaches? So the first of four coaches is Tom Ryan.

[01:09] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Tom Ryan is the head wrestling coach at Ohio state university. They won the national championship in 2015. Now, if you’re a wrestling fan, you know, that right now, Penn is By far and away, the most dominant team in college wrestling. They’ve won so many national championships in recent years. It’s absurd.

[01:28] Jim Harshaw Jr.: And for anybody else to really sneak their foot in the door and win a championship during this stretch is just incredible. So we had Tom on the call, just a passionate guy and amazing author wrote a great book called chosen suffering, becoming elite in life in leadership. So if you want to go back to listen to that episode with Tom Ryan, that was episode three 68.

[01:49] Jim Harshaw Jr.: All right. Now our second coach is Sherri Coale. Sherri is, or was the head women’s basketball coach at Oklahoma. Phenomenal story in terms of how she got the job. I mean, she was not, she was a high school coach and she got the head job. And not only did she get the head job, she crushed it. It’s amazing how she stepped into this role, upped her game, dealt with failures, dealt with setbacks and real struggles.

[02:13] Jim Harshaw Jr.: And. And became one of the all time greats, Sherri Coale as a coach, they won the big 12 championship six times. And we’re in the final four, three times she’s at the women’s basketball hall of fame, and she was the head coach of the team that won the world university games in 2013. So that’s Sherri Coale episode three 99 phenomenal story, phenomenal person.

[02:38] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Also, just like Tom, just a great episode. So I highly, highly recommend that one. Okay. Next one is Mike Candrea. Mike Candrea is, or he was the head women’s softball coach at Arizona. Absolutely dominant program. They went to the women’s college world series 23 times. That is absurd. And they won eight. Eight national championships, eight national championships.

[03:06] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Unbelievable. They won the world championship multiple times. He was the head coach of the national softball team. They won the world championship twice. They won the world cup twice under his leadership, Pan Am games twice. And they also won the Olympic gold medal in 2004. Phenomenal coach, again, phenomenal human being.

[03:26] Jim Harshaw Jr.: All right. So last one here is Brian. Bollin now, Brian Bollin. I met Brian when I was the assistant wrestling coach at the university of Virginia. He set foot at UVA, took over a very, very mediocre program, ranked 50th or 60th in the country within 90 days. He had the number one ranked recruiting class in the country.

[03:43] Jim Harshaw Jr.: And later on in his career, he went on to win four national championships in five years, four national championships in five years. They had the longest winning streak against ACC opponents in any sport. In history, it was 140. I don’t think that has been broken since. And that was, uh, as of 2016, he had that streak.

[04:02] Jim Harshaw Jr.: So that was a, just a phenomenal run by coach Bolland at UVA. So we have four coaches for championship coaches, and you’re going to hear from each of them on some of these different themes that we’ve identified that are really relevant for you in the real world in business and in life. So here we go.

[04:19] Jim Harshaw Jr.: One of the themes that we identified through these episodes through these interviews was the importance of failure as a learning opportunity. Like they see failure differently. Now, listen, at a logical level, you’re probably saying, yes, duh, I get it. I’ve heard people say that ad nauseum failure is a stepping stone to success, but here’s the catch.

[04:37] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Do you really believe that at an emotional level, these coaches do failure sucks, failure hurts, they were frustrated, probably shed tears after some of these losses and failures, but they take failure as a learning experience. Can you do that as well? Like if you fail in the next 24 to 48 hours, are you going to say, I’m not good enough, not smart enough, not capable enough.

[04:59] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Are you going to say, okay, There’s a learning experience here. How do I get better because of it? Okay. So let’s hear from these coaches as it relates to the importance of failure as a learning opportunity. Let’s hear from coach Mike Candrea, the former head softball coach at Arizona University.

[05:16] Mike Candrea: I think it’s part of the process and um, if you make it part of the process, then your players will look at failure in a different way.

[05:23] Mike Candrea: They look at it as an opportunity to get better because it is going to be there and we have to learn how to deal with it. But I think too many times we don’t practice failure recovery. We don’t have a plan for when it happens. And. Um, I think it’s very important that each and every kid is kind of prepared for that, you know, and it’s something that you have to talk through.

[05:46] Jim Harshaw Jr.: What do you mean failure recovery, like practicing failure recovery?

[05:50] Mike Candrea: Well, exactly what you just said, you know, you have to practice it. And so part of your repetition, softball’s a game of repetition, is when something happens, do I have a recovery plan to get myself back? Moving forward, you know,

[06:06] Jim Harshaw Jr.: the words, the picking up the hands, throwing, picking up the dirt, throwing the ground.

[06:09] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Yeah,

[06:10] Mike Candrea: right. Yeah. And a lot of times it’s, it’s having teammates that help you also with that. So that’s what I loved about the Olympic, um, experience because those kids were mature and, and they had played the game. And so they had the database that you need to be successful. So they, they didn’t have blinders on when they played, they could look at the big picture and they could help others.

[06:35] Mike Candrea: Get better. And boy, that’s a unique thing. And that’s pretty neat thing. When, when your players are helping each other go through these tough times in a positive way.

[06:46] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Let’s hear from Brian Boland, the former head men’s tennis coach at the university of Virginia.

[06:50] Brian Boland: Well, I think too, like one of the things that I would I would tell your listeners is that first of all, failure to me, it’s not giving yourself a chance and putting yourself in the arena.

[07:00] Brian Boland: You know, I tell people all the time that you kind of have three choices. You can freeze, you can flee, or you can fight in extremely adverse situations. And as long as you fight with the best intentions and you do things the right way, as you know, you’ve never failed. And so we oftentimes look at coaches or people that did extraordinary things over the years.

[07:20] Brian Boland: I mean, look at Dan Marino. I’m what a great quarterback he was and how he never was part of a Superbowl championship or Marv Levy, who brought his team to four Superbowl championships as a coach. And what was all for four? Does that mean that he wasn’t great at what he did? Absolutely not. I mean, and I think what’s extraordinary about those type of people is they’re not afraid to put themselves out there.

[07:42] Brian Boland: They’re not afraid to, you know, to have the best team, to give themselves the best chance and to let the world know that they gave everything that they could and they came up short time and time and time again, to me, that’s not really failure. So I try to pride myself on it, but what I do think failure is, is a lack of preparation, a lack of intentional.

[08:03] Brian Boland: Preparation to know and to let those around, you know, that you’ve done everything that you could. And then I think also part of that process is to make sure that you’re always learning. I think if you’re not open minded and you’re learning from those around you, to me, that’s a failure. And that’s something that will, will really have you miss out on some incredible opportunities as a leader that wants to have influence.

[08:29] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Let’s hear from head coach, Tom Ryan, head coach of the Ohio State University Buckeyes wrestling team.

[08:34] Tom Ryan: There’s a fine line, right? That’s just a play on words between fail and failure. Fail is that workout was a fail because I thought I was prepared for it and I wasn’t. But it definitely wasn’t a failure, you know, and I know these guys that write the programs on these gaming, you know, the kids are these gamers, they’ll say fail, level up, fail, level up.

[08:53] Tom Ryan: Right. They never say failure because it was a fail. You did fail, but you’re not a failure. And I think that workout was brutal. I was broken. I left crying. I was a 21 year old man. Couldn’t pick my head up to drive my car back to where I was staying, you know, again, right? You don’t make decisions when you’re down.

[09:13] Tom Ryan: I was so down. So I let myself cool down and you were self assess. And you tell yourself the truth. The world is full of people that tell themselves lies. We constantly lie to ourselves. I know I have many times, but when I get somewhere that’s productive, I tell myself the truth and I have truth tellers around me in this scenario.

[09:30] Tom Ryan: I just told myself the truth. You got the living snot kicked out of you. They were better fit than you. They felt stronger than me. They were very technical on top. I couldn’t get out. So you just assess what happened and then you slowly work at it. And I wasn’t going to leave. I was going to stay. And if I was going to stay, I had to put my best self out there.

[09:53] Tom Ryan: And these guys gave me truth and boy, did I need it.

[09:56] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Quick interruption. If you like what you’re hearing here and you want to learn how you can implement this into your life, just go to Jim Harshaw, jr. com slash apply to see how you can get a free one on one coaching session with me. That’s Jim Harshaw, jr.

[10:11] Jim Harshaw Jr.: com slash apply. Now back to the show. All right. Another theme we identified was intentional. Preparation, the emphasis on preparing so often. We just show up at work and we show up and think that we’ve got enough gas in the tank and knowledge and experience. These coaches prepare to a level that we as mere mortals would think of as over preparation.

[10:35] Jim Harshaw Jr.: They consider that And so let’s hear about what they talk about as it relates to intentional preparation. Let’s cut over to Sherri Coale, the former head women’s basketball coach at Oklahoma.

[10:49] Sherri Coale: I’ve always believed in the power of questions as a teacher. That’s what you do in a classroom. That’s how you make it stick.

[10:54] Sherri Coale: And I was taught by some. Tremendous teachers. Again, there’s a story in the book about my college, uh, Shakespeare professor who really taught me the power of questioning, but I think early in my coaching career, I did way, way, way more telling probably 90 to 10 telling to asking. As I got older, I began to realize the importance of asking questions for a number of reasons.

[11:18] Sherri Coale: One being that’s how we learn. That’s how we remember best when we have to go fishing inside there for the answer and come out with it. It has a way of sticking. And if coach can say a thing 10 times and it kind of floats right by, but if a player has to find it and say it, it sticks, it creates these ruts in our brain where information flows.

[11:39] Sherri Coale: That’s scientific as well as what we feel when we’re teaching what we can see happening. I used to ask my players questions like, uh, what did you notice there? And they’d be like, excuse me, you know, young players, excuse me, what did you notice? Why did you decide to drive right there? I don’t know. Well, pay attention next time.

[11:55] Sherri Coale: Tell me what you notice. And they become coaches of themselves, which is ultimately where we want our athletes to be. Like, why did you make that cut? Because the defender was leaning to the right. Okay. That’s perfect. See, you knew what to do. You don’t even need me. That’s perfect because things happen so fast.

[12:15] Sherri Coale: The closer they are to the decision making process, the better the decision is going to be. And I’m all the way over on the sideline making that decision. I’m going to be late half the time if I tell them what to do, but if they can make it in the second, I have a better chance of being on, on par. And so also there are like so many other advantages of it.

[12:34] Sherri Coale: The building of an athlete’s self esteem when they have to. Think for a minute and talk their way into a solution. Now they feel capable. They feel capable. They’re not bound to your wisdom or your expertise. They can find their way there. Now, as I used to tell my coaches, my assistant coaches and young coaches about this process, there’s a certain amount of skill development that has to be information relay.

[13:02] Sherri Coale: You have to get them up to a certain level. In terms of them understanding what things are, you have to lay that foundation. But once you do, then I think it’s up to a coach to put athletes in positions where they have to use that information that you’ve given them to draw their own conclusions, to make their own decisions and what a skill that is to take into your life, the ability to make your own decisions based on information and a sound thought process.

[13:30] Sherri Coale: I mean, that in and of itself would be enough reason to participate in sport.

[13:36] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Let’s hear from coach Mike Candrea, the former head softball coach at Arizona University.

[13:42] Mike Candrea: I always tell our kids, the game’s never going to be life threatening, so don’t make it bigger than what it is. And I think many a times, especially when we’re young.

[13:51] Mike Candrea: And a little bit immature and maybe a little bit selfish. We make things that are not important in the scheme of things important. And that’s how you get yourself in trouble. You know, don’t sweat the small stuff. We’ve all heard all these things. But I think in athletics, that’s really, really true. I mean, you’ve got to have a way to handle failure.

[14:12] Mike Candrea: So you have to have a plan because it’s going to happen. With a team, team, I mean, you got a group of 18 individuals, you better make sure that you spend a little time on crisis intervention because it’s gonna happen. And do you want it to, to blow you know, the team up, or do you want them to be able to have the tools to handle, you know, when things occur?

[14:36] Mike Candrea: I mean, it happens all the time.

[14:38] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Let’s hear from head coach, Tom Ryan, head coach of the Ohio State University Buckeyes wrestling team.

[14:43] Tom Ryan: The first thing I would say is you got to be real with yourself, got to tell yourself the truth. I knew how much work it was going to be. Do I really want this? You know, I have plenty of guys, I’ve coached plenty of people through the years that say they want something right.

[14:56] Tom Ryan: And then when it’s time to show up at six, They don’t show up at six, right? So I think just being deeply honest with ourselves about this is what it’s going to take. And am I willing to do it? And then starting small, right? Just start small, right? Just, you know, get there at six and take a small bite out of what you’re doing, right?

[15:15] Tom Ryan: Put a plan together. You know, I knew I needed to work on bottom. I knew I needed to be better, more fit. I knew I needed to be stronger. You know, and then what helped me also, once you come to terms with, I’m willing to do this and I know what it’s going to take, and I’m not lying to myself, but what it’s going to take, you know, you jump into a world of people that will pull you through.

[15:36] Tom Ryan: You find a running group, right? Or you find a group of people that are going to hold you accountable.

[15:42] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Another theme that we identified was this ability to adapt and adjust in response to change. Change is always, always happening. It’s happening in your life. It’s happening in the economy. It’s happening in the company that you work for or lead right now.

[15:58] Jim Harshaw Jr.: It’s happening in the world. Change is the only thing that is consistent. And so you have to be able to adjust and adapt to change. And so. AI, for example, is not coming anymore. It is here. The future is here. It’s today. If you’re sitting there saying, I hate AI, I’m not going to use it. I’m not teaching my kids how to use it.

[16:17] Jim Harshaw Jr.: I’m not going to use it myself. You’re just slipping behind, right? This is a change. It’s here to stay. How do you leverage this to get ahead and to make this your unfair advantage? Right? So these coaches know the value of being able to adapt and adjust to change. Let’s hear from them. Let’s hear from Brian Boland, the former head men’s tennis coach at the University of Virginia.

[16:38] Brian Boland: I think in that case, it came down to really being open minded that despite the fact that you’re right there, you’re in the final four or the final, that there’s so much more to learn. And with that comes in a willingness to take the risk to Adjust and to adapt, to get better all the time. And that’s scary because when you’re, let’s say that you’re running an organization that’s, you know, top five every year in the country.

[17:05] Brian Boland: And if you’re okay with that, that’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with that. But if you want to be the best. And you believe by being your best that you can ultimately be the best in the world at what you do, because that’s the potential you have, which oftentimes we do, you have to continue to adapt and adjust.

[17:24] Brian Boland: And if you look at society today, how much it’s changed, I mean, when I started coaching, see, it’s almost 25 years ago, we had landlines, we’d pick up, We’d call the recruit on the phone once a week, we would handwrite letters. Technology has changed everything. Social media has changed everything. You know, now we’re dealing with young people that in an instant they get gratification.

[17:47] Brian Boland: It’s a whole new world as a coach. So if you haven’t. been able to adapt and adjust through those changes. It’s going to be hard to be successful because you’re not really going to be living in the world in which we do today. I mean, look at the average teenager that spends eight, nine hours a day on some form of social media or technology.

[18:07] Brian Boland: That’s if you backed up, you know, 20, 25 years ago, when a coach was in Europe, coaching a player. And he got a result. Well, nobody knew until a couple of days later or whenever it may be. And nowadays they, people know everything regardless of where you are. So, you know, the pressure that young people feel today is so different, so drastically different than the pressure that they felt 25 years ago.

[18:31] Brian Boland: It doesn’t mean there wasn’t pressure. It’s just so drastically different. And people are such, so much more impatient. Most likely today. They don’t want to put the time that it may take to do certain things that in years past have changed. The game has changed. They take tennis. It’s become so much more physical.

[18:48] Brian Boland: So in the past, you would spend most of your time focusing on the number of hours that you would spend training on the court to get the repetitions. Well, now, if you don’t do the things that are necessary to prepare for To practice and then you you aren’t able to warm down properly. You’re not able to stay up with the technology and opportunities that are involved in the gym.

[19:08] Brian Boland: You’re not involved in understanding how to use video and analytics. There are so many variables to become great and you need to try to understand that all of those developmental tools need to be balanced out in order to be the best you can be. I always look at it this way. If I and I, I actually wrote this.

[19:27] Brian Boland: I have a developmental tree. And basically it has all the areas of development on there and everything that you could ever utilize to be a great athlete in tennis. And if you don’t take care of every branch, eventually one side of the tree is going to take from the other because you’re not going to water it.

[19:48] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Let’s hear from coach Mike Candrea, the former head softball coach at Arizona university.

[19:54] Mike Candrea: If you’re going to coach for 47 years, you’re, it’s not going to be all roses, you know, you’re going to have moments where as a coach, you get put into a corner to have to make a decision. And sometimes that one decision can dictate the future of your program.

[20:11] Mike Candrea: So I think foremost, I think coaches need to make sure that they are a person of character. They need to make sure that they are consistent. You know, I want kids to know how I’m going to be every day. I’m not here one day and here the next. They need to bring emotional stability to their players. You know, so all of those things I think are huge in creating that culture that you need.

[20:37] Mike Candrea: But when it goes bad, I always go back to relationships. You know, everything I do is building relationships. As a coach, that is the primary responsibility. It’s for me to build relationships that are going to last a lifetime, not just the four years that they’re with me, but forever. And I go back to you have to coach the person first before you can coach the athlete.

[21:00] Mike Candrea: So when you have to make those tough decisions and have those tough discussions, if you haven’t built a relationship, it’s hard to do. It’s impossible to do. But if you built a relationship, it’s much easier to have those tough discussions and to be able to guide young people, you know, in the right direction.

[21:18] Mike Candrea: Because they’re going to make mistakes. We, we understand that. But at the end of the day, you know, we want to make sure that, that they understand that there’s a right way and a wrong way to do things. And so a lot of it is the standards that you set every day. Standards you have as a person. How you live your life, because they’re going to, what you do is more powerful than what you say.

[21:44] Mike Candrea: Because they hear about 20 percent of what we say. You know, so being that example, being that mentor, being that role model, I think is, is so important, especially in today’s world, because kids come from a lot of different backgrounds, you know, not everyone has a mom and a dad, some people I’m their dad away from home, I may be their dad that they never had, you know, so you have to take that responsibility pretty seriously.

[22:10] Mike Candrea: And I do, because there’s one thing I never wanted to do is disappoint any kid that I ever coached by making a bad decision. And so I think it starts with that coach to be able to look in the mirror and say, I like what I see, and this is the standard I’m going to set. And it’s 24 seven, you know, it’s not just when you want to

[22:32] Jim Harshaw Jr.: write another theme to identified is managing competitiveness and conflict in leadership roles.

[22:39] Jim Harshaw Jr.: There’s going to be conflict. There’s going to be challenged. There are going to be times when your leadership is challenged and it’s the same with these coaches. We think, okay, they’ve won these championships. It’s easy. That’s Kumbaya. They’re always tough. The other players are happy in the locker room.

[22:56] Jim Harshaw Jr.: No, that’s, that’s just not reality. And it just like, it’s not reality in your workplace or wherever you’re leading or wherever you’re working. And so how do they handle conflict, especially in a competitive environment? Let’s hear from them. Let’s cut over to Sherri Coale, the former head women’s basketball coach at Oklahoma.

[23:16] Sherri Coale: You know, again, I think I was very fortunate in that while we were building the program and climbing to that 2002 pinnacle where we’re playing in the national championship game, we were very much a goal setting culture. I mean, we were very specific by March of 2000, we will win a game in the NCA tournament.

[23:33] Sherri Coale: I mean, we were very specific and we had little signs around and we were, it was just a very much process oriented. Well, as soon as you get to the national championship game, you realize that it’s dumb the next year to go back and say, okay, we want to make the NCAA tournament. What? Like you just played for the national championship.

[23:49] Sherri Coale: There’s only one goal left to win that last game. And it’s so hard to get to the tournament, to get to the sweet 16, to get to the final four. Do you know how many story programs, how many fantastic coaches have won? Thousands of games and never been able to play in the final four. There’s so much that goes into it.

[24:12] Sherri Coale: There’s some luck, there’s timing, there’s, there’s all kinds of things. One year we were playing in the NCAA tournament with a really, really good team day before the game and it was at our place. Everybody got the worst stomach flu you’ve ever seen in your life. We were on IVs in the locker room before the game.

[24:29] Sherri Coale: We lost that game. No telling what could have happened that year. We got stomach flu, you know, so things happen. And if you think about it in terms of one outcome, one final outcome, you’re going to be miserable. I was lucky in that I didn’t. Have to be miserable in that chase to understand that. It just dawned on me while we were sitting in a really good spot, national championship, national runner up.

[24:59] Sherri Coale: Hey, Gino is the only person on the planet happy today. That’s dumb. That’s dumb. We’re not going to do that. We’re going to play a certain way and we’re going to have goals and objectives, but they’re going to be about the things that we can control, not the things that we can’t. And so it was, this is what an Oklahoma team looks like.

[25:19] Sherri Coale: This is what an Oklahoma team plays like. And at the end of a game, I would ask my guys, did the people who came to watch, did they leave thinking I’m going to be a better nurse or teacher or doctor or policeman or whatever tomorrow? If they left thinking that after watching you play, if they were inspired to be who they are and do what they do in a better way, we won.

[25:41] Sherri Coale: I don’t care what the final score was. And sometimes we’re going to have more points than the other guy. And they’re not going to walk to their car and feel that way. And we didn’t win. So our barometer was just different. And that’s not to say that you don’t hurt when you lose. That’s not to say that you’re not devastated when your season ends before you think it should.

[26:01] Sherri Coale: It does mean that what happens at the end does not define you. And I think that’s healthy, not just for coaches, but certainly for players.

[26:09] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Let’s hear from coach Mike Kandrea, the former head softball coach at Arizona university.

[26:15] Mike Candrea: I think obviously there’s a lot of different moments in my career. And first of all, is we’re going to have those moments.

[26:23] Mike Candrea: No one wins every game and no one’s going to feel good every day. So you, you kind of be, have to be prepared for that. And I think the big thing was never making the moment bigger than life. The kid went 0 for 10 at 17, 18 years old, man. That’s, it’s pretty life threatening to them. I mean, it’s the most important thing to them.

[26:45] Mike Candrea: But I, I was always the person that always related things in sport in our game to life. Because I thought that my job was to refer them to life after softball. And so everything that occurred in the game was really a lesson in life. You know, for instance, I’m, you know, a kid went 0 for 20 and they’re feeling bad.

[27:05] Mike Candrea: I, I said, well, let’s walk across the street to the cancer center. And let me walk you through a ward of young kids that can’t do what you’re doing. So keeping the game in perspective, I think is. Was huge, you know, and, and even as a coach, I mean, I, I’ve got to be honest with you, I wasn’t good at that because I kind of blew through the victories and the losses took chunks out of my body.

[27:29] Mike Candrea: That’s that competitive nature that we all have. But, um, I, I never did. I never used to celebrate the small victories. Cause I was always moving forward. I was always preparing for the next moment, you know? And I look back now at my career and I wish I would have taken more time to enjoy, not just the good times, but even some of the bad times, because I think some of those bad times were the reason why we ended up circling the wagons and getting back on the winning track.

[28:00] Mike Candrea: I think life has a way of kind of reminding you of that. You know what I mean? Oklahoma City, we always go to the bomb, the area where the bombing was. And that, that really kind of makes things real about, we’re playing a game. You know, it’s, it’s only a game, you know, at the end of the day. You, you’ve got to have fun and you’re going to make mistakes.

[28:18] Mike Candrea: And, but so what, you know, I, I loved, I love working with medical people and I love working with the military. I mean, I probably, if I wasn’t a coach, I really think my best fit would have been in the military because I love structure. I love discipline. I love having a process and. So right now I’m an honorary commander at Davis Monthan Air Force Base with a helicopter group and it’s, it’s kind of fun watching them work and watching what we do and at the end of the day it’s like, you know what, there’s not a game that we’re going to play that’s going to end up in a life threatening situation where these guys are protecting our lives every day.

[29:00] Mike Candrea: They make a mistake, it’s a life. You know, so I think having a good, wholesome outlook on why we do what we do, I think is very important and, um, you try not to make it bigger than what it is, but as a competitor, it’s hard, you know, it’s really hard. I mean, there’s a lot of things that I’m really good at presenting to my players that sometimes I needed to listen to it myself, you know, I, I wasn’t probably the best parent.

[29:29] Mike Candrea: At one time, because I was so obsessed with winning championships, I had to change my thought process because I thought that I was only successful if I won a national championship. So if I didn’t win, man, that summer was miserable. And I couldn’t wait for the next practice to start the next year. And I look back now and I, there’s a lot of things that I talk to, to people today that I should have listened to back then.

[29:53] Mike Candrea: Part of that is making sure that you have some type of a balance in your life. Because it’s hard when you’re achieving greatness or achieving excellence to really have balance. It takes a lot to be successful. Yet on the other hand, I think at the end of the day, if you’re looking at in the scheme of life, it’s only a blip on the screen, you know, that one year or that one game.

[30:19] Mike Candrea: And so what’s more important is your, your overall wellbeing. So I’ve learned a lot, you know, about maybe some of the decisions I made, but I had to kind of redefine success. To me, because you can’t define success by winning a national championship every year, that’s crazy. But yet there was a time in my career where we were winning it or finishing second every year.

[30:42] Mike Candrea: And it was like, that was the expectation, you know? And then, then all of a sudden now reality sets in, you have this dry spell for a while, and then when you get to go back to the world series, it’s like, it’s a special moment again, you know? So I think, I think the good Lord teaches us those lessons, um, whether we know it or not, I think it’s pretty important that as.

[31:03] Mike Candrea: Leaders are as coaches that we need to make sure that kids understand that it’s a game that we play and you need to have fun with it and you need to realize that there’s going to be bigger games that you’re going to have to play. Uh, when you get into life,

[31:20] Jim Harshaw Jr.: so you heard it straight from these coaches, how do they approach life?

[31:24] Jim Harshaw Jr.: How do they approach coaching? How do they approach leadership? How do they approach performance? You had a chance to get inside the heads and hear these different themes, different coaches, different sports shoot, even different eras, right? Most of these coaches are retired and you’re hearing from them in terms of how they think about success, how they think about failure, how they think about performance.

[31:46] Jim Harshaw Jr.: What are you taking from this? What are you taking to implement into your life? Take action from this.

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