Finding Mastery with Dr. Michael Gervais - Tom Osborne: Leadership

Episode Date: September 2, 2015

While in graduate school, a psychology professor asked the class to draw a line across the middle of the paper. He asked us to write down, above the line, three people that have helped shape who we are — that have helped us feel good about who we are. He also asked to list three names below the line, that have negatively contributed to how we see ourselves. The purpose of the exercise was to reflect on the way that people “coached” us from an “above the line” perspective. Coach Tom Osborne is an above the line coach — for tens-of-thousands of men and women. His deep care for others is apparent in the way he conducts his life — and his life efforts. Thomas William “Tom” Osborne (born February 23, 1937) is a former American football player, coach, college athletics administrator, and politician from Nebraska. He served as the head football coach at the University of Nebraska football team for 25 years, from 1973 to 1997. Osborne was one of the most successful coaches in American college football history, with a career record of 255–49–3, 13 conference championships, and three national championships. He was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame as a coach in 1999. Osborne was later elected U.S. Representative from Nebraska’s 3rd congressional district, as a Republican. He served three terms, from 2001 to 2007. In 2007, he returned to the University of Nebraska as athletic director (AD). He retired as AD in January 2013. He lives a life of love and purpose — and is deeply devoted to his faith, his wife and children, and the service of mentoring others. You can learn about Coach Osborne’s mission at TeamMates.org._________________Subscribe to our Youtube Channel for more powerful conversations at the intersection of high performance, leadership, and meaning: https://www.youtube.com/c/FindingMasteryGet exclusive discounts and support our amazing sponsors! Go to: https://findingmastery.com/sponsors/Subscribe to the Finding Mastery newsletter for weekly high performance insights: https://www.findingmastery.com/newsletter Download Dr. Mike's Morning Mindset Routine! https://www.findingmastery.com/morningmindsetFollow us on Instagram, LinkedIn, and X.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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P-R-O-T-E-I-N.com slash findingmastery. This conversation is with a man of wisdom, and I do not say that lightly. He shaped so many lives from having an authentic way of living that is value and purpose driven. And it's the way that he has conducted his life and the authenticity that he has

in how that's paralleled the way he's coached. And this conversation has tremendous weight to it. And it had impact on me while I was in it. I just really hope it translates in this podcast. And this conversation has tremendous weight to it, and it had impact on me while I was in it. I just really hope it translates in this podcast. It was such an honor to be able to sit down with the legendary football coach Tom Osborne. And he brings us right in and starts this conversation off with sharing his relationship with his father that was deeply shaped in December 7th in 1941, when he watched his dad jump out of his chair when he first heard the news about Pearl Harbor.

Tom at that age was four and that experience and his dad going away to defend our country shaped him for the rest of his life. He goes on to describe the path towards mastery is as simple as doing things the right way. And it's simple and that's profound, right? Like to do things the right way is a path that he's come to understand for mastery. And it takes courage that he goes onto water, that to do things differently than what you did before

and to not get stuck into the holding onto a pattern, but to keep exploring and to do things differently than you were once taught. And he talks about an accelerant to enhancing the winning process. And this is important because over the, I think it was like 300 games that he's played over the 25 years of coaching, he has an 83% winning record. And when he talks about an enhancer to winning, I think there's lots for many of us to learn. And the way he described that is

treating others with dignity is what he captured as a way to enhance the winning process. Okay, so he's going to teach us about grit. He's going to talk us about the capacity that he had at a young age to do and work really hard. And he was a grad assistant coach. He was a grad assistant in graduate school. He was at the same time a student working another 40 hours a week in the football office. And this all happened in 1962 while he got married to his wife, Nancy. He went on eventually to earn his PhD in education, I believe it was. And I mean, this is a man who I can't wait to share this conversation. And, you know, I mean, he's full of jokes and humor and sensitivity and

authenticity and humility and the amount of wisdom and the pearls of insight that come from this conversation for me in it was tremendous. And again, I've said it like four times, I'm excited. So let's just jump right into it and understand Dr. Tom Osborne's, Coach Tom Osborne, Congressman Tom Osborne's path towards mastery. Coach Osborne, thank you for spending some time to have this conversation about mastery and the path that you've taken and what you've come to understand on your journey. If we're just to begin, and what I'm most interested in for you is what is the unique path that led you to now? Well, I don't want to be too lengthy, but probably my story begins back, maybe the first salient point was December 7th, 1941, when I remember my dad jumping up out of

his chair and saying he was going to get into this thing when the news came that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. So how old were you at that time? I was four. And so he was gone for the better part of five years. And so I moved in with my maternal grandparents, my mother, my brother, and I. And he was gone. And so I remember feeling somewhat isolated and alone, you know, because I was the only young person in my class, kindergarten, first grade, second grade,

part of the third grade year, where I didn't have a parent or a father. All the other kids had parents because my dad was old enough, had a family he didn't have to go, and was beyond draft age. And so I experienced fatherlessness a little bit at that time. Fortunately, I had an uncle who lived across the road, and he kind of took the role of my father to some degree. So if I'm tracking correctly, you were four years old, and you remember this moment where your dad said, I'm going to go make a difference in the war and defend our country. And then so he went and served his country. And during that time, it was like four to eight years old, where you remember having maybe a wanting or feeling lonely or not having a father mentor, except less your uncle.

Yeah. Yeah, okay. Yeah, I felt somewhat inadequate because I was the only child in my class that didn't have a father present. And so I guess maybe that sparked some of my interest in mentoring because I realized that having had that uncle was important to me at that time. And just to note, we're now in your office, and the entire structure of your business right now is about mentoring. Yeah, I work primarily for teammates.

This is a mentoring program that we started in 1991 with 22 football players mentoring some 7th and 8th grade boys like in public schools. And it's now expanded to about 7,500 matches in 133 communities across Nebraska and Iowa, one in San Diego. So that's pretty much what I do now. One outlier down in California. I don't know how that happened, but it did.

So anyway, that's what I do. And you started, was this born out of your, tying it back to your childhood? Was this born right out of it? I think somewhat and then of course it also had to do with the fact that saw so much um change in culture so many so many more young people that i was coaching over 36 years of coaching who were experiencing fatherlessness, single-parent families. Back in 1962 when I started, I think the number of kids growing up without both biological parents was 6%. Today that percentage is about 53%, 54%. So there's a tremendous change in the culture.

Is that in the athletic culture from Nebraska? That's total, total in the nation. So anyway, I was coaching more and more kids who didn't have fathers, and I saw some of the fallout from that. And so anyway, we thought that mentoring would be one thing that we could do. We couldn't legislate strong families. We couldn't put families back together, but we could provide a mentor. And so that's what we do now. And that's where I spend most of my time. So anyway, I grew up in a fairly middle-class environment.

Parents had experienced the Great Depression, and there was always that assumption that somehow that would reoccur. So pretty conservative, and spent most of my life in Hastings, Nebraska, which is a community of about 22, 23, 24,000 people. And when my dad came home from World War II, I wanted to please him. I didn't really know him. I could barely remember him. And he loved athletics. And so probably one of the major themes during my middle school and high school years was athletics.

I felt that was an avenue where I could connect with him and please him. And how old were you at this time, when he came back? When he came back, I was nine. Nine, okay. And so he loved athletics, and so I played him all, football, basketball, baseball, track. And he was supportive, but I think that was probably one of the reasons why I was so attracted to athletics. And so I eventually graduated from high school, had some success as an athlete, was offered some scholarships both in football and in basketball uh here at the university of nebraska the football coach said they'd like

to have me play football but they didn't want me to play basketball because football was going to be full-time the basketball coach told me the same thing they They wanted me to play basketball, but not football, because I was going to have to devote all my time to basketball. So I eventually went to Hastings College, which was a small college here in my hometown, and there I was able to do many things and play several sports, which I did. Is that the reason you chose Hastings? Yeah, that was the primary reason. So you could play both sports, or more than one. Yeah. Okay, so is your sense that most people

that excel in sports have a similar story to yours? Like there's something that's compelling them to invest deeper? Or is your sense something that may be more aligned that there's a feeling that comes with mastery or there's a feeling that comes with progression

that people are more attracted to? Well, I really can't speak to everyone's condition. In my case, I would say it was a little bit neurotic. It was not necessarily a case of wanting to be good. It was kind of a case of wanting to be good. It was kind of a case of having to be good. The underlying reasoning, I suppose, if there was any, was simply that I had some feelings of inferiority, maybe because of the World War II experience. And the idea was that if I could be good in athletics, then people would

approve of me. And if enough people approved of me, then I could approve of myself. And so there was probably that connection. But also, I loved athletics. And so it wasn't totally a deal of just wanting to please my dad. But that was probably some of it, too. Yeah, so there's a mix in there of both. I'd say so. At what point do you think you, and maybe you haven't, but at what point do you think you might have found what you were looking for? Well, I guess I was able to achieve a fair amount of athletic accomplishment, you know,

and was pretty fortunate in that I played in a couple of small college bowl games, and one of those was refereed by a guy whose brother was Lynn Waldorf. Lynn Waldorf at that time was the director of player personnel with the 49ers. And so this particular individual, John Waldorf, told his brother that I was a good player. So I was drafted in the 18th or 19th round by the 49ers. And at that time, I think there were maybe 30 draft picks each team had. There were only 12 teams, and the number of players on a team was 38,

as opposed to 53, which is the current number. And so I went to San Francisco and tried out. The coach told me that they had two quarterbacks. They had Wyatt Tittle and John Brody. I was a quarterback. He said, now if you can beat those guys out, go ahead, but we're only going to keep two. So I could tell what he was trying to tell me,

which is essentially the odds of playing quarterback for the 49ers were just about zero. And so I said, well, I think I could be a receiver. So I moved to receiver and made it down to the final cut. And at that point, they released me, and I was asked to stay on the taxi squad. What's the taxi squad? Well, the taxi squad at that point was a practice squad. Okay, sure. So five players.

Where'd that name come from? I don't know. I guess because you rode a taxi to practice. Oh, my God. I'm not sure. But anyway, Jack Kemp was another one of the people on that particular group, and so we practiced with the 49ers, and the next year I came back again and then was released right at the end and went to the Redskins,

played two years with the Redskins, and had a couple hamstring injuries. And each week they injected the hamstring, Novocaine, let me play. But eventually I developed so much scar tissue I knew I couldn't play anymore. So I came back to Nebraska and went to graduate school and planned originally to go into college administration work and got a Ph. a PhD in educational psychology, but also knew that I was going to miss athletics because that had been such a big part of my life. So I went over to see Bob Devaney, who had just been hired at that time, 1962,

and he said, well, I don't need any coaches, but I could really use somebody to move into the dorm and supervise some of the players that are causing trouble in the dorm. He said, if you'll do that, then I'll give you meals on the training table. So I said, well, okay, I'm going to have to live somewhere. So I moved into the dorm. And was this, okay, so if I try to connect a couple dots, was this before you finished your PhD or was this after? Yeah, this was when I first came back and enrolled in graduate school. I'm still working on a master's. On a master's degree.

Yeah. And you're heading down this track where you were divorcing yourself from sport, but you felt this pull and tug to still be around. I knew that I would miss athletics, and so I asked him if I could help as a grad assistant coach and he gave me that entree and I later that spring I began to help with spring ball and then became a graduate assistant. So I was actually a graduate assistant football coach and also a graduate assistant in the ed psych department so i was teaching four sections of educational psychology doing my graduate work and probably still spending another 40 50 hours in the football office and uh so uh and also that year i got married and uh met my wife nancy so

1962 was kind of a big year and And a lot of things went on. And so eventually I finished my Ph.D. And I was getting pressure on the academic side to become a graduate student advisor and teach full-time. And I was getting pressure on the athletic side. If I wanted to do that, that I needed to go out and recruit and be a full-time coach. And so I was a little bit of a crossroads, and finally went in and told Bob Devaney I'd like to be a full-time coach.

Just didn't feel like I could pull away from athletics, and I told him I could make $10,000 as a professor, and I'd like to make that much as an assistant football coach. And he said, okay. And so within about a year or two, I began to coach the quarterbacks, and he more or less made me the de facto offensive coordinator. Okay. And asked me to redesign the offense.

We'd had a couple years where we struggled a little bit, and then one thing led to another. And he told me in 1969 that he wanted me to be the next head coach in Nebraska. I didn't particularly want to do that because I thought following Bob Devaney, who'd been very successful, would be probably the kiss of death. And so I applied down at Texas Tech, came close to that job, and a couple others I was offered, and stayed here at Nebraska. And eventually in 1973, became the head coach the age of 35. Now we'd won a couple national championships in 70, 71, so the bar was pretty high and

expectations were kind of off the charts. And so the first four or five years were tough. We had nine and three, ten and two seasons, played in major bowl games most years, and won several of them. But we didn't beat Oklahoma. So it kind of got to where it was a one-game season. So I think probably the noose was getting a little bit tight. But in 1978, we beat Oklahoma here in Lincoln. They had a great team.

And we managed to beat them 17-14. And then things began to get better. You know, we had some... How many years were you in as a coach at that point? About five. About five. Yeah, it was the fifth year. So there's a couple threads here that early on you found sport as a way to find

favor with your father, an important model for you. And then you had this tug when you were in graduate school to go back to sport, right, when you were on a successful educational path, even though you were uber successful as a high school athlete, a college athlete, and then played in the pros for a couple years. What was the new tug? What was the tug now to go back? It was just mostly a fascination with football. I like the... What part of it? I like the strategy. I like the players.

I always felt the players were people who were risk-takers and lived life to the fullest in many cases. I can't wait to talk to you more about this. I like the challenge of it. And education didn't have that for you, risk-taking, challenge, the type of personality. Yeah. I really enjoyed teaching you know i that was something that was really tore me you know in both ways i i love

coaching i love teaching and um but eventually i realized that um i just couldn't give up coaching at that point so that's the direction I went. Finding Mastery is brought to you by Momentous. When it comes to high performance, whether you're leading a team, raising a family, pushing physical limits, or simply trying to be better today than you were yesterday, what you put in your body matters. And that's why I trust Momentous. From the moment I sat down with Jeff Byers, their co-founder and CEO, I could tell this was not your average supplement company.

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So you talked about doing two things at once. You were grad assistant plus a grad assistant in football, grad assistant education, and then one in football, as well as doing your school, your schooling. And you throw it out there like it was, you know, like not that big of a deal, but I'm imagining 60, 80 hours a week that you're putting in. And then later in your career,'re also um the oc as with the offensive coordinator as well as the head coach in some respects and that capacity to do that much work where did that come from prior to grad school like what allowed you to have the capacity or the hunger or the sheer madness to be able to put that much intensity into work? Yeah. I really don't know.

I suppose, to some degree, I was born with a fairly high level of energy and maybe a fairly high level of ambition. Maybe, as I said earlier, there's probably a little bit of neuroticism to the way I approach athletics. That may have been part of it, too. But I would imagine working 80, 90 hours a week, which is fairly accurate, is a little bit abnormal for most people. And yet in the coaching profession, it's pretty common. That's right. Yeah.

And I found that my experience has been the capacity to do deeply focused work comes from somewhere. I don't think we're born with this ability to want to work at that clip and pace because it's difficult. And it sounds like, for me, it's a mystery why people put in that work. And you're saying maybe it's some of the neuroticism. I wonder if you'll agree with this idea that some of the best in the world, people that are truly masters of craft, there is just a bit of anxiety. There's just a bit of obsessiveness. There's just a bit of narcissism. And to believe that you can be one of seven billion people the best in the world at something there's but that it's harnessed in a way

and almost pro-social inside of that that environment like it's okay to be a little bit anxious a little OCD and a little narcissistic inside of a sport. I'm wondering if that thought makes sense to you. Yeah, I think probably does. I think there, for whatever reason, there was a pretty high need to achieve. And I don't know if I would have ever articulated it that way. But looking back, I would have to say that maybe I was somewhat of a driven person because it was hard for me to sit on the bench. It would have been hard for me to go through a track season and not participate in track or baseball or football when I was younger.

And so I wanted to be in the action. I wanted to be in the action. I wanted to be competing and participating. And again, that probably isn't totally normal. Well, there's not many. You talked about the need for achievement, and there's not many people that have achieved the level of success that you've had. Almost everything you've touched, whether it's serving in Congress or it's, you know, the most advanced degree you can have or being herald as one of the greatest coaches of all time. And the awards and the achievement you've had has

been phenomenally noticed. And I'm curious what achievement means. and is that what it is like? Is achievement enough? Is it fulfilling in and of itself? Is there something else that you would say counterbalances that need to achieve now? Well, you know, I became pretty well acquainted with John Wooden, both personally and then through some of the things that he wrote.

And I guess as time went on, I have tempered some of that achievement need to look more at his definition of success, I believe, was being the best you could be given the circumstances that you had and calling that good enough. And it might mean that you gave a great effort, you prepared well. You might not win the game, but in a sense you won because you did the best you could with what you had. And I think that's probably pretty much where I am now. But as you know,

when you're in coaching, the hard-cold reality is that there's a standard out there which the public and the press holds you to, which is probably a little bit more than just making a good effort. They're going to measure.

You felt that intensity for the first maybe half of your coaching career, where you were unbelievably successful, but still there was this undercurrent that you hadn't won the big one yet. Yeah. I think for the first 10, 15 years that I was a coach here at Nebraska, people tend to always point to what you haven't done.

First, it was, well, you hadn't beaten Oklahoma. And that was, well, you haven't won a national championship and all those kind of things. But I think as time went on, I wasn't quite as driven to meet those expectations. And I became, as you probably are well aware, there's a style of leadership called transformational leadership. I didn't know much about that term, but I think looking back over my coaching career, I began to move from transactional to transformational leadership, just primarily by experience and by things I observed. And so hopefully, at least by the end, I was involved in a lot more

transformational activity than transactional. And for folks that might not know what that is, and maybe to make sure we're on the same page, is that the idea of transformational leadership is that you're investing in the human spirit, the becoming of what's possible for a person. And transactional, for me, the way I think about it is, you know, it's very mechanical. It's like if you do this, you get, if you do A, you get B, and let's focus on this A to B, whatever it takes.

Right. Yeah. Transactional leadership primarily is based on reward and punishment. It's pretty much focused on the bottom line. Did you win or did you lose? Did you make a profit or did you lose money? Transformational leadership is primarily focused on serving, serving other people, caring about other people, and responsibility, you know, taking responsibility

if things don't go well, particularly, and listening, and trying to lead by example. And if people are going to work 18 hours a day, you probably work 18 or 19 instead of telling them to do as I say, you do as they do. So that's kind of the style that I, but I think that the main thing that became more apparent to me in my coaching career was that athletic talent was important, you know, you had to have talent. But chemistry, cohesiveness, people caring about each other, people being committed to the welfare of the team or the organization, even to a point where they were willing to lose track of their own personal ambition. That's kind of where it all stood.

What would you do to cultivate or create that chemistry of selflessness and that chemistry of pure, what I would say, love for another person or love for the collective aim. Was there something that you would do in particular to create that? Well, I don't think there was any one thing that we did. But I think there have been several books that have been written about a period of time when we were pretty successful. And the author would ask various players about, well, what was it that they experienced that they thought made a difference?

And one thing that they mentioned was they felt cared for. It didn't make any difference whether they were first team player or scout team player. They felt that we cared about their education, we cared about their family, we cared about their health, we cared about them as people, and that was important. We knew their names. We often knew the names of their parents, their brothers and sisters, their high school coach. And so that was one thing. The second thing that they mentioned was integrity. And integrity had to do with telling the truth and keeping promises.

And I think very, very few players left our program thinking they were deceived or that we'd offered them anything that was illegal or that we would try to circumvent the rules. And so we lost players that we tried to recruit because we didn't promise them playing time. We didn't tell them what they wanted to hear. But for the most part, we lost the right ones, and for the most part, the right ones tended to come.

They also mentioned a positive environment, that there was very little humiliation or degradation. We weren't on their backs all the time. I came to believe that the best way to change behavior was to catch somebody doing something right and to reinforce that rather than to always be criticizing or denigrating. Yeah, and there's so many nuggets that you just shared that I want to tease on some of these. And you said earlier in our

conversation that so many people focus on what you haven't done and what's not working in so many words. And then, and I was going to ask at that time, like, is that the way you coach or do you coach differently? And then you just answered it that you catch people doing right or doing something well. And then for for me my experience has been that requires an incredible discipline and a commitment to find what's working and then how would you how would what was your style or approach to to be able to one have that discipline and then two how would you communicate that with the athlete or the coach that you were coaching? Well, I was never a guy who was somebody who hollered and screamed or ranted and raved and never used profanity. And that's probably more of a personality trait than anything else.

Some people, particularly early on in my coaching career, were upset with me because they didn't feel I was emotional enough, that I didn't holler and scream on the sideline. But I always felt it was important to keep my head in the game, and you had to try to think one step ahead, and it's pretty hard to be ranting and raving and doing that. So that was kind of second nature. But a lot of what I came to believe about reinforcing good behavior

came from a guy named Don Clifton, who was a professor in the head psych department, and he later founded what is now Gallup. And at that time, back in the 1960s, psychology was primarily devoted to studying why rats would turn right or left in a maze or why they hit a bar for a pellet of food so many times. The idea being that if we understand rats, then eventually we'd be able to understand chimpanzees and then maybe we'd be able to understand chimpanzees,

and then maybe we'd be able to understand people. And then what research that wasn't going on in that direction was aimed at abnormal psychology. Why was somebody schizophrenic? Why were they paranoid? Whatever. But Don decided that it was really important to study the very best in human behavior. Why did people display exceptional performance? And he came to realize that the best way to make people perform exceptionally was to reward the behavior you're looking for and not to always be negative

and a negative environment tended to produce behavior which wasn't optimal and so I guess to some degree I internalized some of what he was saying and I thought theoretically it made sense and so I tried to get that across to my coaches. How would you teach them? How would you teach your coaches to care so deeply in a world that is outcome-focused, where people lose jobs, which obviously you didn't for a long time. I don't know what the end was like for you,

but 25 years is an amazing run. And how would you teach them to care deeply about people meaning that transformational the knowing of their names the knowing of their parents names that in such a fast-paced a rugged outcome-based environment how how did you translate that which you came to understand which was the core of coaching? Well, we began to, as a staff, formulate a philosophy of how we were going to coach, how we were going to treat people, certain core values. Do you remember what that was? Like, is it really clear for you now?

Well, I think one of the basic tenets was that we were going to try to put the players at the center, that we were going to truly try to serve them and have them be most important in what we were trying to accomplish. And they weren't to be used as pawns on a on a chessboard to get us what we wanted but rather that we were we're there to serve them now coaches uh i think and we repeated it and we we did we didn't just write something and put it down and put it in a drawer we reviewed that mission statement oh every month or so and tried to see how we were doing. I think the coaches, as time went on, began to come around a little bit. Some of them weren't necessarily wired that way

but most of them came to understand what we were trying to do. Some of them were more intense than I was. Eventually, even though they might get on a player during practice, they'd usually walk off the field with their arm around the guy, and people got along well. I think as time went on, the chemistry within the team was very solid, partly because of that would you do you have a sense that that's a repeatable process that once you understand the core philosophy

you understand exactly the tone of what you're looking for and the behaviors that would support it that there's a way to switch on and i'm asking a very biased question because i full disclosure i think that there's a way that to repeat this on a regular basis now i haven't run a professional organization such as you know nebraska's well maybe not professional but at the highest level for 25 years plus is this a repeatable process that you figured out yeah i think so, yeah. Is there a particular methodology that you would say is at the center of that process? Well, I think first of all, as a head coach,

you better model what you're trying to say because if you say, hey, we're going to treat our players well, we're going to care about them, we're going to, in a sense, love them, and then you mistreat them or you act in other ways. And if you do the same with your assistant coaches, then what you say isn't going to make any difference. So you better model it and you better reinforce it

and you better be consistent in doing so. Win or lose. I mean, so often coaches become different people when they lose. And so often what they've been teaching, what they've been repeating, all of a sudden goes out the window when they hit a bad streak. And so you have to be consistent. What did you do to have the discipline to be consistent when it didn't go the way that

you worked 80 hours for X number of weeks? What did you do to develop that consistency? I don't know. I think in my case, it was so philosophically ingrained that it was almost inherent and probably would be difficult for me to behave otherwise. It doesn't mean I was a perfect coach or a perfect person, but I think that I believed in that approach enough that I wasn't going to probably get very far from it. Finding Mastery is brought to you by Cozy Earth. Over the years, I've learned that recovery doesn't just happen when we sleep. It starts with how we transition and wind down.

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slash finding mastery. So there's, we've been talking in my mind like about the aspirational parts of being one of the best. And there's another, and I don't know if we're ready to talk about this meeting as a community, but there's another side to that I've experienced on the path towards mastery, which, you know, there's a darker side. What has been some of the cost of being one of the best ever? Well, first of all, I don't know if that label applies to me. We had a fair amount of success over a period of time. But you certainly have the cost of time, you know. And you have family. And my family was very important to me and my wife. And I'm sure that my wife paid a price. I'm sure my children paid a price. I did the best I could to make up for it. Now, you know, there's

there's coaching that is really brutal. And I remember talking to an assistant coach one time who said that he had gone six or seven weeks without ever seeing his kids. He'd leave the house at six in the morning and he'd get back at midnight. So he'd leave before the kids got up and get home after they were in bed. And I didn't do that. We met at 7 in the morning. And Sunday night, Monday night, we'd stay until 10 or 11 o'clock. And on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, I'd take films home.

I'd have dinner with my family. The other coaches would too. And I would often work till 10, 11 o'clock at night, but sometimes after they went to bed. And Sunday morning, I usually graded the film late, Saturday night after the game. I gave them Sunday morning off, but some of them would come in. But I wanted them to be able to go to church with their family if they could. And so we, yeah, we were put in 70, 80 hours a week. But I tried to do it in a way where at least there was some time for family. And so that was always a concern of mine. And

sometimes some of the stuff that went on I didn't even know about. You know, if we lost to Oklahoma, my wife said a lot of times the kids didn't want to go to school on Monday. What was that like for you, knowing that? Well, I didn't know that. Oh, at the time you didn't know? Yeah. I don't think she ever told me that

until years later. But that would have been hard. Somebody one time blew up our mailbox, but that was about the worst incident we ever had. So, you know, people here in Nebraska are reasonably civilized, and it didn't get into the wild stuff. Some phone calls at night after you lose a game would be pretty rough, but overall, not too bad.

So we didn't get into the really ugly stuff, but still, your family pays a price. And certainly in terms of discretionary time you pay a price too you know I know by I love to fish I love to do outdoor activities and sometimes by the end of a recruiting season after we've gone seven eight nine straight months you know just the grind that you almost had a physical need to get away and do something different, you know. So in the conversation, I know that you've had a different level of intensity and feeling when you're talking about not being there in particular ways for your family. And I struggle with the same thing in my career as well, is the cost of being away, the cost of traveling. And it's not something to celebrate for me.

It's something that is, there's an excitement to it, to go explore new places. But the cost and the burden of missing, right, missing experiences. experiences and you know i'm wondering if you can help guide me but i think that there's so many people that will resonate with this part this cost this dark side of sacrificing love of the most intimate important relationships for the chasing of achievement well i don't know if there is a real good solution to it but i did i did know that if probably at least for me coaching at a reasonably high level was not going to entail a 40-hour work week. There was just no way I could do it and I guess I felt that there were some benefits to our family. Some of it was economics, but some of it was economics but some of it was um you know bull trips and some of the

amenities that coaching produced for our family and then we'd usually have a few weeks in the summer where i could try to make it up to them and i did but i still love to fish and i probably did a little more fishing than I did sitting on the beach with the kids. But one of the big things was I had a wife who was a very good coach's wife. You know, lots of wives would not have been able to do that, but Nancy had a pretty good sense of humor. She didn't get so wrought up and caught up in what somebody wrote in the paper or what somebody said that she would be unloading on me when I came home at night, you know, and so her demeanor, her personality was such that we were able to make it work. But even then, I think early on when she had little children and I was out recruiting,

and sometimes the signing date wasn't until May, I think I didn't fully realize how difficult that was for her until years later when she talked to me about it. So you do pay a price. And if I had to do it all over again, I don't know. I suppose I was wired in such a way that it would have been hard for me to do it any other way. But sometimes you don't really realize what that cost is until later. And I think I do realize it now. Try to spend a lot of time with family, children, grandchildren, present time,

and I don't think you ever make it up, but you can begin to make amends in some ways. It's amazing how even the smartest of us end up repeating some of the things that happened to us early. And I find that in my own life, is that particular patterns that my father had, that as a young man I said,

well, okay, I'll do those differently. And now as an adult, providing for my family, I find some of those same patterns. I don't know. I'm not sure if they're familiar or it's the model or it's actually kind of the right way to do things. But I'm resonating deeply with how you're describing the way in which the cost is the cost of love and of time and expression with with loved ones that you can't get it back no yeah no you never recover completely it seems like i'm aware of it but i think i rationalize it in a way that you know i'm um and i'm wondering if you were using rationalization strategies or you just didn't have, you weren't attuned to that.

Well, I suppose probably. In a sense, you're saying what I'm doing is in a way for them, providing for them financially in one way or another. But in some ways you wonder if you really ever do fully recognize exactly why you're doing what you're doing. If we shift gears and talk about what's next for you, what is your heart set on next? I mean, I know the foundation you have here is called teammates, and you've been part of incredible teams. How do you see this shaping up? What's your heart focused on seeing through?

Well, right now we're trying to grow teammates to about 12,000 matches, and we're trying to expand throughout the Midwest. And I guess one of my main concerns is just see a lot of young people falling through the cracks. And one of my main concerns for the culture is that, you know, you're never more than one generation away from major disruption because the next generation has to be able to hold things together, pull things off. And so when you look at a 20%, 25% dropout rate in kids not finishing high school, and when you look at the number of kids who are fatherless, about 26 million, and the number of kids without biological parents, more than half, you begin to be concerned. And so I guess this is,

as far as I'm concerned, this is the greatest threat that our country faces right now. It's not affairs in the Middle East, and it's not the economy, but it's rather what's happening to our family structure. And so I find this a worthwhile cause and something that we're working at pretty hard, not just looking at numbers, but we're trying to figure out what is the optimal situation for mentoring, and how do you best prepare mentors, how do you have the most effective outcomes, and so those are the things that we're working at right now. And do you prepare the mentors? Do you give them training? Yeah, we train the mentors, we select them, we match them according to common interests.

Is it based on your philosophy as a coach? Yeah, I'd say so, pretty much. Yeah, caring about them. And we try to make sure that mentors have good support. We're a school-based program, and so it's one hour a week in the school. And we find that if somebody meets with their mentee at least 24, 25 times during the school year, that very positive things happen. And you don't want somebody to say, I care about you, and I'm going to be your mentor, and they show up five times, and you're doing more damage, and you're doing good.

So we work hard at those things. Is there one word or phrase that guides your life when you look back at or even look forward to what's next? Is there a phrase? I don't know that if there's one word, it might, hopefully it might be service. You know, you're trying to serve other people, trying to serve society, make things better.

That may be a little grandiose, and it may not adequately describe what I try to do, but I guess if I, just off the top of my head, that would be what I would say right now. If we stayed on that theme and said, is there one word that describes what you understand most? Well, it would probably be that service is important because not just of what it does for those that you serve, but also that it provides meaning and purpose to existence. There was a study done not long ago that indicated that most Americans are relatively happy people because our immediate needs are met. We have enough to eat, a fair amount of discretionary wealth. And so they said that happiness has to do with getting and receiving,

sometimes taking. But they also mentioned that there are an awful lot of people in the United States who don't have much purpose or significance in their life, and that purpose and significance and meaning generally comes from giving and serving and sometimes sacrificing. And lots of us aren't built that way. And so anyway, I think that it'd be kind of sad

at the end of your life to look back on your life and say, well, you know, I wish I'd done it different. What was the feeling that you just had, that you just felt? As you're describing it, you're flush with feeling, and I'm wondering what's happening for you in that space. Well, I guess I'm old enough now that I'm at that point where you do reflect back, and you do realize that you're certainly not going to live forever.

And I can relate to lots of people, a lot of people who retire, and they think that's going to be a tremendous opportunity. And then they find that it wasn't what they thought it was going to be because you can only play so many rounds of golf and you can only go fishing or whatever so many times. And they realize that really what gave them meaning and purpose wasn't what they thought it would be. And a lot of their purpose and meaning really came from that tedious job they had, or the

things that they did with their family, or whatever. And to some degree they have missed the boat. And I think that's kind of sad when that happens. Yeah, yeah, okay. I understand that. And you know, in this framework that you've created about meaning and purpose, what happens when we mention the phrase gratitude? What does that mean to you? Well, I just think it means that you're grateful for those insights you've had,

those things you've experienced that have given significance to your life. And I guess as I, you know, I'm a fairly spiritual, some would say religious person, and I guess as I look back over the course of my lifetime, I probably couldn't see it at the time, but I think I can see God's hand in a lot of things that happened to me. And so those are things for which you're grateful. You know, the decision that you made that seemed insignificant at one point, becomes highly significant in the perspective of 20, 30 years later.

Was there a particular time that was in your mind as you're describing that? Well, I think certainly in choosing a career. You know, I could have easily gone into academia, and I don't think it would have had significance for me. Can you imagine? Well, it would have been different. Yeah, it would have been different. And certainly the person I married, I think that was very fortuitous.

Lots of things like that that happened along the way that you look back on it and you realize it would have been very different had you taken a different path. Is there a moment in time that you can reflect on where you realize what you were most afraid of? And the reason I'm curious about that is because fear guides so many people in anxiety and worry and the anxiousness of it not being okay later. And is there a moment in time when you can reflect on, when you realize like, oh, this is what it's about for me. This is the thing that I'm most afraid of.

I suppose a pretty dominant theme in my life, if there was a fear, it would be fear of failure. Fear that I wouldn't be able to make the team as a young person. Fear that I wouldn't be able to do well enough to make the grade as a coach. Maybe fear of not getting elected to office. And I got beaten. I was beaten for governor.

I didn't make that, and that was unpleasant. But I found that I weathered that okay. And so, you know, those kinds of things. Would you want to, as a young man, looking back now, as a younger man, would you have wanted to change that relationship with fear? Or has it served you well? Oh, I think in some ways it has served me well. I don't think that my fear has been overwhelming or all-consuming.

It hasn't been debilitating, you know. But I think there was that pressure, that feeling that, you know, if you had a choice, you'd rather succeed than be unsuccessful. Okay, so being so mindful of your time thank you for the the honest and authentic answers you've had and if i could just kind of go rapid fire for like some really quick hit thoughts and you could expand on anything you want or just kind of be short with the answers whatever you prefer

but how would you answer it all comes down to well i think it all comes down to meaning and purpose and significance yeah doing something that you feel is important and then how do you help people find that or is this like my sense of this is that there's not just one thing that makes people have or allows people have meaning and purpose, but we can help guide ourselves and others towards feeling that we matter and that we have purpose. And I'm wondering what your orientation for that is. Well, I think you're right. I think there's lots of avenues toward feeling purposeful or significant. I guess in my case, the one goal that's been most significant would be to

try to honor God with the way you coach, the way you interact with your family, the way you handle your finances, the way you deal with people. It may sound very altruistic, but that's the one that I think probably works best for me. Okay, how about this one? Pressure comes from? It's usually self-imposed. It comes from within yourself. Wanting to be the best,

at times not being sure whether you can be the best. But I think a lot of people are driven out of coaching. They're driven out of their profession, not because somebody fires them or because the fans are unhappy sometimes because they drive themselves out you know it is somehow feel I don't they don't measure up okay how about this one a high-performance coach is? A high-performance coach is one who gets the most out of his players, cares about his players, not only wins games, but tries to enhance their personal lives, their personal capabilities,

helps them be the best they can be athletically and as people. Okay, how about this one? Relationships. Relationships are important. And relationships are primarily at the heart of most everything that gives life meaning and significance. My greatest risk? Greatest risk, I guess, has always been to try to push myself to the brink and to be out there on the edge

to some degree. You've got a cool little smile when you said that. Yeah. Like that is... I'm trying to appreciate how that is a risk. And that's an amazing statement.

I've never heard anyone say that before. Well, when you do that, there's always the risk of failure. Because I certainly could have settled to be a teacher. I could have settled to be an assistant coach. I could have stayed in Congress and not run for governor. I could have done all those things. So there's always that risk.

Okay. Brilliant. I have one last question. I've come to understand that you have a deep history in mindfulness training and a practice of breathing and meditation work and I'm wondering if you can just talk about it share about it and you know and teach yeah well I don't know if I can teach much I am I had a a double bypass when I

was 48 years old and that was a big concern to me because I had always been very active physically and didn't see myself ever having a physical problem. And I wanted to stay in coaching, and I realized that I might be done at age 48. And so I heard about a guy named Dean Ornish. And at that time, it was 1985, there weren't any statins. There weren't a whole lot of foods in the grocery store

that were necessarily so-called heart healthy. And there was a lot of ignorance and misinformation about what caused heart disease. And so at that point, I read some things because Dean Ornish claimed that he could reverse heart disease primarily through four different avenues. One would be exercise, but I had always exercised and I was in good shape. Secondly was through diet, and I had always thought that I'd had a pretty good diet. Probably didn't, but for most Americans it was a pretty good diet at that time. And then thirdly, through some type of group support,

and almost like Alcoholics Anonymous, where you would meet periodically with other people who had heart disease and similar issues. And then thirdly, it was through meditation. And so I tried to do what I could. You know, I didn't smoke. I exercised, so there wasn't anything there I could change. And diet, I made some adjustments, tried to cut some of the saturated fat out and some of the dairy products and some of the stuff like that.

And I began to take some fish oil because I heard the Eskimos didn't have heart disease and they still had a high-fat diet. And how long ago was this? 1985. Yeah, okay. Quite a while ago. Great. And then began to practice meditation.

And so I did that because I wanted to see if I couldn't coach for a while, you know, and not flame out and wanted to live a while, I guess. So anyway, I did that. And so I'd practice. I'd meditate for maybe 20 minutes in the morning, and then at noon, even when I was coaching, I'd take 15, 20 minutes and do the same thing. And I found that it did seem to energize me, and it did tend to give me a little more focus.

And so I've continued to do that now. I probably spend 40 to 45 minutes most mornings in meditation and prayer both and continue to do that. And I don't do it at noon like I used to. But when I was coaching, we'd start at 7 and we'd go pretty hard until 12, 12.30. And I'd take about 45 minutes for lunch. And if I spent 20 minutes meditating, I found that I was pretty fresh, ready to go. Was that on the backside of lunch?

Or did you do lunch for 20 and then meditate for 20? I think, I can't remember which way it was. Sometimes it was both. Okay. But anyway. Was this a breathing meditation practice? Was it a contemplative meditation? A little bit of breathing and most of it was contemplation.

Yeah. Yeah. And so a 20-minute practice, for some people, you've been doing this a long time, and for some people it seems like, how could I possibly get 20 minutes? Like, why would I do that? Or I should do it,

but I'm not sure I'd be good at it, and I'm not sure I'll get the payout for it. Is there any insight or wisdom that you could share about, maybe even how, sorry to interrupt, but maybe even how. Well, I think probably the best way is to start out in the standard textbook method.

You focus on breathing and relaxing each part of your body. And then eventually that relaxation response becomes fairly automatic and almost instantaneous where you're relaxed and you don't have to consciously relax your feet and your ankles and your calves and your thighs and that whole progressive thing. It becomes pretty automatic and then, I think you're able to discipline your thoughts and at the same time meditate. And in my case, I usually have a fairly set routine of people I pray for, things that I focus on, but I do this in a meditative state. And I know some people find that walking in a meditative way or even jogging,

and I used to be a jogger. I can't jog anymore, but I do use the elliptical trainer. And I think to some degree that type of exercise can almost be meditative. You know, there's a rhythm to it. Yeah, mindful movement and just being present with the movement of the activities can drop you right into a trance. My challenge with movement meditations is that it hits the first pillar really well. I become very present. But the second pillar of insight and wisdom, I've found that quiet sitting, following my breathing.

Well, that's my case, too. That's what I do. Yeah, brilliant. So, last question. I know I said that just a few minutes ago. And I just want to make sure I got something right then you said 1987

is that when you started meditation about 85 85 85 or 6 yeah well I'm not good at math but that's over 20 years

yeah phenomenal okay last question that's 30 years 30 years yeah I was just doing the math myself

okay so 30 years of meditation alright have you have you talked a lot about this part of your this is not the last

question so sorry but have you talked about your mindfulness practice often no not too much sometimes I'll be

asked to speak at a something that has to do with with health. And at those kind of occasions, I will often refer to my heart disease and the things that I've tried to do. But if I'm speaking at a coaching clinic, I usually don't get into meditation.

Most of those guys start looking at me a little funny, you know. But I think that there's no question that meditation, I know Phil Jackson, you know, with the bowls and his coaching career, used meditation. Lots of athletes do get involved in visualization, you know, before they hit a baseball or put or whatever so there's no question that there is a connection between the mind and the body that can be can be very beneficial yeah my sense is that people are more open to it now I think mindfulness and meditation and for a couple reasons one is health and the

benefit of a sense of stillness and the recovery that comes from that is, you know, obviously a benefit. And the second is that the connection that I'm hearing people talk about is that there's so much information coming in from the world and there's so much stress and there's so much anxiousness basically that is a breeding ground for being highly switched on. And this is a way to be able to reset, recenter, to be able to find a sense of being present. Yeah, that's a very good point because there is a book written by Elmore

called The IY Generation and he talks about the sensory overload, particularly as it deals with so many very young people that everybody's connected to some type of technological device, almost continuous. So you can work 24 hours a day now on the Internet. And you've got so much stuff coming at you that people just aren't able to slow down

and so just basically as a recovery tool there's something important there and to excel in hostile and rugged environments we have to take care of recovery this is a great strategy there's nothing better than sleep and maybe hydration and food right but this has been an i've seen an incredible benefit from people doing this as an accelerant to performance and hopefully hydration and food, right? But I've seen an incredible benefit from people doing this as an accelerant to performance and hopefully wisdom and insight and depth of experience in life.

Okay, last question. I said this a couple times. This is the third last question. Okay, what's your definition of mastery? There's a book written about, if you repeat something 10,000 times you tend to tend to get the hang of it and so I suppose mastery has to do with practice and repeating, but you have to do the right thing. In other words, if you practice shooting 10,000 free throws

and your form's bad, all you're doing is practicing bad habits. So it has to be tied to the best way to do something. It has to be tied to reality, and it has to make sense. So I think mastery has to do a lot with practice and repetition, but also being clued in to the right way to try to do something. And that has to do with knowledge and skill. And so I think that's one thing that's important about maybe the way you're trying to approach coaching,

maybe the way I began to understand it better. So often coaches are afraid to coach differently than they were coached because they feel that if they change the pattern that they won't win and they feel that you've got to be transactional reward and punishment top-down militaristic and focused on sometimes humiliation and punishment, and that that's a way to win. But it seems to me that you can care about your players.

You can treat them with respect. You can treat them with dignity. You can listen to them. And it doesn't necessarily take away from your ability to win. In many cases it enhances the ability, but there's a lot of people who get trapped in the idea of what was traditionally done and the way they've experienced it. They won't depart from it because they're afraid they won't be able to win enough games. And so that's one thing I've occasionally tried to get across when I speak to coaches' groups.

That's brilliant. Is there a place that people can find out more about teammates or the projects that you're working on? Is there somewhere we can go to learn more? Teammates.org is just it. Teammates.org. Brilliant. That's it. Yeah. Coach, thank you so much for sharing and being authentic and allowing me to feel what it is that you've worked to be able to articulate. Well, thank you. It's been a

pleasure to meet you. Yeah. Thank you very much. All right. Thank you so much for diving into another episode of Finding Mastery with us. Our team loves creating this podcast and sharing these conversations with you. We really appreciate you being part of this community. And if you're enjoying the show, the easiest no cost way to support is to hit the subscribe or follow button wherever you're listening. Also, if you haven't already, please consider dropping us a review on Apple or Spotify. We are incredibly grateful for the support and feedback. If you're looking for even more insights, we have a newsletter we send out every Wednesday. Punch over to findingmastery.com slash newsletter to sign up.

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