High Performance Mindset | Learn from World-Class Leaders, Consultants, Athletes & Coaches about Mindset - 534: Becoming a Purpose-Driven and Transformational Leader with Joe Ehrmann and Jody Redman, InSideOut Initiative

Episode Date: February 12, 2023

In 2015, Joe Ehrmann and Jody Redman, with a grant from the NFL Foundation, implemented a statewide pilot program in partnership with high school athletic associations, educational leadership associations, and the Dallas Cowboys and Denver Broncos. Since that time, the InSideOut Initiative has partnered with 20 NFL teams in 17 states. With the support of the NFL Foundation, the InSideOut Initiative is creating a national movement to transform interscholastic athletics.    Joe Ehrmann, All-American football player played professional football for 13 years and was the NFL’s first Ed Block Courage Award Recipient. Joe is the author of the highly influential and popular InSideOut Coaching: How Sports Can Transform Lives which provides the basis for purpose-based athletics: connecting student-athletes to transformational coaches, in a nurturing community for their social, emotional and character development.    Jody Redman is a nationally recognized speaker, facilitator, author, and thought leader on strategic planning, organizational design and transformation, and leadership development. She is a former collegiate basketball stand-out, high school teacher, head coach, and Athletic Administrator at both the high school and collegiate levels. During her nineteen-year tenure as an Associate Director for the Minnesota State High School League, Jody authored, developed and produced cutting edge online education that supports the social-emotional and character development of school community stakeholders.     In this episode, Joe, Jody and Cindra talk about:  Why it is important to be purpose-driven  What it means to be an inside-out coach and leader  How leaders can become transformational  What healthy masculinity looks like     HIGH PERFORMANCE MINDSET SHOWNOTES FOR THIS EPISODE: www.cindrakamphoff.com/534   FOLLOW CINDRA ON INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/cindrakamphoff/  FOLLOW CINDRA ON TWITTER: https://twitter.com/mentally_strong  Love the show? Rate and review the show for Cindra to mention you on the next episode: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/high-performance-mindset-learn-from-world-class-leaders/id1034819901       

Welcome to episode 534 with Joe Ehrman and Jodi Redman. My name is Cyndra Kampoff and thank you so much for joining me for the High Performance Mindset podcast today. I had the amazing privilege of listening to Joe Ehrman and Jodi Redman speak multiple times over several years and I'm really excited to have them join the podcast today. So let me tell you a little bit about Joe and Jodi just to give you a little bit of Joe and Jodi just to give you a little bit of background here before you listen to the episode. Joe Ehrman is an all-American football player who played professional football for 13 years and was the NFL's first Ed Block Courage Award recipient. He's also the author of a highly influential and popular book called

Inside Out Coaching, How Sports Can Transform Lives. Jodi Redmond is a nationally recognized speaker, facilitator, and author. She's a former head coach and high school teacher, and she spent 19 years as associate director for the Minnesota State High School League. And together in 2015, Joe and Jodi, with a grant from the NFL Foundation, implemented a statewide pilot program in partnership with the Dallas Cowboys and Denver Broncos. Since then, the Inside Out initiative has partnered with 20 NFL teams in 17 states, and they're working to create a national movement to transform interscholastic athletics.

Now, in this episode, Jodi and Joe and I talk about more than just athletics. We talk about what it means to be a purposeful driven leader and how you can do that. What it means from their perspective to be an inside out leader and coach and how leaders can become more transformational than transactional. And we also talk about what Joe has been speaking about most recently, and that is what healthy masculinity looks like. I hope you enjoyed this episode, and if you'd like to see the full show notes and description, you can head over to cindracampoff.com slash 534. Again, that's cindracampoff.com slash 534. Here's Jodi and Joe. Hey, my name is Cindra Campoff, and I'm a small-town Minnesota gal,

Minnesota nice, as we like to say it, who followed her big dreams. I spent the last four years working as a mental coach for the Minnesota Vikings, working one-on-one with the players. I wrote a best-selling book about the mindset of the world's best and I'm a keynote speaker and national leader in the field of sport and performance psychology and I am obsessed with showing you exactly how to develop the mindset of the world's best so you can accomplish all your goals and dreams. So I'm over here following my big dreams and I'm here to inspire you and practically show you how to do the same.

And you know, when I'm not working, you'll find me playing Ms. Pac-Man. Yes, the 1980s game Ms. Pac-Man. So take your notepad out, buckle up and let's go. This is the High Performance Mindset. Thank you so much for joining us on the High Performance Mindset podcast. Joe and Jody, I'm so grateful that you're here with us. So thank you so much for joining us today. Well, we're thrilled to be with you and we really appreciate the work that you do and the impact you're having across the country and in Minnesota. So wonderful to be with you. Thank you, Joe. I appreciate that. And when I was thinking about this interview, I was really pumped because I've got to see you both live speak. And Jody, I think about

the reputation that you have in the state of Minnesota and all throughout the U.S. And I'm just thinking about all the things I've heard people say about you and the impact that you've had in our high schools and other organizations. So I'm like just excited to share your work. And Joe, I'm thinking about the time I got to hear you speak was at the Minnesota Athletic Directors Administration Conference. And I couldn't believe like the vulnerability that you showed. And then also how you got mostly men to talk about and share their life story and their

crucibles and their difficult moments in these small groups and these small tables. And I was, my mind was like, you know, that, that you could have just have such an incredible impact. So I'm grateful that you're here with both with us today and all the thousands of people who are listening. Us too. Thanks. Thrilled to be here. So like to get us started, maybe what we should do is just tell us a little bit about Inside Out and why you're both passionate about what you're doing right now. Well, Inside Out is a systems level. It's a catalytic organization organizing principles that address large systemic issues, which is the best way to address them. So 2014, I have been in and around the NFL for,

gosh, 40 years. 2014, there was a spike of NFL players that were arrested for domestic violence or sexual assault. I was called in as part of an ad hoc committee to help define what appropriate penalties and rules there should be, and also what is the corporate social responsibility in addressing these issues. In the midst of that meeting, Roger Goodell turned to me and asked me if I would speak to coaching character. In the context of can you coach character in a way that would not only address issues of male violence toward women, but all the other social issues that we have in every community. And the NFL is certainly a microcosm of that. And my immediate response to him was, no, I don't think so. There's not enough space in high school sports today to really develop a character. There's a lot of character programs, but few of them have very little impact.

So I left that meeting, and I'd been doing coaches training for probably 30 years at that point in time. And I was really kind of devastated by the lack of impotency I felt that sports was having in the moral social development. So I left that meeting frustrated. I ended up calling Jody, and I asked her if she would partner with me because I had heard her recently talk about you can't address this through coaches alone. It has to be a systemic approach.

So Jody and I collaborated, and we started in 2015 within the state of Colorado with the Denver Broncos and with the state of Texas with the Dallas Cowboys. So we've started on this long, deep process and I'll let Jody share the rest of that story. There we go. I'm sorry about that. So we as you know, as Joe mentioned, he called, he left that meeting and called me. And I actually, if I went back three more years previous to that, I led a book discussion around Joe's book, Inside Out Coaching, How Sports Can Transform Lives. And I led that with about 20 athletic administrators. And then as in my role at the State High School League of Minnesota, went out and started teaching and delivering that content to coaches.

And what we realized after a year is that we were really setting coaches up for failure. There wasn't anybody that was back in the school community who was talking about transformational purpose questions and Joe's big four questions of why do you coach? Why do you coach the way you do? How does it feel to be coached by you? And how do you define success? So went back to the drawing board and started to look at our systems in Minnesota. So school board associations, principals, superintendents, parent organizations, how could we take the philosophy that's contained in Joe's book, and really move it across all layers of an ecosystem to see if we align that ecosystem around a shared value or a shared purpose, that then we could really garner the support necessary for coaches to be transformational. today has really become an industry. The youth sport culture specifically has become,

I think it's now a 25 or $30 billion industry. And so when we look at that, all of those individuals who participate in a youth sport experience understand what sport is about, right? You go out, you travel internationally, you win national championships, you have lots of coaches and uniforms, and then they get put into a middle school program that's education-based and purpose-based. And so you begin to see where the dissent begins to occur with what is the reason for this? Why do sports exist? And so, as Joe mentioned, we went back to this collective, looking at his best practices, some of the practices that I had put in place here, and looked at the systems level approach to try to transform lives through what we call purpose-based sports, which is connecting student athletes to transformational coaches in a culture of belonging for their human growth and development. Wonderful. Thanks for the backstory and just like learning more a little bit about

how you both got partnered together to do this work. And that was going to be my next question is give us a little sense of, in your opinion, what it means to be purpose-based, purpose-driven, and what do you see the impact? You know, what I'm hearing you say is that it's not just a coach understanding, you know, why they coach, and that's a really powerful question to think about. How does it feel to be coached by you, right? And I'm thinking about how does it feel to be led by you, you know, for those people who maybe aren't coaches here, and that's a really powerful question. Makes you really take a step back. I'm curious. So what does it mean to be purpose driven and purpose based, in your opinion?

And what is the impact that you're seeing at a, you know, a school wide level, a system level when they go through your training? Well, purpose based is, again, connecting student athletes and transformational coaches. So we believe that you can grow and develop transformational coaching. That starts on the inside, works its way out. It's about being a better, to be a better coach, to be a better leader, you've got to be a better you.

You've got to have some of your own personal growth and development disciplines and always be working on creating the best version of yourself. So we do a lot of internal work with coaches, helping them to clarify what their purpose is, their passions, what their values and virtues are. Creating a community of belonging. Most coaches all talk about culture, but few know how to create one. Is there anything more important to a pre-adolescent or adolescent boy or girl than being part of belonging to something, to be loved, to belong, to participate of something? That is a recipe for mental health, wellness, and, you know, an antidote for much of what's taking place in this society.

And then the human growth and development, which is really the social-emotional character development of student-athletes. And foundationally, what we do is teach coaches that you want to talk about the power of high performance. Well, the foundation of high performance is secure relationship between that coach and student-athlete. When that student-athlete feels safe, seen is secure relationship between that coach and student athlete. When that student athlete feels safe, seen, and supported by that coach, boy, that opens up the platform, not only for higher performances, for deeper personal relationships, which is foundational to all transformation. All of our transformative work is based on science.

We've got eight years, almost eight years of evaluation. We publish that. But our work is built on a thing called attachment research, which is the capacity to build and maintain relationships. It turns out that the single biggest predictor of your ability to build reciprocal positive relationships is when you've made sense out of your own life, when you have a coherent network, an autobiographical history and data that's in correct autobiographical order. It's the integration of the good, the bad, and the ugly. The second thing is social neuroscience, which shows us that because of neuroplasticity of our brains, relationships plus experiences can change the form and function of the human brain it can do that at any age then the third thing is just an integrated spirituality that we use

to really understand self-understanding self-compassion mindfulness and meditation those are the transformative pieces that we use to help coaches really be able to maximize the platform, the power position that they have in the lives of young people. Yeah, powerful. I would add that as we look at that coach relationship, certainly then our work also centers in preparing athletic administrators and or school principals to lead, meaning that you have to go on, as Joe mentioned, that inside journey and make sense out of your own life, your own narrative, understand where your values came from. If you're choosing a moral value to really build your culture around, well, you chose that for a reason. That came from somewhere in your

own life experiences, in your own narrative. And so we spend a lot of time working with athletic administrators because they can help to what we call lead from the middle. They can lead both up that chain in the ecosystem to their principal, superintendent and school board. And they also then have direct influence and leadership and responsibility for their coaches who are under them, and then student athletes, parents, and community members. And so it's really equipping that athletic administrator to sit in that middle of that space and do their own work to prepare their own voice around what purpose-based is, how they can connect to that, and then how they can stand up and communicate that vision within their own school community. Yeah, excellent. Well, and I'm thinking about, Joe, when I heard you first speak and you had us do this like lifetime exercise where we identified our highs and lows and then

the degree of impact, right? And really being able to understand yourself and your struggles. I think you wrote about how an inside-out coach means turning your struggles, errors, and misfortune into lessons. That will make a coach who can instill a sense of community and be a better leader. Tell us a little bit more about why that's so important to understand yourself and your own struggles. And then how they impact your leadership or your coaching? Well, I think it's critical to understanding why you coach, why you put yourself in a position, why you make the sacrifices, why you give up your own family opportunities in order to coach. So I think it's imperative you understand what's the deep-seated notions, what is egocentric and what is other-ric? What are you trying to get out of this

relationship as well? Yeah. So the narrative work is so incredibly important in that journey. And to your question, Cinder, about, you know, doing that exercise of elevating or highlighting who are those people that positively influenced you and who are those people that negatively influenced you? You know, we talk about our life as a tapestry where there are people that actually have woven their values or their tendencies, how they respond in certain situations, how they're triggered. All of that is woven from those individuals who had influence over us positively or negatively. And so we respond in ways, in similar ways to how we were responded to.

And so it's critically important to take a look, to go in, to look deeply at what those things are, what are those values, what are those tendencies that we have? Because the only way that we change them and intercept them is to address them, make sense out of them, bring them into some kind of coherence. So as a high school coach, my purpose was I coach to help boys become men of empathy and integrity who will lead, be responsible, and change the world for good. That's why I showed up every day. That's why I was willing to make the sacrifices. Now that was purpose. And it was a passion for me that allowed me to be transformational in the lives of other people because I had already done my inner work. I was a boy that was always looking for the affirmation, the validation of other men.

I was always trying to figure out what it meant to be a man. So when I became a coach, I became a coach because I had men that built into me, that spoke into me and did validate me. So I understand what my purpose was and with my purpose comes a passion. And the passion is what allows you to compensate for the sacrifices that you make in order to do what you love to do. Yeah, excellent. So I'm thinking about maybe leaders and coaches who are listening that say, well, I already have so much to think about, right? I got the game plan and I really want to get my team to win, right? And so, and I think about this winning culture that we live in. You turn on ESPN and it's all about, you know, who won last night and who lost, right? So what, what rebuttal

might you give to people who say, you know, is this really important or gosh, I have so many other things to think about besides my own inner work and why I coach and these relationships, which I'm really hearing you say is like foundational, which I agree with. Yeah. Well, I think relationships is the foundation for all transformation, and personal transformation always precedes social transformation. So at the core, you know, our system allows us to address hazing, bullying, racism, sexism, gender violence. Our system allows that whole process to be taken in.

Yeah, I would add that it's not an either or perspective. And many in our culture believe that it is. Either you're about winning or you're about the what they call soft skills. And what our philosophy looks at is that the goal is to try to get a group of students to achieve a win. That's the curriculum, right? That's where all of the teachable moments that exist in sport and why sport is so valuable because of those teachable moments. But if I'm not aware of the purpose of why I'm showing up, if I'm not aware that that's, that it's the human growth and development that I should be focusing on, then I will most often do anything. It will be at the expense of the student athlete, right?

It will be, I will center on that goal of winning and I'll forego capturing those teachable moments. When I'm a coach who understands that the goal, I'm going to play, plan, and prepare to win every game that I'm in. But I also understand that I have a higher calling or a higher purpose. Now we've got kids that because of that secure relationship are going to perform better. They're going to do better because they know it's safe to move outside of

their comfort zone. They know that it's safe for them to take risks, right? If you're not in a, in a culture or an environment where you feel like it's safe for me to do that, I'm going to stay locked into what I know right now, because I'm fearful of the consequences. I'm not going to play. I'm going to get yelled at. I'm going to get benched or whatever those consequences are.

So again, the goal is to try to win the game. The purpose is the human growth and development of our students. And it's capitalizing on those teachable moments. Yeah. Excellent, Jodi. I'm thinking actually, as you're talking about my son. So I have two boys, one that's 13 and one that's 15. And I think about particularly my 15 year old, he really needs to feel like loved and belonged, right? Like he belongs. And I think when he

doesn't have that, he holds himself back. He doesn't really, you know, take the shot at the last minute that he could, he passes it. Right. And, and I, I see him thrive when he has really great coaches that care about him. That doesn't matter if he makes a mistake. Hey, I love you anyway, Carter. Right. So I'm seeing it, even what you're saying, I'm seeing it in my boys and how it plays out in them. And that's what we want for parents as parents, right? We want our kids to feel supported and like they belong on a team. Yeah.

And I think for that to happen, coaches also have to understand that they're being supported. If the minute a coach doesn't win on the scoreboard, but is the best person that we can put in front of our students, if we're going to fire that teacher coach, who is the best person that we can put in front of our students, because we're going to fire that teacher coach, who is the best person that

we can put in front of our students, because maybe they didn't have a successful season or came up against teams that were just better than they were. That becomes like the, I think the demise of the, of the culture that becomes the demise of those coaches who are transformational. So I think we have to be very conscious about putting support systems around transformational. So I think we have to be very conscious about putting support systems around transformational coaches so that they can coach in that way. They can coach from that place of wanting to grow and develop that student or child into a better human being, which is really the whole reasons sports should exist in our culture. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So, Joe, I'm thinking about something you just said previous and you said, you know, that part of your purpose and you're

talking about being a man and your understanding of that and how, tell us a little bit about, I know you talk a lot about healthy masculinity and I want to kind of shift our conversation and we'll probably go back to the broader conversation a little while, but tell us a little bit about what healthy masculinity means to you. Yeah. So we've changed that phrase, you know, as things get politicized in this country. So we now call that heroic masculinities. Masculinity really is a social construct. So every socioeconomic group, cultural, ethnic,

has their own kind of fluid definition of masculinity, of their own masculinity. But we define masculinity based on five criteria. One is self-understanding. You've got to understand who you are, what your own passions, what your gifts, strengths, what you need to develop. The second thing is self-management. How do you control emotions? How do you make best decisions? The third thing is relationship development. You know, the key to every transformational leadership is leadership. But how do we teach

as men to be relationally connected, to be open and honest with who and what you are. The fourth thing is social awareness, understanding group differences, that we're individual people that come in different colors, shapes, orientations, what have you. We've got to be aware of and understanding the inherent dignity and value of all human beings. And the last thing is the moral character of empathy, integrity, and moral courage. We teach those are the three really to personal transformation that will lead to social transformation.

Because when you're empathic with other human beings, that drives kindness. That's an engine for kindness. Kindness then moves toward compassion that demands some kind of integrity between your actions and your belief. And moral courage is the critical component. We've got all these athletes that are being praised for having physical courage, but they can't stand up to some basic peer pressure. We've got to raise up a generation of men and women that have the moral voice to speak truth into this culture. So when we talk about healthy masculinity, it really, it's those five competencies, but it comes in two buckets. And one is relationships. At the end of life, the only thing that really matters is relationships. What kind of mother, what kind of father, son,

daughter, husband, leader, what kind were you and the second question is what was your purpose in life did you leave the world a little better place so that's not only a definition or a criteria for masculinity but feminine as well as are the five competencies because at the end of the day it's about our core humanity as men and women. Powerful. And say a little bit more about why you chose heroic. And either of you, yeah, can speak on that versus another word. What does that mean to you? Well, heroic means strength beyond self. So an African elder was once asked what makes a good man? And the elder's response was one who can laugh, cry, and protect, and does each one need it. So there's a holistic development of one that needs to take place.

Heroic means that you have strength and capacity beyond for just yourself, your other center, other focus, and assume those responsibilities as well. So, Cinder, we've just developed four learning modules for USA football. We've trained 100,000 youth coaches in the first two of transformational coaching. So, looking at Joe's four questions and the transformational purpose statement of I coach with empathy and integrity to create secure relationships where every student is seen safe and supported. So, that's the foundation of that first course. The second course then is really how do we create a culture of longing where the student is seen safe and supported? What are the actionable steps that a coach would take to create that culture on their team? The third is around healthy and heroic

masculinities and femininities. How do we instill that and give the adult the perspective of how socialization impacts our youth from the time they're born until they reach us as coaches and what we need to be aware of in our own journey so that we don't damage our students further? And then the fourth is on parents as partners. How do we develop coaches who can create partnerships and collaborate with parents instead of seeing them as an adversary, but that we're all on this journey to, again, grow our students into better or the best people that they can be. So again, really exciting to see these concepts from where we are to, you know, now that we're able to scale and be able to deliver to large populations, to national governing bodies, and really, I think, get into the systems that sport is structured under and impact those systems across all participants within the system.

Yeah, and what a unique way to talk about these ideas, you know, in an impactful way, because and Joe, you can ask the same, answer the same question about your own background, but how does your own background, Joe, impact what you do today? Well, I was, as a boy, I had two major wounds. One was a father wound, severely wounded by a father that left me with relational, social, emotional kind of issues. And then I had an adverse childhood experience that I experienced as a 12-year-old boy that I never dealt with for 47 years. So my journey really was marked by my wounds and trying to heal those. So it turns out there's two kinds of wounds in this world,

two kinds of wounded people. One are wounded people that ignore and deny their own wounds, and what they do is keep wounding other people. They're wounded wounders. The second kind of person is a wounded healer, and they kind of take their own wounds, heal them, and in the process of learning how to heal them, they then can take their healed wounds and help heal others.

So when you think of young boys in America today, one of the greatest quests is this quest for manhood. Who gets to validate that? Every boy is filled with this insecurity about being a man. It's part of our culture that's bred into young boys. So, but you ever have a man outside of the home, whether the boy has a dad or not, but to be able to stand up there and just look a young boy in the eye and say, I believe in you, I see in you, you have what it takes, you're on the right path, the right road. Well, that's very validating.

The essence of masculinity and the beauty of sports is that a team is nothing but a set of relationships for a common purpose. So when you think of masculinity or femininity as relationships for a purpose, it's the ideal place to help develop that. The problem is we have to walk and particularly hold young boys' hands as we help them develop their own social-emotional language and capacity to express that and teach them how to build authentic relationships. We live in a world of community, but how do we in the context of sport build authentic community where everybody's known and accepted for who and what they are? That's where the power lays. Yes, thank you. And I know if people want to pick up your book, you talk a little bit about

your experience and inside out coaching how sports can transform lives. Jodi, how would you, how would you answer that question? How does, you know, maybe your experiences impact you today and impact your purpose? Well, again, my, my journey, especially around Joel's book and this idea of sport, it was the first time that I, when I sat down and did read his book and then led that book study with those athletic administrators that I ever went inside and looked at the people who influenced me. I think we're so busy today. We never really stop and spend too much time reflecting on our journeys and or even where we want to go or how present we want to be today. And so it really, it forced me to look at,

as I was leading this, my own experiences. And, you know, I too had an adverse childhood experience that really left me wounded. And I think that is kind of the nature of, for all of us, it's the same for all of us. I think we all have things that were really challenging in our youth. And I think it's when we're awake enough to look at it and then look at who either helped us along the way and how we recovered from that experience. It takes time and reflection to do so. And so out of my own wounds came this need to create community and to create a place where everybody belonged and where we could create community where there was this growth and there was this energy and people wanted to be a part of it. And I think

that has really fueled not only my journey as a teacher, a coach, an athletic administrator, and certainly in my role at the Minnesota State High School League, working with school communities across the state of Minnesota and nationally and today is this purpose-driven life, right? It's being awake and aware and it's understanding our journey. It's understanding what we learn from it. And then it's taking that and making something better for our world with it. So my passion has always been about leading to change the arc of others' lives, to create this place of belonging where we're awake

and aware and conscious of the power of adults in students' lives and the impact of either making it better or making it, you know, an experience that is damaging. Yeah, excellent. Well, I'm feeling, you're speaking to my soul today. And so I'm feeling like this is very impactful and meaningful. And I know when you're speaking in front of, you know, coaches and leaders, they feel the same. So I'm curious, how can people get involved and reach out to you?

And just if they wanna learn more about what you're doing and just inside out in general and how you and your team could come and work with their team? Well, I think the best way is reaching out to our info at insideoutinitiative.org. We have an admin that will work with you to schedule and to bring and look at all the possibilities. I think the other part is that we have now a new platform. It's a inside out community of practice. So we have courses and resources and ways to really scale this within your school community. I think it's a matter of, we're not a cookie cutter.

We don't live in a box at all. Whatever the needs of that group might be, we really tailor our message and our process based on how you're showing up and what your needs are from a community perspective. And I was looking on your website about the impact of this work. And I know that UNC Greensboro has been the center there of athlete well-being, I think, has been doing some research on your program. That's where I got my PhD. So I'm really excited to see that you're working with UNC Greensboro.

Congrats. We're going there next weekend for a meeting. Oh, I wish I could come with you. I love Greensboro. Lived there for seven years, so one of my favorite places on earth. And I'm just curious, you know, what, tell us a bit about high level on that study and what you found there. We were fortunate enough that when we met with Alexia Gallagher,

the director of the NFL foundation back in 2015, in April of that year, we met up at the NFL office and she said, here's your evaluation team. And they literally followed us with clipboards and kept notes like every 30 seconds, they were writing down engagement based on, you know, what we were teaching at the time. And so we've been on this incredible and blessed journey with them, not only to inform our work from a data perspective of impact, but also to help us to really focus on and now publish, we've published in two educational journals that really will help to elevate the educational value of what sport can be. I think people see it, and I think there was a huge impact in sport

when we started defining it as extracurricular. I know back in the, I think, late 70s, early 80s, that change in kind of how we talked about sport in our school communities. And so I think that there's been a real push for us, and especially with the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and our evaluation team, to look at sports as being as important as math and science and English. It is teaching and learning. And if it's not, then it really does not belong in our school communities. What are the educational, what is the educational value that comes from sport? You know, as Joe mentioned, we're going to be meeting with them next week.

We're going to spend a lot of time mapping out our DEI work within section one of New York. We're going to, we're working on a masculinity paper, looking at masculine tendencies around some of what Joe shared in our podcast today. So we're really spending an awful lot of time looking at and mapping out our growth and also trying to bring and elevate the value of what sports can and should be in the lives of our students. Yeah, excellent. Excellent. Well, as we wrap up today, I'm grateful that you're both here and just shared more about your passions and your and your work and had us really think a lot about why we do what we do and how we can, I think the biggest message I'm really hearing is just continuing to create lasting relationships and keeping that front and center.

Joe, what final thoughts or advice maybe would you have for those people who are listening and everyone who's listening is really working to be the best version of themselves. So I'm curious, what, what thoughts, final thoughts do you have? Well, I think my final thought is just all of us have to assume responsibility for other human beings. And in that responsibility, it demands that we be the best version of, of ourselves. We live in a world that's filled with pain. I mean, sports coaches, leaders have a tremendous opportunity to make a difference. But unless we step out of our

own egocentric mindsets, it's not going to happen. So I again, want to just thank you for your work, warm and friendly you are. And I'm really looking forward to listening to your podcast. Yeah, thank you, Joe. Jodi, what final thoughts do you have? The only thing I would add to that, one has been just, I've been blessed by this journey with Joe. It's been so impactful in my own life. And, you know, again, we always try as in these leadership roles to expand our territory, so to speak, and to ensure that we're reaching and growing ourselves every day. So it's that being intentional component of, you know, we can be happy in status quo and just kind of continue down the course and

the path that we're on. But it really leadership, effective leadership impactful leadership requires us to continue to grow and elevate every day and to be awake. So I would leave it at that. And again, blessed to be with you today. It's always good to see you, Cinder. Thank you, Jodi. And thank you, Joe. I'm really grateful for your time and your energy today and keep doing the incredible work that you're doing in this world. It's much needed. Way to go for finishing another episode of the High Performance Mindset. I'm giving you a virtual fist pump. Holy cow, did that go by way too fast for anyone else?

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