Sports Ethics: Power Through

“I’ll just power through.” She stated it as a simple reality of how she would deal with the problem plaguing her. No longer on the playing field, my old student faced some serious emotional wreckage and career challenges. But she evoked the language of her life as an athlete when she faced the obstacles or adversity of life. Sometimes being smart or well trained or good is not enough, sometimes shit happens and a person must “power through.” I admired the clarity and courage of her approach and believe that this attribute involves a basic human capacity and requirement that any high performing person needs to call upon at certain times.

Anyone seeking to live his or her life according to a purpose needs to power through sometime. Anyone seeking to survive has to power through some time. Anyone facing obdurate obstacles in their mind, emotions or physical environment, sometimes has to power through. Notice the emphasis here upon will, upon deploying attention, mind-focused energy against obstacles to endure in a purpose. It is intimately related to “showing up.”

To be honest often the person may not even know where they will end up. All the individual knows is that he or she must get through the conflagration facing them. It is enough to focus upon getting through with integrity and body intact. The other side may be unclear but it will permit escape and new start.

Teams and players face the challenge to power through when they face adversity, serious adversity. Notice the emphasis here upon “power.” This does not mean the player or team does not use its mind and plan and adapt. But at the core, the challenge facing a person who must power through requires an emphasis upon the internally organized and deployed power to endure in face of pain and adversity and keep going even when things get worse rather than better.

Powering through assumes that a person or team will get through it. But the “it” and the end are not clear. Often it means just getting through the adversity. It could be as bad as being in the middle of a melt down by a team or a huge thumping where a player or team is simply outmatched or not on its game. They are getting beat. They probably will not be able to win no matter what they do; but they must continue to be present, continue to perform and be loyal to each other and their goals and team culture. They play with integrity even when the plan is falling apart and the game is being lost.

It may mean powering through a bad spot or touch of adversity. Maybe a series of mistakes or a serious injury that takes away a critical player or a good friend during the game. It may mean a sudden jolting change in the dynamic or the game, the balance of power or talent or just losing momentum and suddenly playing from behind.

In all these cases, it recalls almost Nietzsche’s will to power. Not in its demand for dominance, but in the sense that Nietzsche believed that the force for living and growing could be harnessed by a person and directed inward and emerge as a form of self-mastery. This requires the internal person to expend immense attention and energy to forge a steady ability to overcome the desire to quit or give up or stop trying. It means the person or athlete can endure the pain or loss or push back from the obstacle they are facing. Often the battle is never seen, maybe the body movement gives evidence, but the real battle occurs internally in the mind, focus, intention, will and cognitive capacity and organization of the person.

Enduring pain and pushing or fighting back against the sapping fear of failure or desire to give up takes huge amounts of internal energy and will. It requires focused attention and concentrated action to organize and move body and mind in an intentional manner. This can be as direct as pushing your legs to keep moving forward when you are tackled in football to tossing the ball and smashing a serve when a player is down and has missed the first serve.

Powering through flows naturally from the central aspect of athletic and achievement based ethics—intentional integration of mind, body and emotions for a purpose. Powering through means a person is capable not just of overcoming physical limitations but also of putting aside distractions or being distraught to stay on track for a goal, even when aspects of a person’s body or mind or emotions may scream to not try, to give up, to just stop. It also means the goal may fade, become fuzzy or reduce to just getting out alive or soul intact.

The challenge can be as daunting as facing mental anguish or the dark radiance of depression to just get up each morning, get dressed, eat and show up for work. To do the work and relate to others requires some aspects of powering though. It can be as overwhelming as facing six months of rehabilitation work to restore an ACL or torn Achilles tendon. Each day demands doing exercises, often with little perceived return, but the athlete or person must show up and do the exercises and endure, persevere and face set backs and bad news, but keep going. Most of these days of

overcoming injury or emotional pain call for powering through.

It depends heavily upon the ethic of self-mastery but also of the loyalty and training that go together in athletic achievement. Often it requires the support of fellow players or coaches or advisors who can give encouragement and help and advice and constructive criticism in technique or buffering to sustain the effort. Going through the physical or emotional therapeutic journey depends upon strong, consistent and supportive therapists and friends.

This triumph of will of powering through centers strong athletic achievement and virtues. It demonstrates what coaches call being “mentally tough.” But tough is not enough, it requires not just standing up amid the turmoil but forging an intention to act and then calling upon all our resources to act despite the odds and even when we do not feel like it.

Power through has its own dark side. The emphasis upon just power, just getting through to the goal can result in serious loss and injury. The Achilles temptation always arises when will to power drives powering through. Nietzsche knew this as well as anyone. Sometimes a person should not “play through the pain.” Sometimes the limits of endurance physical and emotional have been met and it is time to stop, rethink, renew and maybe even change purpose.

Powering through is not sufficient and left untended by reflection and good advice and support, it can lead athletes and people down paths where injury can get worse and isolation can lead people to implode.

Another danger of powering through is that an athlete or person can get isolated in their pain. It can become the loneliness of the long distance runner. Athletes and people need a “little help from my friends” and experts to get through these trials. Like all aspects of ethics, powering through is important but needs to be tempered by mindful consultation with friends and teammates and coaches and experts. Support can matter as much as will.

In the end like all dimensions of athletic ethics and performance ethics, power through supports and sustains. But it builds more deeply upon purpose and integrity. This means it can drive to achieve, but needs to be tempered by the wisdom and support to know when to change direction and purpose.

Sport Ethics: "Be Smooth"

I watched a amazing double play last night and marveled at how seamless and flowing the entire coordinated action was. The integrated flowing precision of the play while adapting on the fly reminded me of how important being efficient and flowing can be to sports achievement. When he spoke to the media for the first time in six months, the Seattle Seahawks powerful half-back Marshawn Lynch was asked how he felt. The man known for "beast mode" running over people, simply responded, "smooth," capturing a powerful insight into how strength matters little unless allies with form and efficiency.

In an ESPN Magazine article Aaron Rodgers described the result of his endless repetitions in his off seasons as well as how he has grown over the last five years. He reiterated that what he achieved was to be smooth. Smooth captures an interesting and vital concept when thinking about athletic and professional accomplishment. I would like to explore its nature and importance.

Smooth is the anti-thesis of turbulent and chaotic. Hitching, jerking, choking, hesitating and waste stand opposite of smooth. Smooth actions maximize outcome for energy expended. Smooth operations epitomize efficient energy deployment, a smooth action simply does not waste motion or energy so it maximizes quickness and execution consistency. Being smooth represents integrity of action and judgment expressed as expertise.

Smooth encompasses two domains: physical and mental. First, extra or needless motion slows down action and exposes players to greater disruption. The more complex and less integrated the motion, the less smooth and the greater the probability things will go wrong. Smooth physical action minimizes inconsistencies in performance and requires the least energy because no extraneous motion occurs. Smooth action permits the body to bring maximum energy to bear upon the movement and because it is smooth, it increases the consistency of action and results. 

Second, smooth actions flow from integrated decisions that adjust to the situation and deploy technique in face of unpredictability. These decisions proceed without hesitation or second-guessing because the person represents the pattern emerging in the situation and responds cognitively. This minimizes openings that  opponents can disrupt. As actions grow into a single, fluid motion, they minimize what can go wrong and minimize the profile to be attacked by an opponent.

Rodgers talked about the micro-adjustments he made over the years such as footwork, arm angle, release point. Each evolved, but more importantly, over time these changes coordinated with each other and then integrated. He learned to release faster and more accurately under attack. This hard earned smoothness minimizes friction which  maximizes  predictability in his suite of skills and confidence to employ them. Repetition, continuous learning and adjustment resulted in coherent dependability.

If you watch a beginning athlete or a beginning anything, she or he moves very cautiously. Often they master one skill at a time in sequence. They then try to connect them together. Their actions hesitate, jerk and seldom link together well  or the same way each time. Each action becomes an adventure with little reliability or confidence.

Athletes and professionals master small aspects and then mesh them together. Tennis and volleyball players practice tosses thousands of time before a consistent serve emerges. Then they work on swing, angles and release points. Most important they learn to translate lower body strength into explosive energy. I could break down any athletic or professional skill suite this way. To achieve smooth integration of a skill suite involves committed discipline and practice.

SMOOTH requires integration of skills and synchronization with context to achieve. It requires endless practice and refinement. Social psychologists talk about the idea of flow that I have often mentioned. In flow, an athlete has prepared so that the kinesthetic, intellectual and perceptual dimensions of suite of actions flow together. Actions possess a rhythm and resonance where the athlete precisely repeats what works and can slow down the world as they act.

Each motion and skill involves thousands of micro-skills and adjustments. These must be mastered and blended into a master action suite. This action must then coordinate with fellow teammates or adjust to conditions. Think of a rower in eights. The angle of repose changes as the wind or place in race changes. The angle of one’s wrist, shoulders, elbows and back and legs must all be monitored, coordinated and then adjusted on the fly. From a distance it looks beautiful and powerful, but each sweep, like each Aaron Rodgers' throw or Albert Pujols' swing requires incessant monitoring, adjusting and fusion of perception, power and form.

Dave  Cameron discusses this in terms of kinetic chain or transfer and the importance of efficient and effective energy impact maximization. This involves mindful practice, refinement and adjustment. Talking about a baseball swing he points that that actions look smooth because there is a proper transfer of energy as it flows through a chain. The energy flow is close to seamless from one step to another. Any movement that siphons energy away from the kinetic energy in the chain of action will diminish the energy output of the bat or action. Put simply this swing analogy applies to all professional actions:

Swing energy = Total energy - Energy lost to excess movement and bad timing.

Even more simply:

Smooth is good; herky-jerky is bad.

When you listen to scorers, they will sometimes complain of a “hitch” that subverts their shot. Other times they might talk about how they had to hurry a shot, and to hurry means they could not synchronize in adjusting and executing. The hitch or jerk induced or self-inflicted subverts smooth. It upsets reliability, induces tweaking and over-thinking and can undermine confidence. Opponents will try to hurry or disturb rhythm or fluid motion to throw off the skill and the mind of athletes.

Being smooth in executions means that practice and experience reinforce each other. Mindful repetition enhances the integration and etches the neural pathways that support habitual and instant action as well as refined decision making under pressure. Experience builds psychological, physical and memory capital for a person. It builds a mental toughness flowing from “I have seen this before, so my body and mind do not panic.” Internalized experience supports smooth action because athletes don’t panic or choke in face of surprise or opposition; like good professional they adapt and call upon extra energy and focus to stabilize emotions and perceptions that permit focus upon actions. Every pick and roll or double play embodies unique aspects but great teamwork makes it all look smooth.

Smoothness reveals “thought-less” expertise. The repetition and adjustments from game to game and season to season mean athletes and professionals constantly must learn. The learning results in refined skill and adjustment. Athletes improve  proficiency as well as decision-making. The learning manifests as reliable performance under stress. 

People compliment actions by calling it a  “smooth operation.” They seem to mean something went off without a hitch, notice that word again. They often refer to the actions relative to a plan, like a litigation strategy or football play. However, we seldom really mean an operation that went off exactly according to plan. The old truism “no plan survives contact with reality” carries real weight.

We need to distinguish between an operation going exactly according to plan and one that achieves its outcomes. In reality, the plan condenses to a direction or momentum, but not an exact rendition of what unfolds. Outcome based “smooth” means well trained and experienced athletes and professionals improvise, adapt and achieve outcomes within the plan’s goals. It looks smooth because their actions seem fluid and continuous with the goal even as they must perceive, process information and make new decisions constantly and seamlessly.

A smooth operation achieved its goals by executing but also adapting in countless micro decisions to small and unexpected obstacles or surprises. The individuals and team worked together kept their cool and achieved the outcomes with practiced efficiency. In smooth success, small things matter and the hours of practice to orchestrate internally and externally come together.

Good athletes, good teams, good professionals make it look easy, make it look smooth, but it never is.

Sports Ethics: Why Athletes say "Good Luck"

"Good luck."

I was counting down the carnage of both college and professional football seasons. I lost count at over 120 people lost for the season. UW lost six starters within weeks. The NFL is so riven with injuries that the league mandates weekly reports on injuries. The baseball  season winds down the the grind of 162 games more and more players lands on the disabled list through sheer attrition regression. This endless array of injury and harm reminds us why athletes wish each other good luck.

These few words are central to the morality of sports competition. Athletes exchange these words with competitors and fellow teammates. The common phrase expresses a core relation in competition among athletes. To wish someone luck recognizes them as fellow competitors in a difficult intense endeavor where good athletes prepare in every way possible. That preparation displays their commitment and focus and enables their talent to be pushed to its greatest potential. The words also reveal that the competitors seek to win on the basis of skill and competition, not on the basis of injury and harm to other competitors. Athletic competition is not war nor based upon hatred, but rather a respect, sometimes grudging, that exists across individuals who may not like each other but understand and recognize commitment and excellence in performance.

Preparation, effort and focus matter and prepare athletes for the highest competition against their opponents. But every athlete knows luck enters into the equation.

Many kinds of luck affect them, especially situational luck such as a bad or good bounce or slippery surface or bad call. The "luck of the game" pervades sports and life. Most athletes accept this and understand the arbitrary and conniving nature of such luck.

I want to address a very particular type of luck that involves  staying healthy in competition. Any commentator projecting a career prefaces it with "if he can stay healthy" as the fundamental condition of having any success.  Every athlete knows that their career can be taken from them in a nanosecond. One misstep, one cut, one crash, one accidental block--the causes of athletic injury are endless. But athletic morality relies upon the fact that such injuries are not intentional; they occur from bad luck or as side effects of both athletes intentionally seeking to execute their roles, but not intentionally seeking to maim or end the career of the other athlete. The former involves luck, the latter criminal mayhem.


At its core, good luck extends wishes that a fellow athlete not suffer sudden injury that harms  and ruins their ability to play. A twisted ankle on a cut, a knee giving out, a concussion from a trip, fall or slam, a blown ACL on a cut or sliding tackle. A hundred different ways, all unforeseen, many not yet envisioned, can ruin an athlete's day, year or career. This wish of good luck reaffirms that an athlete would rather win "fair and square" against the best the opponent has to offer rather than win because the other athlete was injured. The injury brings a win and no athlete will reject the win; but the winning athlete knows that it was not a true and complete test because they did not face the best the opponent could offer. Good luck offers a wish for health but also for the ultimate competition, not a wounded one.

The Roman goddess Fortuna carried a cornucopia from which she poured out her largess, but she wore blindfolds so the gifts are distributed with no connection to moral desert. Good as well as bad flowed from her, and behind her the wheel of fortune turned inexorably demonstrating how capricious fortune's "gifts" could be. Athletes know this better than most people.They know despite their intense physical preparation, it can all be taken away in a nanosecond. This awareness lies on the back of their minds, and they do not wish it for themselves or even upon a fellow competitor.

This reflects the athletic code, when it works, that sees opponents as just that, opponents and fellow competitors, not as enemies. An enemy crosses a moral boundary. Facing an enemy is a different moral endeavor than facing a competitor, so acknowledging their mutual vulnerability both respects fellow athletes and respects fortuna who haunts them all. Athletes play hard against each other. In contact sports they play hard, hit hard and everyone hurts. But trying to deliberately injure another athlete and take away their capacity to play, to take away their dream and skill on purpose violates the core of an moral athletic code.

Because athletic excellence depends on the body, athletic achievement remains under considerable control because individuals can devote immense trained effort to build and support their body. But the body remains vulnerable and fragile in so many ways. Repetition, striking, contact, intense pressure from the force of arms, legs knees on surfaces take their toll, and bodies break and fold and strain. Accidental contact with other athletes, it all happens every day in their lives. Athletic life can end in a micro-second. Michael Irvin, Troy Aikman, Joe Thiesman, even Petyon Manning, the list goes on, largely in football, but every athlete stands a second from having their career ripped away.

Good athletes know this of themselves and the rigors of their sport. They know their own fragility even as they deny it and train to overcome it. In true competition and fellowship they wish to best the best of their competitors and work with the best of their teammates. That best can be destroyed by the luck of injury; it hobbles their competitors and weakens their team and weakens them since they must not push themselves as hard to achieve success. Bad luck takes away the glory and satisfaction of winning.

True athletes, true competitors wish good luck as a ritual of respect for each other and for the sport they pursue.

If Lance Armstrong is Wrong, Vote against PED Baseball Players

Open season has begun on Lance Armstrong—again. His ferocity, arrogance and success generate immense distrust and accusation. His American success in Europe’s second most corrupt sport, cycling, spawned envy, cynicism, attack and hero worship. I was one of the hero worshippers for his success in a European sport, his beating cancer and his devotion to a foundation that helped give hope to cancer fighters. I still wear my Live Strong bracelet given to me by my son for my own struggles. Now I know and cannot deny that Armstrong had created a massive and systematic blood doping apparatus that drove his seven wins. He pressured his entire team to join. Hedenounced his doubters and regulatory organizations. His hubris created the opportunity for a second round of indictments that brought him down.

Now everyone and anyone, including disillusioned ex-supporters such as myself, are excoriating him, demonizing him and doing their best to belittle even his cancer work and battles. The media demonstrate its typical blood lust that galvanizes them whenever they can destroy another icon or public figure. Some of this goes deeper though and  emerges from long suppressed anger and envy of the journalists and organizations whom he had dismissed and attacked over the years. For many of us, however, I believe it arises from a righteous anger not just at him and the myth he represented but from our own, my own, sense of betrayal. But he did not just betray me or us, we betrayed ourselves by investing so much belief in him and connecting him to precious ideals of integrity, commitment, and devotion. This belief permitted me and us to forgive his arrogance and deny the mounting evidence. This anger at Lance Armstrong burns as much against our selves as it does against him.

I do not think I am a prig. I do not expect my heroes to be perfect. All of us make mistakes; all of us sin. I try to respect and admire people in their domains of achievement. I can admire and respect a sports figure whose accomplishes  reflect focused mental and physical discipline and skill. I do not expect the achiever to be a saint or perfect in the rest of his or her life just as I would not expect it of an artist, lawyer, or doctor. People will be selfish, vain, self-interested and sometimes driven by passion to do stupid things. They may betray their families, make bad investments, lose their temper or let the false hubris of fame and celebrity get to them. I accept this as part of the human condition. My heroes do not have to be perfect humans, just women and men who accomplish great feats in domains of life I follow and admire.

My issues with Lance Armstrong go deeper than he broke the law of his sport in order to win and the issues apply to others like the recent controversy about whether baseball performance enhancing drug users should in the Hall of Fame.

I think we should note that if we jump on the hate Lance Armstrong band wagon, we need to be very clear that we also have to reject all the putative baseball hall of famers coming up for votes like Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens—they should not be voted into the hall of fame and rewarded for their own inhuman accomplishments. You cannot have it one way with Armstrong and another with the PED baseball players.

There are a slew of baseball guys, most known and identified in the Mitchell report, who achieved their outsized success because drug use gave them greater returns in strength, recovery and speed for the same training effort of their peers. I use Bonds and Clemens as surrogates  because they epitomize the endless self-righteous denials, riches, arrogance, iconic status, perverted athletic skill, and counterattacks that characterized Armstrong.

I want to address three issues surrounding Armstrong and the baseball PED users that disqualify them all from our respect. In Armstrong’s case, these lead to his victories being taken away because he used performance enhancing drugs—he is stripped of victories and titles. Baseball has no such way to deny the full moral worth of ill begotten gains such as wins or records, but baseball can, at least, deny these players entry into its hall that recognizes great athletic achievement. I wanted to focus on athletic achievement. Nothing about the Hall of Fame says you have to be a good person, otherwise Ty Cobb would not be there.

What are the problems with what Armstrong, Bonds and Clemens did? At one level we could say they broke the rules of the sport and even broke the law of the land. This is clearly true of Armstrong and only true for Bonds and Clemens later in their careers. I don’t want to focus upon the law breaking. I think they do not deserve our respect and adulation for three moral failings in their performance:

1)            They lived a lie in their sports. Each presented their achievements to others as their own human scale accomplishments. They presented their achievements as earned on an equal playing field of talent+work+skill+endurance. All three were fine, even great athletes, but that did not satisfy them. They took substances that deliberately augmented their human capacities beyond their normal physiological and mental responses given regular well conditioned diets and training. The issue is that the drugs and doping did the work, not the human being. Now the human may train and act, but relative to the baseline of their peers, their increase in strength and other dimensions were caused by the drug, not by the human effort.
         This is the lie, the lie  they told themselves and to others. “I achieved this.”—but the I was an illusion augmented by technologies that caused the same amount of training effort to return more mass and speed and efficiency. They lived a lie as augmented humans.

2)            They competed unfairly. We all know the argument—everybody did it. Well everybody did not do it—although that is less true in cycling than baseball. This deception-based unfairness had two ugly dimensions.

a.    First, other competitors who competed based on their own physical and mental training without physiological augmentation suffered at their hands. They stole a competitive advantage over every player who was not doing it. Their won unfairly because the other players did not have this augmented advantage of quicker speed, recovery time, muscle mass or aerobic efficiency.

b.   Second their using pushed others to use and degraded the tone and culture of the sport. Other athletes succeeded less or had their careers cut off because they could not compete with the augmented humans. The success, adulation and lying of the augmented humans motivated others to live a lie and pretend their accomplishments were based on human effort, skill, and training.

3)            They lied to everyone else about their actions. Sometimes they lied under oath to formal organizations, regulatory bodies and congress. Let me be clear, they did not tell the truth. They deceived others by claiming they did not do what they in fact what they did was augment their strength, recovery time, reaction time and efficiency by taking drugs that bolstered these beyond their own efforts. They gained money, fame, and advantage over others, hurt other’s careers while lowering the culture of their sport. When confronted with the truth, they lied, attacked others credibility, stonewalled to protect their reputation and endorsements. 

I am deeply angry and despairing facing the truth about Lance Armstrong. I am deeply upset with myself for all my defenses of him and my invested belief and capacity for denial to protect my ideal of him and my ideal of myself. What I know is that all the reasons that I cannot respect Lance Armstrong apply to the baseball PED users.

•           They lived a lie and let drugs augment them not their own effort;
•      They competed unfairly and won because they deceived and created an unequal playing field. Doing this they ruined careers of good athletes and demeaned the culture of their sport;
•          They denied the truth, attacked the credibility of their opponents, lied to friends, supporters, the press, their fans and governing organizations. They are liars.

Just being a liar should not disqualify them from the Hall of Fame or their records, unless they committed perjury. But letting drugs replace effort, winning and achieving on an unequal playing field and ruining other careers--these disqualify Lance Armstrong from respect and recognition for his athletic achievements and they should keep the PED users out of the baseball hall of fame.

Sports Ethics: Mistakes Were Made

I was startled last week listening to a coach interview when the coach uttered words no coach or leader should ever say, “mistakes were made." I cannot think of a worse statement by anyone in authority. The phrase is designed to hide responsibility for an action and make it even harder to isolate and rectify the problems. Mistakes were made is one of the worst ethical assessments a leader can make.

I don’t know who invented the passive voice in English but you could not ask for a better way to get people off the hook. The key to passive voice is that the object—a mistake becomes the subject, and the verb moves to past passive construction. Notice the key-missing ingredient—no subject exists, the actor, the doer disappears. Mistakes were made is a favorite locution of corporate and political leaders on the spot.

Bureaucracies love the passive voice. The passive voice hides responsibility and authorship. Any institution that creates products that emerge from committees moves to the passive voice that provides wide plausible deniability for everyone associated with the process. The organization can then hide responsibility or better yet disseminate it over so many people as to make it meaningless. This in turn permits people to go about doing crazy or failed or horrible things with relatively clear consciences. It also means no one has an incentive to learn or get better because no one internalizes responsibility for the outcome and no one is held responsible for the outcome. Accepting responsibility impels learning and growth.

The ethics of the phrase begins with its construction where no one accepts responsibility for the actions done. The speaker does not accept responsibility nor does the speaker accuse anyone else of making the mistakes. The phrase represents a completely neutered moral claim—I am not responsible and I am not claiming anyone else is responsible. It is hard to imagine a more worthless phrase except to escape responsibility or to exonerate oneself.

Beyond the responsibility denying construction, the word mistakes compounds the ethical elusiveness of the claim. Traditionally when we make mistakes, even when we accept responsibility, we basically state that we did not intend to do this badly or do this harm.

A mistake is a mitigated ethical category where one admits harm was done or failure to achieve a good. A person can admit responsibility for it—although not in this construction—but the person denies that he or she intended to harm or not achieve the goal. A mistake is not done on purpose.

This is not the place to discuss in detail, but mistakes can sometimes occur because of negligence. More often, however, people make mistakes because they misread or misdiagnose a situation. A person may see the situation unfolding but miss a critical point and diagnose it wrongly. Or a person might simple respond a little too quickly too slowly after the diagnosis. Sometimes people just go blank, the mind paralyzes and no obvious pattern or meaning occurs to them. They react rather than initiate action. I could go with the myriad ways we as well intentioned people may make mistakes such as when facing surprise they were not trained for. People might react to planned deception and not see through it. All of these actions do not involve intended harm or collapse of a plan.

The language matters deeply here because patterns of language create patterns of expectations and norms. Coaches, players, and leaders who rely on the passive voice teach the wrong lesson about not accepting and claiming responsibility for actions. Claiming responsibility involves the motivation to get better and learn from mistakes.

I can understand a coach, player or leader trying to avoid calling out a colleague in a public setting. The coach I heard may know damn well who made the mistake. Often coaches know more because as spectators we only see the person who looks like he or she made the mistake, The expert, however, knows that the perceived “goat” is actually merely the player left in the lurch when others failed to follow through on a scheme or misread a pattern. The person who appears to make a mistake in fact represents the end game of a cascade of mistakes from the whole team.

So mistakes were made might be used to protect a team/player in public, but it would be much easier to use a collective “we” made mistakes or “our team” made mistakes. Leaders emphasize and isolate the collective endeavor and remind everyone, coaches included, that the team’s decisions and actions made this possible.

When my kids were growing up we had a song we loved to sing called “Mr. Nobody.” The key refrain was that whenever something bad happened and a parent would ask, “who did this?” The answer, “Mr. Nobody  did it.

Mistakes were made suggests a habit of thought that veers from accepting, isolating and speaking in private and public about common accountability and responsibility.

Speech habits can shape expectations and shape our very thoughts. If we speak one way enough, then we actually start to think that way. Worse, if we hold responsibility, then those for whom we set expectations start to internalize them

Good leaders, good coaches, good players avoid the passive voice; they do not hide, deny or duck responsibility. Even if they have not yet figured out who is responsible or what went wrong, they know it went wrong. A good leader ensures people accetp responsibly and work to make sure everyone learns from their mistakes.