The Wisdom of Athlete Cliches

In one of my favorite sport movies Bull Durham, Ebby Calvin “Nuke” LaLoosh, “the million dollar arm with a five cent brain,” asks his grizzled mentor, Crash Davis, to “teach” me more stuff. Crash sits him down on their rickety bus and says, "it’s time to talk about clichés." He begins with “I am just happy to be here.”

How many times have you listened to the same words or variations from athletes as they answer the same hackneyed question for the umpteenth time? Consider that a midlevel major league player would be asked similar questions by multiple reporters over 900 times a year.

Athlete speak seems to involve what Washington, D.C. would call a “non-answer answer.” It sounds like an answer but has absolutely zero content. Now these answers evolve for reasons. First, no athlete wants to call out or publically insult teammates or members of the other team. Athletes have to play every day with each other. Real problems are hashed out in private. Second, no athlete wants to give the other team motivation for a game or insight into a team’s problems. In pro sports, athletes will move across several teams and no player wants to alienate or insult someone who may be a teammate next week or next year.

What do we want them to say? “W botched the double play because he played out of position or X missed the ball because he was not only not playing to the scout or Y misread the trajectory and broke wrong?” He could no more say that Z was out too late with his mistress and not as fully focused as he could be. Come on guys! The need to protect team cohesion and relations, as well as the endless sameness of the questions and situations abrade the answers and wear away all the externals. The clichés gleam like polished rocks eroded and buffed by hot air and weather of media storms.

I believe, however, that athlete speak also contains some strong and consistent wisdom that athletes and coaches do believe and that are worth listening to. At the end of a recent come from behind over time victory, the Seahawks young and very smart quarterback Russell Wilson described the mood in the locker room at the half time after the Seawhawks had been soundly trounced for 30 minutes. Wilson feels not only smart but genuine and is too young to have built up the smooth deflective armor of words and poise that many veterans adopt to protect themselves. Here is what he said:

"The mood in the locker room was unbelievable," he insisted. "We knew that if we could just hang in there, if we could just play one play at a time, stay in the moment...and we did throughout the entire second half."

Now the reality is that most cliches began as and in fact still reflect deep truths. They become cliches by repetition and trained ignoring. Wilson in fact described exactly what the battered but not beaten Seahawks did.

Athletes and trained professionals have worked hard to practice reflectively and train their emotions and cognitive responses. They respond under great pressure with quick decisions that reflect perception of what the situation requires, coordination with fellow players and execution based upon powerful and trained pattern recognition and cognitive and emotionally united instincts. Often the cliches refer to these practices lying below the surface of actions. 

For instance, it is absolutely critical to "play one play at a time." The most dangerous thing an athlete can do is carry the emotional dredges of the past mistakes or success into the next play. This distracts from full attention and can code the execution either with too little or too much optimism. Emotions impact all performance and it is critical to let them go each play. One step at a time matters as a way to live and overcome adversity and stay on track when a person is ahead. The Seahawks, their coaches and their execution focused upon each play without giving up or pressing too hard.

High level performance requires being totally present to each moment. Elite athletic competition requires supreme pattern recognition from players and coaches. Being in the moment means players put aside emotional and physical and external distractions to bring their entire and multi-dimensional attention to bear at each moment of the competition. This can lead to interceptions, stopped plays or break aways or simply superb execution that wins a critical third down on a stalled drive. High performance achievement requires this ability to be entirely present to oneself, call upon one's skills and be present and connected to team mates and the opposition. This being present, playing one play at a time and persevering lay the emotional and psychological foundation of situational awareness that sets timely interceptions, blocks, sacks or brilliant runs.

Finally the Seahawks just kept at it with consistency. They endured mistakes and successes. Did not matter, but they kept present, focused upon execution of each play and gradually built up momentum and scored and chipped away.

Wilson in his thoughtful and balanced way described what many athletes have said thousands fo times and been ignored, but he spoke the truth and told exactly what happened at an attention based focused level.
Athletic wisdom may sound like cliches but it embodies serous wisdom and a way of being in harsh competition.

So professional athletes and most visible elite athletes draw upon a standard repertoire of answer across all sports. Consider:

• We just take it one day at a time.
• I do my best and the good Lord willing, I will get better.
• We just have to go out and try our best each day.
• He’s a competitor and never gives up, so he came through.
• We all have days like this  (could be good or bad).
• The other guys picked me up.
• I want to compliment the other team; they played a great game.
• I couldn’t t have done it without the rest of the team.
• Just go to let it go. Tomorrow is another game.
• Guys are not focused. We have to be focused out there.
• We need to work on that in practice.
• We’re in a groove, on a wave, in the flow and will ride it.
• Sometimes you win. Sometimes you lose. That’s the game.

Each of the phrases divulges a real truth about sport. The fundamental rule of all sport must be to take it one day, one episode, one moment at a time. Sport involve constant failures. If a player lets a dropped pass stay with them or a strikeout or missed jump shot, then the memory and upset from the failure will poison and undermine their next pass, next shot or next strike. Elite athletes must have no memory from one moment to another.

Elite athletes like any of us who seek to strive and succeed, need to remember Kipling’s injunction in IF: “If you can meet with triumph and disaster 
And treat those two imposters just the same.”

The mental and emotional discipline of being focused on each moment, each pitch, each movement of the person you guard, each set and pattern before you defines the attention of a fine athlete. Athletes must be totally present and aware and attuned; they must bring their best attention and effort on each play because at the elite level small mistakes or miscues lead to immense and brutal consequences. So competitors never give up and achievers remain focused.

In competition if athletes let their emotions get the best of them,they lose focus. If they let the other team get into their heads or let their own emotional anger at the other team influence them, it can subtly lower performance or lead to overcompensation. It opens them and their team to being angered or thrown off their concentration by the other team.

Staying focused but also staying connected to their team remain essential. Team members may not like each other but have to trust to commit to their own expertise and place. If a player tries to do too much because they don’t’ trust their team, a player will get out of place and upset a formation or play. A player will leave openings and overcompensate and the other team will adjust and exploit it. So trusting and relying on their teammates and acknowledging them is critical, just as critical as respecting and acknowledging the other team when the opponents play well. That respect and acknowledgement can trump simmering anger or resentment that the other team may seek and exploit.

All of us and all athletes have those moments, those wonderful transcendent moments when we are in the flow. The moment when we are living at our highest potential and our skills and practice and training come together. It can feel like an epiphany, but when we have them, like Crash Davis says you have to “respect the streak” and we have to respect our performance and ourselves.

So we all have days like this and sometimes you win and sometimes you lose, but you carry on, you show up and you do your job. And every athlete does know in his or her heart of heart that Crash is right, “I am just happy to be here.” That is life, not just sport. Trite, but true.

Sports Ethics: No Excuses

“No excuses,” how many times have players heard this from coaches? How many times have good coaches stated this to the media or fans when accepting responsibility for a failure. These two simply words reflect a profound acceptance of responsibility for actions and a commitment to get better that reflect core of professional growth.

We all prefer excuses—“not my fault;” “Mr. Nobody did it;” “the sun was in my eye;” “the ref botched it;” “my partner missed the signal.” I could go on because the ways to duck responsibility stretch endless and tempting. Having an excuse avoids the pain and demands of responsibility. Having an excuse avoids being singled and taking the blame for an action’s consequences. No excuses is the flip side of the buck stops here.

The concept of excuse is old and important. It arose legally to exonerate and justify pardon for actions. A person offers excuses to explain that he or she had reasons to guide their action. The bad consequences of the action really flowed from good reasons and reasonable responses, so they were not guilty of malfeasance.

An excuse is not an apology. An apology accepts responsibility for an action and consequences and seeks forgiveness for acting and the consequences that follow. Apologies accept responsibility as moral core of the action.

Excuses really mean to escape from “cause” of an action—excuses nullify responsibility for actions. Excuses carry huge import in legal and moral assessment of blame. Determining negligence makes them even more important in moral life because if a person has prepared and done due diligence and makes an honest mistake or faces impacts beyond their control, they offer an excuse to avoid charges of negligence.

Excusing oneself possesses serious moral weight. It offers an explanation for why it was reasonable for me to fail and reasonable to make a mistake. It deflects responsibility from my decision making to external influences or deflects it to others. Sometimes we may even have good reasons for our mistaken actions as in “excuse me” when we sneeze or inadvertently insult someone.

No Excuses takes a different tack towards oneself and responsibility for actions. Essentially it refuses to let oneself or team off the hook of responsibility. Maybe one mistake or bad call or luck influenced a game or decision. No excuses, however, means players and coaches look at the entire context of the game, not just one actions. They do not use excuses to release them from seeing their failure and from working to find the causes and working to correct them.

Rejecting excuses puts the onus on players to embrace responsibility. No excuses for oneself or team pushes players to want to take action when under stress. It creates a mindset that motivates players to practice and learn from mistakes. Players, coaches and professionals prepare by practicing scenarios and anticipating future actions.

In professional and sport life publically stating “no excuses” extends responsibility to go back and learn from what happened. It requires a post mortem and sometimes scenario testing to get better. This may mean going back and relearning basics or changing patterns of recognition. Often it involves mental work where individuals and teams refocus intensity or learn how to handle the buffeting of luck and bad calls and maintain their focus despite the slings and arrows of fortune.

Mistakes, losses, blowups all tend to linger in the back of one's mind. People can nag and diffuse focus and intention. Worse, they struggle to rationalize away what happened and are tempted to blame anyone or anything but themselves. No excuses as a team culture does not eliminate this self recrimination, but buffers against it and drives players to the future, not the past. To responsibility to grow and learn, not blame and gnaw on oneself or teammates. 

I believe no excuses makes sense as a public position for players and coaches and one worth internalizing for high performing teams. I think, however, that in private relations among professionals excuses matter profoundly and need to be acknowledged. For instance, players often play with injuries or at limited strength. This debilitation constitutes a reasonable excuse by any moral standards, and coaches and fellow teammates need to understand this. People have “brain farts” as they say. Sometimes luck intervenes or bad calls happen. Sometimes despite preparation the other team is more talented and focused and the team struggles to make a game of it.

Coaches, players and professionals need to acknowledge and integrate these assessments of themselves and teammates in assessing blame and praise. Inside the team, people need room for support, mercy and pain. A player who plays through pain and injury may deserve as much praise as excuse.

No excuses not only isolates responsibility and obligations to learn, but it generates another imperative. Once admitting “I contributed,” no excuses helps players and teams move on. 

This approach demands honest recognition of what happened and people’s contributions to it. But it insists that once this has been done, people have to let go and move on. As Nick Saban likes to preach, “last race doesn’t matter.”

High achievement and learning requires being full present to the moment and open to seeing the patterns and needs of a moment. To learn requires total presence and focus on technique and situational awareness. Players cannot afford to have the past nagging and shadowing their action. Acknowledge, learn, let go.

Players, teams and coaches have to “let go” of the past to be present to the future. Offering and accepting no excuses lets this happen.

Sports Ethics: Taking Care of Business

When Rick Pitino the coach of Louisville was asked how his team will prepare for the NCAA tournament, he responded, “Nothing to see here. We’re just taking care of business.” Most great coaches would respond in the same way. Besides being the name of a great Bachman Turner Overdrive song Takin Care of Business articulates a powerful way to approach challenges and high performance.

The concept links performance and business. I think of business as a group of people committed to a common task or mission. These can range from making a great product, providing a service, or achieving a goal like winning. The metaphor creates ethical obligations upon the person who has the job to master the skills of the job. It also evokes a mindset about how to approach work. In the song self-employed musicians

And start your slaving job to get your pay

If you ever get annoyed

Look at me I'm self-employed

I love to work at nothing all day

Most of us don’t have that luxury, but sports teams and high performing professionals develop a remarkable capacity to link satisfaction to performance and even connect “fun” to high performance as in the song. (other blog) The capacity for fulfillment and fun align with high performing professionals across huge ranges of jobs. The reasons lie in a way of thinking about business

First, business involves having a job or a task. That job or task is imbedded in a project to achieve a goal. Second, having a job revolves around having a role in the goal driven process. The role covers responsibilities, obligations and skills that a person is expected to master and perform with competence and consistency day in and day out. To master a job or rule requires consistent practice, learning and discipline to maintain constant performance and improve where needed. Third, businesses mean working with others. People know they are interdependent and rely upon each other—to achieve team members learn to trust and respect each other as they work together.

Taking care of business involves a mind set and character set for individuals. Successful business and successful jobs require strong work ethic. This work ethic grows from an attitude that the worker or player or professional gradually learns. Some people may bring a natural work ethic where they throw themselves passionately into work. Others may have to be cajoled, trained, motivated or even commanded into a strong work ethic.

The work ethics has to be learned but also tempered. Just having enthusiasm and throwing oneself into work is not enough in any successful enterprise. First, a player has to temper their effort to match the endurance of the task. They often have to build up endurance and conditioning both physically and mentally. Second, the cognitive and skill dimensions matter deeply. Just contributing effort and hard work does little unless the person masters the cognitive and skill and formal dimensions of a task.

This craft knowledge unites cognitive, physical and emotional dimensions. Third, the work ethic plus cognitive dimensions require the ability to learn and adapt. Many jobs seem not change, but all the best production processes work when workers constantly contribute to improving the process even in little ways. In sports and professional life innovation is the norm as well as competition. Players and professionals must be open to learn. They need a quality of mind and character that does not lock them into only one way of doing things when the environment or conditions or opponents change. Consistency is one thing, stubborn futility another.

The simple words “take care of business” involve complex challenges to individuals. The work ethic, mastery of skills and learning need to be packaged with a particular type of commitment and endurance.

To take care of business entails a process of preparation, training, testing and learning that builds a team culture and character as well as style of learning and adapting. It narrows the focus and training for the persons to give them the space to practice, perfect and achieve despite distractions and surprises. This permits teams to keep an even keel amid stresses of different environments. Alabama football coach Nick Saban links this approach to business,

“Eliminate the clutter and all the things that are going on outside and focus on the things that you can control with how you sort of go about and take care of your business. That’s something that’s ongoing, and it can never change.”

Fine players and professionals show up for work each day. They bring it each day. Taking care of business means men and women have gained a mature and durable emotional, cognitive and physical solution to the emotional roller coasters of competition as well as the nagging costs and thrills of winning and losing. Most professional life and sports combines deep capacity to prepare and husband energy for a marathon. But this deep reservoir is not enough.

Competitive and professional life also resembles a series of sprints under intense competitive pressure. The sprint requires total commitment for a period of time, then time to recoup, renew and then give maximum effort again. Football probably resembles this most, but most sports carry this rhythm, so having a workmanlike attitude.

This approach also permits players to approach high stakes games with focus and intensity and not get overwrought or panicked—they keep balance. At the same time to take care of business also means players and professionals never take things for granted. They understand there are no “gimmes” and that upsets can occur. Players show up for what may feel like lesser games and still play with focus, skill and appropriate intensity.

Player’s don’t “lose it” either under stress of high stakes or temptations of low stakes. Business-like teams possess a steady keel and durability across different levels of competition and different intensities of experience and challenge. They possess the preparation, work ethic, skill and willingness to learn and adapt.

And I'll be...

Taking care of business, every day

Taking care of business, every way

I've been taking care of business, it's all mine

Taking care of business and working overtime

Sports Ethics: Don't Try too Hard

It sounds counterintuitive—“don’t try too hard?” When we are struggling, shouldn’t we just try harder? I have been following the comments of Mariner’s players at spring training and all their comments converge on the same set of insights about high performance. A young Mariner’s pitcher Danny Hultzen spoke about adjusting during a game, “A year ago I probably would have even tried harder to just get the pitch there instead of just relaxing and calming down." Hultzen’s work involved a mind set change, and the rest of the game he excelled. Not trying too hard points to the importance of how top professionals work best and how to manage effort and practice in a productive way. 

Top professionals devote immense hours to practice and learning to achieve. Real masters have invested at least 5-7,000 hours at their craft. They constantly practice and more important learn from mistakes. Their lives reflect endless adaptation to changes in environment, changes in their own skill set and studying their successes and mistakes. High performing professionals adjust to people and environments.

I have talked about this before as one of the great strengths and dangers to athletic and professional excellence. Sometimes the problems with performance flow from failure of technique or erosion of skill, sometimes from adaptations of the other side. In the middle of a game and performance—players are tempted to “try harder.” Coaches and teammates exhort them, “just try harder.”

Trying harder is not exactly the same as another phrase “bear down” which demands more focused attention and being present to situational awareness. Trying harder usually means the player or professional has to step back from what they are doing, think about it and then “fix” it through exertion of energy.

Trying harder in the midst of a game erodes the entrenched expertise and pattern recognition of a high performing professional. Trying means a player willfully and self-consciously pushes him or herself. They exert more energy or effort simply for the purpose of exerting more energy.

This exertion can be mental in trying to overthink a technical adaption or in trying to outthink the opposition. Once a player enters this mind space, he or she has essentially lost the emotional mind game. They are no longer present to the situation. He or she no longer relies on the fine-grained pattern recognition and split second perception and skill deployment they have practiced. They tighten up mentally.

They also tighten up physically. Their self-conscious mental effort and internal command to try harder sends urgent messages to the body that launch high levels of cortisol and adrenaline that wrecks havoc on timing and rhythm. These responses narrow the perceptual field.

The mental reaction slows down reaction times with a mental screen interfering. A physiological reaction increases the response with too much strength or speed. Beyond inappropriate energy distribution, players over anticipate and commit too early on an action permitting the opponent to fool them.

Athletes use a large number of terms to identify the same phenomenon—players press or force actions. This pressing grows from trying too hard and ends up with a mismatch between energy/speed of a player’s action with the requirements of a situation.

When the Seattle Seahawks came from 21 points down to win a game, their Coach Pete Carroll addressed the very issue. He mentioned that the team and coaches had actually practices this scenario during preseason practice in order to focus the energy and words of coaches. Carroll then pointed out the danger. When teams are down and start to get anxious and press, execution and forcing it come into play.  "The problem," Carroll explained, " is they overtly and we need patience. Literally you are  going to have to go one play at a time." Cliched wisdom matters here for coaches and players who have to rein in their anxiety and focus. Carroll spoke again of how the coaches had to "direct our language in the right direction." This meant no panic driven emotional speeches, but concise and directive and strong places. As he said, "you can't win it on the first possession." 

Creating a culture where coaches especially have the knowledge and trust to build in patience and convey this is critical. 

Hultzen is a young pitcher and when he fell behind, he had the common tendency to try and “spot” or “overthrow.” This impatience leads  pitchers to miss their slots or lose rhythm. A player loses consistency because he or she tries to reinvent each pitch. Quarterbacks, basketball shooters, tennis serves all suffer form same response.  

Once players try too hard, it permits opponents to dictate the game. Players who are trying to hard become predictable and less quick. They over anticipate while having slippage in reaction times because they grow to mistrust their own skills. This permits opponents to dominate with feints and misdirection or even beat more talented or skilled players who are confused and off their game. Teams dominate another team when other players press and try too hard losing their rhythm and undermining skill. This creates a vicious cycle that undermines confidence, leads to more trying and even greater futility. 

Worse, trying too hard becomes a mental distraction for the players. Trying too hard turns mental energy into a spiral of self-criticism, failed experiments and loss of confidence. The spiral is hard to break. Ex General Manager Bill Polian talks about how critical this is to good coaches “In order to perform well as an athlete you need to be single-minded, focused on the job at hand, right down to the minute details. If that focus is shattered, if you're distracted, you do not perform as well.” The paradox becomes the harder a person tries the worse the distraction becomes.

Brendan Ryan who plays gorgeous short-stop for the Mariners but remains one of the most cringe-worthy hitters in the American league describes the cycle perfectly:

"My thing was, I have got to try harder. Get in the cage and spend more time there.”…"What I think happens most of the time is the harder you try, the harder it gets and things start to snowball. Maybe the biggest thing is confidence, going up there and believing something good was going to happen.

"It just felt all year I would get the count to that pitch, I would get the pitch and just miss it. It might even turn into a walk but you don't even feel good about that because you knew you should have hit that pitch and you should have been standing on second. The frustration just kept building."

Mike Morse a new Mariner teammate gets at a basic point of professional high performance, “Guys are more relaxed, and when you’re relaxed your talent comes out.” 

No one suggests not working or practicing to refine expertise or adapt to changes. "if at first you don't succeed, try try again," still carries real weight, but what matters is how a person tries and the mind set of learning and integrating learning, not just pure effort. It all depends upon the mind-set of the effort. Relaxing means not placing the mental screen in place that slows reaction and induces inappropriate levels of effort. It requires a letting go and being present to permit the well trained and refined expertise to be released.

It reduces to trusting the work you have done prior to the moment in the game. Trusting that skill, trusting to micro-adaptions in the moment and trusting to the trained situational awareness you have developed.

As Danny Hultzen stated so simply, “just relax.”