Leadership is influence based on trust that you have earned.  Average leaders have quotes. Good leaders have a plan. Exceptional leaders have a system

Establish your clarity of purpose Ask yourself exactly what is it that you after everyday?

Do a great job of communicating the why. Be true to who you are. Run toward problems. If you ignore them, they only get worse. Work to get better every day. Staying the same gets you nowhere.

Savor the journey. Every day. You only get to do it once.  Get great players to play great. You have a choice of how you want to respond to things that irritate you. You can give into impulsive behavior or you can be above the line and think

Convincing yourself that if you are not on the job at all times then you are falling behind is a classic impulse driven below the line behavior. Blaming others, complaining about circumstances and defending yourself are all below the line behavior. Your sole focus should be on finding solutions. Every day is a battle for how you will live your life: above the line or below the line. The R factor. It's not what happens that matters. It's how you respond. Event + response = outcome

R:1 press pause. What does this situation require of me?  R:2 get your mind right. Elite performers win in their minds first. What you focus on and how you talk to yourself. Purpose mindset: embrace productive discomfort because it knows that discomfort is necessary in order to practice and perform at an elite level. This drill makes me better. It makes our team better. Bring it on. R:3 step up. How you feel is not always the best guide for what you should do. Resilience. Learn from pain don't run from it. R:4 adjust and adapt. Be flexible and responsive in today's competitive environment. Be quick to break the habits that will break you. Make sure the habits you have today are in alignment with the dreams and goals you have for tomorrow. R:5 make a difference. Your r is an e for others. Your attitude and behavior have a profound impact on your teammates and your coaches. You get the team you build, not want. Make the people around you better. R:6 build skill. Elite performers are the ones who are relentless about building skill beyond their talent. Talent is a gift. Greatness is a choice.

Exceptional performance is the result of an uncommon level of focus and discipline in the pursuit of greatness. Build skill every day and consistently get better. Be coachable. Grow beyond your talent. Embrace discomfort. If it doesn't challenge you, it will not change you. Your actions are so loud I can't hear what you are saying. We are not measured by our intentions but by our actions

Do your work. Tell the truth. Own your mistakes. Respect your elders. Keep your mouth shut and do the right things. Never quit. Leaders create culture. Culture drives behavior. Behavior produces results. Culture is what we believe, how we behave, and the experience that our behavior produces for each other. Leadership isn't a difference maker, it is the difference maker

Core beliefs: relentless effort, competitive excellence, power of the unit. Building a culture is a three part process: believe it, sell it, demand it  Believe it. Think deeply about the guiding principles and core values. What behaviors are essential to execute your strategy and what beliefs are essential to drive those behaviors? Examine yourself. Be honest and courageous. Do you believe in those core values and does your behavior reflect that belief? Sell it. Your culture message must be exceptionally clear: no confusion, no uncertainty, no excuses. Explain to your team that this is what we believe and how we behave in all circumstances. Demand it. Hold people accountable to it. If you permit it, you promote it. You don't get the culture you want, you get the culture you build. Channel your efforts towards things you can change. Great effort can overcome poor execution

Being elite is not about how talented you are. It is about how tough you are. To achieve anything great in life you have to fight for it. Every day clarify what you really want, then work as hard as you can for as long as it takes. Success is cumulative and progressive. So is failure. It is the result of what you do every day. If you want to win in the future, you must win the grind today. Elite performance requires elite preparation

The drive to do the work necessary to prepare and the discipline to do the work right.  Are you going through the motions or are you training to get better? Autopilot is the enemy of greatness. Fail often but fail forwards

Elite performers get to that level through great coaching and careful attention to preparation. Even after a horrific event, change the only thing you can change, how you perform in the very next play. You don't have to be Braxton Miller or JT Barrett, just be the best Cardale Jones you can be. You have the take ownership of your mistakes and you have to be there for your teammates

Sometimes the problem isn't the problem. Sometimes the bigger issue is how you respond to the problem. You build resilience by training and developing your ability to respond long before adversity ever hits. You will play like you practice. You can't practice on autopilot and play with purpose. How you compete in practice will determine how you compete in games

Developing skill required lots of reps. Physical and mental reps. Every rep counts. You never know when your opportunity will come. The key is to be prepared.  With trust you can accomplish more than you can ever imagine. What motivates a player to give maximum effort and play with selfless commitment to the team? A person will fight for the guys in his unit

The strongest motivation for enduring combat is the bond formed among members of a squad or platoon. Lead the team through the unit leaders. Unit leaders need to be exceptional teachers, not tellers. Trust us. Believe in the reliability of a person. It is confidence that you can count on a person. The strength of a team is determined by the strength of the connections on the team. A great team requires great relationships. Trust is earned through your behavior, not granted by your position. It is earned through repeated behavior over time. Every day, through your actions, you make deposits into or withdrawals from your trust account with the players you are seeking to lead and coach. Trust is earned through three areas: character, competence, and connection

Character is ethical trust. It is built through repeated experience of you doing what you say you will do. Competence is technical trust. It is built through repeated experience of you doing your job and making the team better. Connection is personal trust. It is built through repeated experience of you caring, listening, and fully engaging with the people on the team. It is important to remember that people or players do not experience your intentions, they experience your behavior.

When contact is made and the bullets start flying it all comes down to training and how much you trust each other. Don't just point out all the things guys do wrong. Praise them for the things they do right. Finish up every meeting on a positive note to make sure your players departed in a good frame of mind. Talk more about the process than the destination. It should be about enjoying the week not just getting through it. Focus on working hard every day and getting better tomorrow than we were today. Sometimes when people are negative, you start believing it. When someone really cares about you and they show you that they care, you're going to do whatever you can for them

Being challenged is great. Constant pursuit of knowledge and improvement, striving to make yourself better today than you were yesterday is not merely an indispensable tenet for leaders to follow but one of the great joys of life. An aligned organization gets things done faster and with better results and is more agile and responsive to the competitive environment Leadership is about connecting. It is about engaging deeply with others and inspiring them to be better.

Time is a nonrenewable resource. If you waste it, you never get it back, so it's essential to pick your battles wisely. Being elite is not about how talented you are. It's about how tough and committed you are to getting better. The more ways your people can share ownership, the more loyal and committed they are going to be. If your habits are not in alignment with your dreams, you can either lower your dreams or elevate your habits. Do whatever you can to reinforce someone's confidence by helping him achieve small victories

So much of leadership comes down to knowing the people you are leading and providing them with what they need to succeed. Failure is not fatal but a failure to change might be. Time is a limited resource. Stop wasting it trying to motivate the bottom 10 percent The deeply originally and often bravely. Leadership is a mindset first and a skill set second. If you don't think like a leader you won't act like one

Thinking about problems, challenges new ways of doing things and creativity is one of the hardest things you will ever do. It also brings you the finest results. When things aren't going right, the most important thing you can do is slow down go deep and figure out why. Take 15 minutes to think write down one idea that you believe would improve our program. I don't want yes men around me. I want people who've thought stuff through and are bringing it to me because they think it will make us better. A big part of being a true leader is being open to new ideas

Pursue relentless efforts competitive excellence and the power of the unit everyday. True leadership comes from within. It comes from a deep introspection into your beliefs. Thinking means concentrating on one thing long enough to develop an idea about it. Not learning other people's ideas or memorizing a body of information, however much those may sometimes be useful. Developing your own ideas. In short, thinking for yourself. You simply cannot do that in bursts of twenty seconds at a time

The way to cultivate the strength and wisdom to do the right thing is through deep fully engaged solitary thinking. You need to know what you believe. Sometimes great leadership demands space and doing nothing. You need to be a great delegator. Exceptional leaders think about uncommon things in an uncommon way. Invest the time to think. Make it a priority

Encourage your people to bring new ideas to you. And when they do listen. Research shows that the highest levels of human performance are empowered by the deepest levels of belief. Belief creates vision. The ability to see possibilities that others do not see. You see the pathway. The effort and action. Think I will. I will do the work. I will do my job. I will make the play. No matter how difficult no matter how big the challenge. I will do whatever it takes for as long as it takes

The brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. The brick walls are there to stop the people who don't want it badly enough. Leadership is about making people better. Live, listen, and learn

The principle of inertia dictates that objects in motion tend to stay in motion unless acted upon by sufficient energy. Objects at rest tend to stay at rest. How to get alignment: hire the right people and recruit the right players. Communicate your purpose and your culture with exceptional clarity and relentless consistency. Make it clear to your leaders that it is their responsibility to build and maintain alignment, then equip them with essential skills. Hold everyone accountable. If someone is out of alignment deal with it quickly and decisively. Always bring in people who can enhance what you do without changing the basics of it