I was not allowed to quit when things got tough

Saw recently where Dwyane Wade relies on guys like Kobe and LeBron to push him to achieve more. In his words:

"Listen, I won a championship. I’ve been a Finals MVP. I’ve had All-Star games. I’m on every commercial you see. My life is good. But you have to keep going and keep going. You need things to push you, and I found them. There are always guys that are going to push me. LeBron and Kobe are two of the best talents this game has ever seen. If you want your name to be right there with them, you’ve got to continue working hard."

Wade's quote reminded me of a book I read last year. In it, professionals from various fields and walks of life talked about who had pushed them to achieve success.

The great Morgan Freeman (pictured above), one of my favorite actors, said he "was not allowed to quit when things got tough. I was not allowed to give up acting and try something else. I was just not allowed. There was always somebody there who gave me encouragement or help."

Several people credited their mothers or fathers with providing the support and positive reinforcement they needed to press on. According to Pablo Picasso, one of the world's great painters, his mother told him, "If you become a solider, you'll be a general. If you become a monk, you'll end up as Pope." He continued: "Instead, I became a painter and wound up as Picasso."

Early in his cycling career, Lance Armstrong wanted to quit a race, telling his mother that he simply couldn't go any further. His mother replied that she wouldn't allow him to quit, even if he had to walk his bike across the finish line. "So Lance walked to the finish line."

Then there's Derek Hatfield, who was in a Trans-atlantic sailboat race when his mast broke. When he finally made it to land, he called his father to tell him he was quitting. "Bring the trailer, I'm dropping out of the race," recalls Hatfield.

His father was having none of it, saying, "I'm not bringing you the trailer. You get back on the boat and go to the finish line."

Hatfield "finished the race and became one of the few people who have ever sailed around the world alone."

A player-coach team is a lot better than a coach-coach team

Michigan State's Travis Walton, the Spartans' team captain, only averages about five points per game. In fact, in MSU's last five games of the season -- all wins, by the way -- Walker only has seven field goals.

Says MSU coach Tom Izzo (here with Walton): "Walton is the only guy I know who cannot score a lot of points and be a difference maker in a game."

At halfime of the Spartans game yesterday against Purdue, "Walton offered some terse, fire-up-the-troops comments at halftime."

When he speaks, which is rare in public, he commands complete attention from his teammates.

According to Coach Izzo, a vocal leader who's also respected by his peers can have a big impact on a team's performance.

"I always say a player-coach team is a lot better than a coach-coach team. He was a difference maker in our locker room. You need somebody that puts winning above everything, and is tough enough to deal with it. And you need a coach on the floor. That's all Trav."

Learning from others, but being your own coach

Great quote in the Orlando paper from MIA coach Erik Spoelstra, who talks about how, as an assistant to Pat Riley and Stan Van Gundy, he'd write down everything, including their "philosophy, poetry and daily practice plans."

Coach Spo also noted Coach Riley's "motivational talks," though he could never replicated them.

"I loved hearing motivational talks. I'd get fired up hearing them. But there's only one person who can talk like that. If I tried, it would sound false, so I don't. You can motivate in different ways."

The fire he got in his eyes was amazing

As this article tells it, Washington coach Lorenzo Romar "wasn't happy with the way his team had played in the first half. There was too little energy. Too many mistakes. In front of the home fans, with so much riding on the game, the Huskies were playing as if beating Arizona was their birthright. Now, after a ho-hum half, they trailed 36-32."

So, he gathered his team's captains, "tugged hard on their uniform shirts and stared into their faces."

"The fire he got in his eyes was amazing," said junior forward Quincy Pondexter, who finished with 12 points and 7 rebounds to help the Huskies come back to beat Arizona, 83-78. "It felt like I was in a movie because of all the passion he had in him. I'm going to think about that moment down through the years and through time. I mean, I just love the dude."

"You'd run through a brick wall for him," said senior Jon Brockman (above with Coach Romar), who entered the season as the nation's leading returning rebounder. "He gives us an unbelievable amount of confidence and an unbelievable amount of trust. When you have someone behind you who you know believes in you and cares for you as a person and wants the best for you no matter what, you're going to work your butt off for him."

"Usually with coaches, as they get older they get mellower," said UW assistant Cameron Dollar. "But he's kind of been the opposite. That fire and that passion and that intensity has churned and churned and is coming out even more. It's just fun to see it."

So what did Coach Romar tell his guys before heading back out for the second half of the Arizona game?

"We've come too far to play like this. You have a chance to win the conference outright. You have a chance to leave a legacy." And then the coach's throat caught. The words that meant so much to him felt stuck in his chest. Finally he told his team leaders, "I believe in you."

UW outscored Arizona, 51-42, in the second half, and with the win, clinched a tie for the Pac-10 title, UW's first in nearly 25 years.

Your best players need to be your decision-makers

John Tortorella, who led the Tampa Bay Lightning to the 2004 Stanley Cup, is the opposite of the coach he just replaced with the NY Rangers, Tom Renney, who was let go after a rough 12-game stretch in which the team came away with just two wins.

According to this article, "In terms of on-ice, Renney was safe-safe-safe, whereas Tortorella is a 'safe-is-death' guy."

Says Rangers veteran Scott Gomez, a former NHL All-Star, "That's normal. You're going to hire the opposite."

An article in the Minneapolis paper from May 2004 said that when Coach Tortorella was in Tampa Bay, he had three signs posted in the locker room, "each intended to remind players of [his] philosophy."

One reads: Safe is death. Another: Good is the enemy of great. The other: Don't think ... do.

In his first day on the job, Coach Tortorella, who as a minor league coach in the mid-1980s "spent a summer hammering nails and painting walls so his guys would have a better locker room," had some interesting thoughts regarding coaching and the role of the coach.

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On his coaching style: "I'm not going to stand behind the bench and just calmly go about it. I'm just not built that way. I think honesty is what players want. They're going to get pushed, they're going to be held accountable, and there are going to be some bumps in the road. There may be some conflict, but I don't think we should be afraid of conflict. This reputation that I just kick the hell out of people, it takes on a life of its own. As a coach you'd better understand what your team is right now as far as how they feel."

On the coach's role: "I think the coach is the guidance counselor. That's an important aspect of a head coach, getting the most out of your top people."

On regaining confidence after a losing streak: "Losing knocks you down. I'm gonna push them, but as a coach, you have to understand when you need to be with them. This is a time to get them to feel decent about themselves. They need to get a little self confidence. We're going to allow them to try to work through that and try to find a way to get a win."

On his predecessors who were fired: "There's going to be a philosophical change here, but there's a couple of good guys who are out and I just don't want them blamed."

On team leadership: "Your best players need to be your decision-makers. They're going to get every opportunity to win hockey games for us. If they're playing hard, I'm going to send them right back out there."

6 Minutes, 50 Years

Yesterday's All-Pro Dad had a great story about Bear Bryant's speech to his team before a game back in 1974:

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6 Minutes, 50 Years

"Most of you will live another fifty years or more. I hope it's seventy, but if it's fifty that's still a good life, and what happens today you'll have to live with the rest of the way. You can't get it back if you don't win. It's sixty minutes and over. The losers are the ones who say, 'Oh I wish I could play it again.'

You can't play it again.

Well, you're not really going to have to play sixty minutes. None of you. The longest play in a game is six and a half seconds. The shortest play is less than two seconds. That's barely a wink of the eye. You'll average five seconds a play. Five seconds of total effort, going all out, giving a hundred percent. You oughta be able to hold your hand in a fire that long.

If you're lucky enough to play seventy plays, that amounts to about six minutes. Six minutes of your time. Out of fifty years, six minutes doesn't seem like much. But a loser will regret it the rest of his life.

You've worked a long time for this. You've been playing since you were in the seventh grade. You go out there in front of all those people and don't give a hundred percent every play then you're cheating yourself, and your recruiters, and your parents, and your high school coach, and everybody whoever helped you. This is what you have been working toward.

In any big game there are five or six or seven key plays that will decide the outcome. If you put out for five seconds on every play, you'll get your share of those key plays. You never know when they'll come, so you have to go all out every time.

If you're reckless, and give that extra effort, and every play try a little harder, you'll see in the films on Monday that it was you who made those five or six plays that win. Play 'em jaw to jaw, and you'll win in the fourth quarter."

The best coaches create the conditions for the team to motivate itself

Dean Smith, who coached UNC to two national titles in the '80s and '90s, once said that coaches are hired to teach execution, not effort. Effort, according to Coach Smith, is the responsibility of each player.

Of course, that doesn't stop coaches at every level from not only demanding excellent effort, but trying to motivate their players to produce a better effort.

Nets coach Lawrence Frank recently spoke of working to get his guys to "compete harder."

Effort is defined as "the use of physical or mental energy to do something." Things like playing with a sense of urgency, focus, intensity, energy, passion -- all of these go in the "effort bucket."

Often, when teams lose, you'll hear words like "lethargic," "uninspired," or "lackadaisical" used to describe the losing team's effort. Similarly, teams that manage to stage upsets are described as "scrappy," "overachieving," or "spirited."

Unfortunately, as coaches know, there's not a magic formula for inspiring every player on a team to put forth their best effort throughout a game.

According to the book "Coaching Matters," Tom Landry, like Paul Brown before him, believed that emotion had "a limited effect... on the outcome of a game."

"Thought passion could be beneficial, Brown knew that it was simply a state of mind. It was not going to make a dramatic difference during a game and certainly wouldn't sustain a club throughout the course of a season. To depend on players to consistently achieve a higher emotional level than that of their opponents would surely be foolhardy, and sometimes counterproductive, Brown concluded."

Coach Landry learned from Coach Brown that it's not about "the most spirited, toughest, or strongest players." To him, it was about "systems, technique, and teamwork."

Mike Pelino, an assistant for the NY Rangers and Canada's National Hockey Team, believes a coach's job is two fold:

First, he has a responsibility to help each player develop to their full potential. Second is to bring a team's players together to form "a cohesive, successful unit."

To achieve these goals, a coach must be able to motivate players and encourage them to strive for levels they may not believe they are capable of reaching. Every player is unique and may need to be motivated in a different way. A coach must find out what motivates a specific individual and assist that player in drawing out this energy. The more personal attention and individual time spent with each player, the greater the opportunity for the coach to recognize how to develop that person’s passion.

So how does a coach "draw out" that energy in his players?

In 2004, Dr. Josè Maria Buceta, a psychology professor and the former head coach of the Spanish Women's National Team, wrote a story for FIBA's Assist magazine titled "The Motivation of Elite Players."

According to Dr. Buceta, while goal-setting is critical to success, "motivation that comes from within really makes the difference. If your players are not motivated to achieve goals, they won’t get far."

Think about this analogy. You have a car with a full tank of gas, a well-tuned engine, a good set of tires, and a sleek, polished exterior. The car sits by the roadway, ready to be used. This car has incredible potential. However, until a driver puts the key in the ignition, and starts up the engine, the car doesn’t function or move forward.

He suggests balancing team goals with individual ones, writing that "players must perceive enough individual benefit related to ambitious team goals, and then be an integral part of the decision-making process involved in setting goals."

This helps to ensure ownership. If that's missing, "their motivation to achieve the goals will be very weak, and, at some point during the season, any motivation efforts will become insufficient."

The professor concludes with this statement:

A good coach can be a catalyst for motivation in the short term, but the best coaches create the conditions for the team to motivate itself.

How coaching is like the Wizard of Oz

NY Rangers coach Tom Renney, whose team started the season at 10-2-1, but has lost eight of its last nine games and sits at 30-22-6:

"I take full responsibility for where the team is right now. That's incumbent with the position," he said. "My job is to correct this, get us winning, get us feeling better about ourselves, look to be a solution. It's as simple as that. You know, coaching is an interesting art ... I think it was Jimmy Johnson who said the Tin Man needed to be yelled at and the Scarecrow needed to be kicked in the butt and [the Lion] needed to have an arm put around him or whatever."

Playing it all the way through

Saw where Georgia ended an 11-game losing skid with a win over Florida yesterday.

According to this note from the Atlanta paper, UGA football coach "Mark Richt deserves at least some credit for inspiring the Bulldogs. At the behest of interim coach Pete Herrmann Richt came and spoke to the team before their Friday afternoon practice."

“I called Mark and asked him if he’d come over,” Herrmann said. “He’s as respected a person as we have on this campus and I wanted him to, you know, say a few words about what he loves. He loves Georgia. He loves the coaches here at Georgia, he loves the athletes, and he talked about that. And he talked about playing it all the way through.”

During his talk with the team, Coach Richt wrote "GATA" on the board. Translation: "Get after their [butts]."

Said one Georgia player, "He said we have to play for us and that’s what we did."

Communicating authentically

What do you say to your team before the biggest game of the season?

What would you tell your guys before they headed out of the locker room?

For PIT coach Mike Tomlin, whatever he says, it won't be rehearsed.

"I make a conscious effort to wing it. I think that's real. I think our guys relate to that," he said. "It's that way that I deal with them, for the most part. This week has been tougher than most in terms of trying to keep those thoughts out of my mind because there's a lot to say. But at the same time, I'm intent on doing that (winging it). I'm going to just walk in and communicate with them like I always do. I never prepare for the night-before-the-game speech."

What Coach Tomlin is describing is his value for "authentic communication," which has been defined as "speaking from your heart from the highest regions of the mind and from the depths of the soul."

As this author writes:

"Communicating authentically is not an easy task. At times, authentic communication feels like risk and takes courage. It reflects your experience, not an absolute reality."

Tell me I can't do something, I'll show you that I can

Bill Cowher guided PIT to a Super Bowl in 2005. Tomorrow, he'll watch as his successor, Mike Tomlin, tries to do the same.

In the Wall Street Journal today, Coach Cowher talked about mental toughness and what motivates him:

"In hard times the greatest motivation you want to hear is: Tell me I can't do something, I'll show you that I can. To me sports is about mental toughness. When you take a mentally tough individual, someone who is not gonna be deterred by getting knocked down and not gonna be thinking they can walk on water when they have success, that's to me someone who's tough, mentally tough. I want my kids to be able to do that because I think it carries over in life."

[Thanks, Brian, for passing this along!]

There is a problem, let's fix it

Four interesting points from the book "Hard Facts," a book from the Harvard Business School Press:

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Talent or ability... depends on what happens to people and how they are coached, not just their innate skill or motivation.

A study by Lawrence Kahn examined the effect of baseball managers on team and player performance. Kahn measured player ability by the average of their performance over their entire carers, a reliable indicator of player talent.

He found that some managers inspired players to perform above their ability, and other managers stymied players, consistently driving players to perform below their ability.

Ability or talent did not explain all of a player's performance in a given year. How the player was managed or coached mattered, too.

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What is true for individuals is also true for organizations, groups, and teams. Exceptional performance depends heavily on experience and effort. No matter how gifted (or ordinary) team members are to start out, the more experience they have working together, the better their teams do.

Think of the U.S. women's national soccer team, which has won numerous championships, including two of the four women's World Cups and two of the three Olympic women's tournaments held to date.

The team certainly has had enormously talented players. Yet every team member will tell you that the most important factors in their success were the communication, mutual understanding, respect, and ability to work together tha tdeveloped in the dozen or so years that the stable core group played together.

Quantitative research on team effectiveness has demonstrated the power of such joint experience in every setting examined, including string quartets, surgical teams, student groups, top management teams, and airplane cockpit crews.

Experienced teams perform better because over time members come to trust each other more, communicate more effectively, and learn to blend each other's diverse skills, strengths, and weaknesses.

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The "talent mind-set" is dangerous because it treats talent as something fixed. This mind-set causes people to believe that it just isn't worth trying hard because they -- or the people they lead -- are naturally smart or not, and therer is little if anything anyone can do about it.

A seires of studies by Columbia University's Carol Dweck shows that when people believe their IQ is unchangeable, "they become too focused on being smart and looking smart rather than on challenging themselves, stretching and expanding their skills, becoming smarter."

Dweck concludes that:

When people believe they are born with natural and unchangeable smarts, it causes them to learn less over time. They don't bother learning new things and improving old skills.

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Given all the evidence on the importance of systems, why do so many companies place so much emphasis on getting and keeping great people [or players] and so little on building and sustaining great systems?

A big part of that is Western countries, like the United States, glorify rugged individualism so much that we make a cognitive error. We forget that history, organizational goals, rewards are potent causes of what people and organizations do. We give too much credit to individual heroes when organizations [or teams] do things right and too much blame on individual scapegoats when things go wrong.

[In successful organizations] managers consciously fought their natural tendency to focus on who deserved credit and blame, and instead worked on strengthening the system.

A supervisor explained:

"There are two theories. One says 'there is a problem, let's fix it.' The other says 'we've got a problem, someone is screwing up, let's go beat them up.' To make improvement, we could no longer embrace the second theory. We had to use the first."

Your message should be constant

Went back through Nick Saban's 2005 book "How Good Do You Want to Be" last night and came across this passage:

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Let me let you in on a little secret about football coaches: Very few of us have the skill, experience, and education necessary to motivate a group of eighty men merely with a pregame speech. Contrary to what you have seen on television or in the movies or read in books, Knute Rockne was doing something out of the ordinary in rallying the troops with a few words before kickoff.

The truth is, if you have been sending the message all week, then two minutes before kickoff doesn't matter much.

At our level, if your players are not ready to play on their own, then there's something wrong. Of course, all coaches and leaders like to give a few reminders and will occasionally play to the emotion of the game, but sometimes saying little or nothing can be as powerful as saying a lot. It's the repetitive motivating message given daily over the course of the week that has a real effect -- not a few words before kickoff.

Parents will get their message about the dangers of underaged drinking through to their children better with constant reminders than with a speech the night before prom.

Your message should be constant. A well-developed message is more effective than one motivational talk.

The challenge of coaching on an interim basis

When Johnny Davis (pictured here) was named interim head coach of the Memphis Grizzlies late last week, he described his role this way:

"You just try to keep the team focused. Obviously, we're in transition, and there's uncertainty surrounding the team right now. The former coach is gone. The new head coach has not arrived. There's trepidation there, angst, there's uncertainty. All I'm trying to do is hold things together."

Last month, Spurs beat writer Mike Monroe wrote that "nothing in sports is more difficult than turning around the mentality that infests losing situations that have become chronic. Little wonder that few interim coaches end up getting the job on a permanent basis."

As quarterback father-son duo Archie and Peyton Manning write in their book "Manning," "interim coaches are the equivalent of substitute teachers, unlikely to get the allegiance they deserve." [Interestingly, between 1960-December 2004, interim NFL coaches were 16-43 in their debut games.]

According to Alvin Gentry, who served as interim head coach in Miami and Detroit:

"It's a tough life. Interims are coaching teams that failed to live up to expectations. They have only a limited amount of time to audition for the permanent job, fully flesh out their own philosophy and make changes in strategy and style. Interims can also face authority and communication issues, since players don't expect them to be around long-term."

As this article points out, one challenge is that "an interim coach doesn't have much time to implement his own philosophy and style. The players are accustomed to the system of the previous coach, who used training camp, preseason and regular season games to establish his own approach. It's hard to make radical changes during the season, with a tight game schedule and few opportunities to practice. What an interim coach can do is attempt to communicate with and motivate the players."

Says DEN coach George Karl:

"The toughest thing is you'd like to try to make some changes and try to do some different things. Time just won't allow you to do that. I don't think you ever get your system in place until the next year. You move in that direction, but you don't philosophically get your stuff completely in until your training camp next year."

The Cowboys played the 49ers about a month after SF had promoted Mike Singletary to interim head coach. Before the game, Cowboys head coach Wade Phillips talked about how "for interim coaches, motivating players is the basic challenge."

"It's a tough situation when you go in as an interim, because a lot of things are already in place. First off - and this is really important - you have to get the players to play for you," Phillips said. "That's a lot harder than it sounds. There are some technical things you can do to get better. But once (a team) has put in all the hours of training camp and all the things that are done in the offseason, there isn't a whole lot of impact that you can make."

In 1998, June Jones stepped into the interim role as head coach of the Chargers, going 3-7 with the team.

"It's always hard for whoever is named (interim head coach) because his loyalty has been to that person who was just fired so sometimes it's hard to step in," said Jones, who now coaches at SMU after nine seasons at Hawaii. "We changed practice times and started practicing in the morning and did some things like that differently. You can change up the routine but the main thing is you try to find different ways to put the players in more of a leadership role, to try to get them to take ownership of the team."

Getting a team mentally prepared for a big game

As you'll likely hear or read a lot about this week, 35 years ago yesterday, Notre Dame snapped UCLA's 88-game winning streak.

ND was down by 11 with three and a half minutes left, but went on a 12-0 run, holding the Bruins scoreless in that span.

In his book "Tales from the Notre Dame Hardwood," Irish coach Digger Phelps describes his team's preparation the week leading up to the game.

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I always felt the mental part of preparation for a big game was more important than the physical. I even used to have one of my assistants in charge of pre-game motivation, some gimmick that would give the players that little extra from a psychological standpoint.

Even though we were 9-0 and had outscored every opponent by 26.4 points per game coming into the UCLA game, I thought it was important to put this team in a positive mindset.

We had lost four straight to UCLA by a total of 128 points, so I had to change the mindset. One of the things I did was show the team film of the first 10 minutes of the two games the previous year when we'd played well and we were in the game. This way they could see themselves playing against Walton and Wilkes and the others, holding their own for a long period of time.

On Wednesday, it hit me. Why not practice cutting down the nets? So that's what we did at the end of practice that day. That's right, still three days prior to the game.

We had a drill where the blue team (subs) was pressing the gold team, which had a 10-point lead with three minutes left. Ironically, the game situation the following Saturday would be the opposite situation.

At the end of that drill, I brought the team together and said, "OK, you know what happens now? Shumate, you go to one basket and Goose (Gary Novak), you go to the other. The rest of you split up and lift them up so they can cut down the nets, because that is what we're going to do after we win on Saturday. Someday you will tell your grandchildren about this.

Some of them looked at me like I was crazy, but they did it. We repeated it after Friday's practice. Every time Gary Brokaw talks about that game, he talks about cutting down the nets at practice leading into the game. He always said it gave the team confidence.

The story behind the "What's Our Name?" slogan

A must-read story in the Baltimore paper this morning about the origin of the Ravens' "What's Our Name?" slogan.

Before the season-opener, BAL coach John Harbaugh had his father, Jack, who earned ACA National Coach of the Year honors in 2002 after guiding WKU to the NCAA I-AA title, to address the Ravens.

Growing up, the Harbaugh boys would often hear their Dad tell "the story of Muhammad Ali as a teaching tool. He would tell his sons how Ali never quit against Joe Frazier, how he outsmarted George Foreman. And of course, how he repeatedly asked a heavyweight fighter named Ernie Terrell, "What's my name?'"

As he stood before the Ravens team, one that wasn't highly regarded going into the season, "Jack Harbaugh told them how Cassius Clay had changed his name in 1964 after converting to Islam. And how nearly three years later, Terrell still refused to call him Muhammad Ali. He told them how the two squared off in the ring and that their fight wasn't about money or some championship."

Jack Harbaugh told them how Ali kept punishing Terrell but wouldn't put him down for good. At 69, Harbaugh is still light enough on his feet, and he started shadowboxing in the locker room, calling out Ali's words.

"What's my name?"

Pop! Harbaugh threw a jab.

"What's my name?"

Boom! A hook.

"What's my name?"

Bam! An uppercut.

According to the article, "he concluded by telling the players that they had to earn their name and start demanding respect. And for the past 4 1/2 months, that's exactly what they've done."

John Harbaugh repeated it in his locker room speeches and in the season finale against the Jacksonville Jaguars. "What's our name?" appeared in big, glowing letters on the scoreboard. Before long, the phrase was stripped across the front of shirts, hung, tagged and priced for sale at the team store.

Says one Ravens player:

"We wanted to make everyone understand that we are the Baltimore Ravens and each and every time you play us you're going to realize that. You're going to know who's coming to town or you're going to know whose town you're coming into - and that's the Baltimore Ravens. And we preach that every time we step out of that locker room: What's our name? We make sure everybody understands and realizes that this team you're about to fight, you might not want a piece of 'em."

How many people work harder at their jobs after reaching the top?

Insightful story by Steve Politi here about NY Giants coach Tom Coughlin, who the writer describes as "a quoting machine."

Vince Lombardi. Confucius. The Dalai Lama. Coughlin is always starting team meetings with his memorable sayings from philosophers or athletes or whomever.

According to the article, "Coughlin has worked from the moment that improbable victory over the Patriots [early in the season] was in the books to keep this team from being satisfied."

He pulled out every motivational trick in the book to do that. He showed the team clips from the Chicago Bulls. He read passages from Vince Lombardi. He leaned on Wooden and former Yankees manager Joe Torre, calling both men during the offseason for advice.

Even last week, with this game against the Eagles approaching, the players were wearing T-shirts with the phrase "Cut if off" -- a reference to the movie "Men of Honor" that nobody could quite figure out. He doesn't need all of it to stick with each player. Just enough of it to get the message across.

Coughlin refused to let success become the downfall for this team. How many people work harder at their jobs after reaching the top of their profession? How many stay as passionate and keep pushing to get better when they reach the goal they spent a lifetime chasing?

In the postseason, the smallest detail can cost you

The Dolphins' first postseason game with first-year head coach Tony Sparano kicks off today.

To illustrate how difficult it is to even reach the postseason, Coach Sparano "asked all 43 veterans to stand up, and then asked those vets who have not been in a playoff game to sit down and only 18 remained standing. Of those 18, only 11 have ever started a playoff game, emphasizing how an opportunity like this doesn't come around every year."

"That made it seem real and made us realize you have to take advantage of the opportunity that you have and just go out and try to make the best of it," said [rookie DE Kendall] Langford.

According to Coach Sparano, who was a member of the Bill Parcells' Cowboys staff that endured "heartbreaking losses to the Seattle Seahawks and New York Giants" the last two postseasons:

"When you get into this you're talking about the details and that's one of the things I learned out of the playoffs - the smallest of detail can cost you in this and there's no do-overs. The details, the minor details are really major at this time of year, and if you stop coaching them and you stop talking about them I think you're going to get in trouble in this situation."

Optimism and the "persistence instinct"

The CBS "60 Minutes" piece on USC coach Pete Carroll this past Sunday described him as someone who is "upbeat, optimistic, and seems to have a permanent smile on his face."

[Click here for the blog posting from yesterday about the "60 Minutes" story.]

That description got me thinking about the role optimism plays in success. Does a more optimistic coach or player have a better chance of succeeding than one who is pessimistic?

A book titled "Breaking Murphy's Law" by a professor of psychology at the University of Kentucky examines this very question. The author isn't a motivational speaker; she's a scientist.

According to the author, if you're "optimistic" you "can easily envision yourself accomplishing what you want and, although you can recognize the possibility that not everything will turn out well, you think the odds are in your favor." It's just the opposite for a pessimist.

Her research has found that optimism isn't about "being a positive person" as much as it's about "motivation and persistence."

As an example, early in the book, she describes two law school students from a long-term study she conducted on "how optimism affects psychological well-being." One student was found to be in the top 10% of optimistic students. The other was in the bottom 10%.

"The... pessimistic one didn't seem horribly depressed, and the... optimistic one didn't seem happy-go-lucky. Still, there were dramatic differences in their approaches to law school that had to do with how they tackled the difficulties they encountered.

The pessimistic student dealt with difficulty by withdrawing, ruminating, disengaging, and eventually underachieving. The optimistic student dealt with difficulty by setting goals, planning, engaging, and eventually reaping the rewards.

The essential difference was NOT between positivity and negativity, but between trying harder and trying less.

Positive expectancies -- optimism -- increase motivation and effort, whereas negative expectancies -- pessimism -- decrease motivation and effort. Optimism leads to increased well-being because it increases engagement with life's goals, not because of some miracle happy juice that optimists have and others don't."

She calls this willingness to work longer at tasks as the "persistence instinct." In her words, "optimism makes you push ahead."

Based on the author's research, it's when things get difficult -- when there are obstacles and roadblocks on the path to your goal -- that "you see the biggest differences between optimists and pessimists."

"Difficult tasks create different dynamics. There are natural responses to difficulties and roadblocks. First, emotions turn to irritability, dejection, or anxiety. Second, preoccupation with, and attention to... this problem increases. Roadblocks threaten goals, and any kind of threat results in negative feelings."

Think about when a team hits a losing streak or has one of its key players go down with an injury. The team's goal -- of winning the division, reaching the playoffs, or repeating as champions -- is threatened.

When this happens, some people simply give up. Of course, "keeping at a goal is no guarantee that you will reach it. On the other hand, rejecting it almost ensures that you will not."

"This is where optimism comes in. Optimism helps people see beyond the immediate roadblock to a potentially positive future, whereas pessimists see only more roadblocks, problems, and failures.

For optimistic people, it makes sense to incur the costs of trying to get past a roadblock because they expect rewards in the end. Positive expectancies keep people working on difficult tasks... when it would be easier to just give up. Pessimistic people have no such inspiration and therefore fail to see the point of putting effort toward the negative future they envision."

Armed with this information, it would seem to make sense to gauge a recruit's or potential draft pick's level of optimism. After all, based on research, it's a good indicator of how hard someone will work to reach a goal, especially when faced with distractions and obstacles.

Near the end of the book, the author outlines three simple steps for "increasing intrinsic motivation" (i.e., motivation that comes from within us rather than some kind of external reward) that may be helpful for leaders, coaches, and teams:

1. Own the goal.
2. Make if fun.
3. Remember the big picture.

Understanding your audience -- whether pros or teenagers

Pat Quinn is regarded as one of the NHL's all-time great coaches with more than 650 career wins over 19 seasons.

A two-time NHL coach of the year, Coach Quinn guided Canada to a Gold Medal in 2002 -- Canada's first in 50 years -- and a World Cup two years later.

This past spring, he coached Canada's U-18 team to a world championship.

Olympians, professionals, teenagers -- "somehow, he finds a connection with his players, finds a way to make them play for him. [As head coach in Philadelphia], his Flyers once went a record 35 games without a loss. He brought the Flyers (1980) and Canucks to the final (1994)."

According to one of his former players, "He really knows how to get down deep in you and make you want to get out there and work your butt off and win games."

In the words of Coach Quinn:

"They don't care how much you know until they know how much you care. I think that is a real truism. That I find true with the men, too, not just kids. Kids need to feel it, I know that. I think they felt I had an interest in them. The principles of coaching aren't different if you're coaching the NHL level or coaching kids. You have to understand your audience, what they're capable of. You have to give them a plan."