The most powerful leadership tool you have is your personal example.

Incompetent leaders compromise the strength of the group, allowing lesser group to take change  and win. Take time to establish great leadership. [Ref. Sun Tzu, The Art of War.]

Leadership is a matter of how to be, not how to do. In today’s volatile and uncertain world of sports we need to have good leaders if we are to have great team. Yet often we simply tell our people to be better leaders rather than teaching them to lead. Team captains often are chosen because they are a senior, posses the best ability, are the most vocal, or posses many other  characteristics that do not necessarily exemplify leaderships. None of these translate into legitimate reasons for being a team leader.

CORE VALUES

Simply defined, compassion is the willingness to walk in the shoes of another. It is a state of heart that can be taught and, therefore, learned through consistent intentional practice. It's a 'heart-set' of wanting others to feel free, happy, confident, and successful. We believe that this core value was an integral aspect of our leadership as a team-mate. In our philosophy we talk about the importance of being a good team-mate by treating those on your team with the same care you would want for yourself. The most important quality of a good team-mate is to value another’s differences. We each bring our unique selves as we work together toward a common goal of being our very best, individually and collectively. Truth be known, your team-mate don’t care about how much you know, they just want to know how much you care. Their actions and behaviors that you dislike reflect their insecurity, immaturity, and fear. If you can remember this, you will be more patient with them.

WORKOUT OF THE MIND

Our mental preparation is a daily ‘workout of the mind’, using meditation that we claimed helped us to stay connected with our competitive drive. We are relentless about practicing the basic, doing the most basic foot-work, dribbling, and shooting drills with and without the ball, with each hand, in our quest to win more championships. Competing at the highest level is not about winning. It’s about preparation, courage, understanding, and nurturing you people and your heart. Winning is the result.

PURSUIT OF EXCELLENCE

Gaining mastery is not a one-time thing, it’s an everyday thing. This is a process, not an event. We relentlessly work on the basic, mastering everything from footwork to simple techniques, done time and again until they become automatic. Pursuit of excellence requires pounding the rock, day after day, blow after blow, until one day it all comes together, not because of a single event, but because of the hundred impactful moments that came before.

THE WAR IS WON BEFORE THE BATTLE BEGINS [Ref. Sun Tzu, The Art of War]

Showing up to win vs. showing up to compete. Essential absolutes. We never talked about winning or beating an opponent. When you show up to win the game, your focus is on outcomes and results, something you cannot control. Officials, weather, and opponents all have a part to play in the outcome and are out of your control. This will cause you to get tight, tense, and tentative. When this happens, your confidence declines and self-doubt rises. Losing confidence results in a lackluster performance. Conversely, when you show up to compete, your focus is on executing all the little things that you can control. This will allow you to fell calm, relaxed, focused, and stress-free. From this state of mind, you fell free, fluid, and your performance has the chance to be extraordinary. When you do this, you may not win the game, but you are in a better position to do so.

WE HAVE TO WRITE OUR OWN STORY

The difference between responding and reacting is a choice. When you are reacting, they are in control. When you respond, you are. Learn. Remember, team emotions are contagious, in both a positive and negative way. When you are playing a game, you are actually using a different region of your brain to judge a pass interference call or judge offside than you would in a neutral situation. The neutral decision-making areas of your brain actually disengage, and you use a part of your brain called your inferior parietal lobe. When you do this, your brain reacts as if you were the one performing the action. This is why sometimes your team-mates, parents and coaches can completely lose it at the games they are highly invested in. Their brains react as if they were being fouled or having a shot unjustly called back. This is why you yawn when you see your team-mate yawn in a team meeting, and you flinch when you see a team-mate stub a toe or twist an ankle. Do you ever smile when you see someone smile? On the other hand, a response is disciplined. It’s trained. It’s based upon our character, our morals, our life skills. It’s controlled by us and our intentional actions. If there is a bad call, we play the next play instead of arguing the last play, because that is the only one we can affect.  If we don’t make the starting line-up, or play our favored position, we can react and get angry, whiny, and grumpy, or we can respond and focus on our effort, intensity, and play in a manner that ensure we get on the field the next game.

THE HIGHER THE LEVEL, THE HARDER IT GETS

'You were looking really confident out there today, what was your secret?' Many coaches have probably said to you. But is that the case? Can we really see confidence? Can we read minds? Or, as we says, ‘what looks like confidence or is called confidence is actually competence'. Confidence is a feeling, competence is a behavior. In order to develop our own competence that can withstand high-pressure moments, and to perform better in the moments when it counts, we suggests things:

1. It’s not about positive thinking, it’s about taking positive action no matter what you fear or feel.
2. It’s not about reducing pressure, it’s about building the capacity to embrace more.
3. It’s not about motivation, it’s about connecting to what matters.

In order to perform our very best under high stress and pressure, we must acknowledge fear, anxiety, and the other challenging feelings and emotions, not attempt to suppress them. When you do this, and understand why your brain acts this way, because you care, it will free up your pre-frontal cortex to focus on executing your skills and the tactical plan, rather than spending all your time and energy 'in your head'.

CHOOSING DISCOMFORT IS THE PATH TO THE TOP

Let's take a look behind the scenes for a moment. Every single time of those stars you watch on TV had one thing in common, they have gotten comfortable being uncomfortable. They have grinded and practiced many long, lonely hours. They have endured frustration, injury, numerous setbacks, and disappointment . Those moments we watch them on TV are but a fraction of the unseen hours they have spent with no one watching, in pain, in tears, and asking themselves ‘Is this all worth it?’  The more times you choose discomfort, the faster you will improve. The more time you choose comfort, the more you stay the same. Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not, nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. The true vision of a champion is someone bent over, drenched in sweat, at the point of exhaustion, when no one else is watching.

DEVELOP GREAT HABITS

'Today I’ll do what others won’t so tomorrow I can do what others can’t.' Habits are the building blocks of your success, and research estimates that approximately 45 percent of your daily actions are habitual, meaning they are done while we are performing and thinking about other thing. We think many if not all of our actions, from how we exercise to what we eat, are forces of will, but nearly half of the things we do every day are repeated in the same context often enough to become habits.

1. Results are a lagging measure of your habits. We get what we repeat.
2. Habits matter for both external and internal results.

Very often we think we need to change our outcomes, but what really needs to change are habits and system. (the habits = how you build the system, and the system = the process of achieving those results) We suggest you follow what we call ‘BTA Laws of Behavior change’ and we talk about these during our Tea Time.

During our Tea Time (Locker-room) and workouts you will be introduced to effective ways to up your game and master your leadership craft as a teammate. We want to guide you to be a champion teammate by practicing certain traits, behaviors, and characteristics such as courage, compassion, commitment, patience, persistence, integrity, selflessness, humility, love, and modesty, to name a few. Today, there is a need to have good leaders.