“What you do speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Chasing Influence: Transformational Coaching to Build Champions for Life and What’s Your Juice? Unlock the Energy that Transforms Performance, Fuels Purpose, and Ignites the People Around You are available on Amazon and Audible!

This week’s message is coming to you on Friday; there will not be a Sunday message.

The Final Hour

The people crowded into the 78th-floor sky lobby of the South Tower had mostly decided they weren’t getting out. Flight 175 had torn through the building a few floors above them. The smoke was thick, the exits weren’t obvious, and no help was coming up to find them. Then a young man stepped out of the haze with a red bandana pulled over his nose and mouth, and he spoke to them in a voice too calm to belong to that morning.

“Everyone who can stand, stand now. If you can help others, do so.”

He’d found the one stairwell that still worked. He carried a woman who couldn’t walk down on his back, pointed the rest toward the light, and told them to keep moving. Then, instead of walking out behind them, he turned and climbed back up into the smoke. He did it again after that, and a third time. Welles Crowther is believed to have saved as many as eighteen people before the tower came down.

Most of them never learned his name. They remembered a red bandana and a calm voice, and for months that was all anyone had. This Tuesday, twenty-five years later and three days ahead of the 9/11 anniversary, his mother stood on a lawn near the White House and accepted the Presidential Medal of Freedom on his behalf—the highest honor this country gives a civilian, handed to a 24-year-old who has been gone a quarter of a century.

Alison Crowther talked about Welles at the ceremony. She talked about her son joining the volunteer fire company in Upper Nyack at sixteen, following his father into it, spending years around fully trained firefighters who ran ordinary businesses and answered the alarm whenever it went off. And then she said, “He was no longer an equities trader on 9/11. He was a firefighter.”

On paper, Welles was a trader on the 104th floor. That was the job, the title, the thing you’d have found on a business card. But when the building filled with smoke and everything on that business card became useless—no desk, no promotion on the line, nobody keeping score—he didn’t reach for the trader. He reached for the firefighter. He could only reach for the firefighter because the firefighter was already there, built quietly over years, in hours no one would ever hear about.

We spend a lot of energy in this profession wondering how people will respond when the moment finally comes. Coaches wonder which kid will want the ball down two with the clock running out. Athletic directors wonder who on staff will keep their head when a season, or something bigger, goes sideways. We treat the moment like a test that decides who someone is.

But the moment doesn’t build character. It withdraws from it. Whatever a person has been putting in, quietly, over a long time—that’s what’s available when the pressure strips everything else away, and not a bit more. Welles didn’t manufacture courage in that stairwell. He’d been making deposits since he was sixteen.

That reframes a lot of what we actually do. The stuff that feels small and unwatched turns out to be the whole project. How you talk to the twelfth kid on the roster when the gym is empty. Whether you tell a parent the honest thing or the easy thing. Whether the drill gets run right when no one’s evaluating you. None of it earns a medal. Most of it nobody notices. But it’s the material a person draws on later, and there’s no way to fake the balance when the moment comes to spend it.

We don’t get to choose what our final hour looks like. We do get to choose who we’re becoming in all the ordinary hours leading up to it, and those hours are the ones we’re standing in right now, this week, at practice, in the hallway, in the conversations we’d rather avoid.

Welles Crowther’s final hour didn’t make him a hero. It revealed the hero he’d already spent his life becoming.

Who are you becoming for the moment when someone needs you most?

Connecting this quote to the story. Character is built in ordinary moments so that, when others need us most, our instinct is not to stand by—but to stand up and help.

This week’s Chasing Influence tip: Every ordinary choice is a deposit into the person you will become under pressure.

“You can observe a lot by just watching.”

—Yogi Berra

Chasing Influence: Transformational Coaching to Build Champions for Life and What’s Your Juice? Unlock the Energy that Transforms Performance, Fuels Purpose, and Ignites the People Around You are available on Amazon and Audible!

The Only One Facing the Other Way

Sit behind the backstop at any ballgame and watch the field for a minute. Eight of the nine players on defense are looking the same direction—toward the plate, hoping for the ball to come to them. There is one player looking the other way. The catcher crouches in the dirt facing all of it … the pitcher, infield, baserunners, the whole diamond. The catcher is the only person out there who spends the entire game looking at everybody else.

My wife and I have raised four kids, and two of them spent a lot of time back there, strapped into what baseball players have long-called the tools of ignorance—the mask, the chest protector, the shin guards. It’s one of the great misnomers in sports. The phrase is frequently credited to a catcher named Muddy Ruel, who caught for the old Washington Senators and was also a practicing lawyer, smart enough to be admitted before the U.S. Supreme Court. The joke was that you’d have to be a little crazy to buckle on all that gear and kneel behind a swinging bat while baseballs and spikes and bodies come flying at you. You’d have to be nuts to do it!

I’ve come to think Ruel had it backward. Those are the tools of wisdom.

A few years back, the Harvard Business Review looked at how organizations actually produce leaders and investigated, of all things, baseball. At the start of the 2008 season, twelve of the thirty men managing Major League teams had once been catchers. On a twenty-five-man roster, maybe two or three players ever put on the gear, and catching is one of nine spots on the field—yet nearly half the game’s managers came up from behind the plate. The odds of that happening by accident are worse than one in a thousand. Something about the position makes leaders.

Maybe it starts with what the catcher sees. Everyone else is locked in on the hitter, minding their own patch of grass and their own job. The catcher has to capture everything at once—the pitcher’s body language, the shortstop drifting a step too far, the runner sneaking an extra foot off first, the count and the score and the inning, what pitch was just thrown and what should come next and where all eight teammates need to be the instant the ball’s in play. Not to mention the presence of an umpire right behind. The catcher can’t afford to only focus on him/herself. The catcher has to watch and focus on everybody.

That runs against nearly everything a kid absorbs growing up. We raise them in a world built to aim their attention inward … how am I doing, look at my stats, did I get enough playing time, did anybody notice me. A catcher doesn’t get to spend much time with those questions. The job hands them the opposite questions instead … who needs a word right now, who’s out of position, what does the team need from me this inning. Those turn out to be pretty good questions for how to live a life.

Catchers also learn something that has nothing to do with catching a baseball. Pitchers on the mound sometimes come apart, and reading them is part of the job. Some days you jog out there, put a hand on his shoulder, and tell him you’ve got him. Other days you look him in the eye and tell him to quit feeling sorry for himself and throw the ball. The good ones learn to tell the difference—when a person needs grace and when he needs a push, when to settle someone down and when to call them up. Miss it in either direction, and you lose them. That same read runs through every classroom, every team, and every kitchen table where somebody’s trying to draw the best out of somebody else.

There’s one aspect of catching I love. A pitch skips in the dirt five feet short of the plate. The catcher doesn’t point at it, doesn’t stand up and glare at the pitcher for missing the spot. They drop to their knees and get their body in front of it before it can scoot to the backstop and hand any runners a free base. Somebody else made the mistake, and yet the catcher’s instinct is to move toward it and keep it from getting worse. A lot of leadership looks exactly like that. Something goes sideways, and instead of asking whose fault it is, you shoulder the accountability, get down in the dirt, and take the brunt of it all.

Catchers get beat up. They call the wrong pitch. They get crossed up. They take foul tips off places that really hurt. They get run over at the plate. Then the umpire flips a fresh ball out to the mound, the catcher settles back into their crouch, and the game just keeps going.

Next pitch.

None of us gets the version of life where that doesn’t happen. You’re going to get hit. You’ll make the wrong call, back the wrong plan, put your trust in the wrong person. Someone will let you down, you’ll let yourself down, and a good share of it won’t be fair. You don’t have to pretend it didn’t sting. But at some point you put the mask back on, get back in the crouch, and call the next one.

And none of it requires the gear. You don’t have to be young, or a ballplayer, or strapped into anything to catch. The posture is available to any of us, in any room we walk into. Most people move through their days like the other eight on the field—head down, locked on their own patch of grass, keeping an eye on their own line in the box score. The catcher turns around and faces everybody. So can we.

We can be the ones who take in the whole field instead of just our piece of it, who read the person in front of us and know whether they need an arm around the shoulder or a kick in the pants. And when a ball skips to the backstop through no fault of our own, we can be the one who runs after it anyway.

My wife and I tried to raise four kids who’d live like that, and I hope we did. But I’ve stopped thinking of it as something we hand down only to children. The people I most want beside me—at work, on a staff, in a marriage, at the kitchen table—are the ones who play life like a catcher. And if I’m honest with myself, it’s the person I most want to be, too.

This weekend is a good time to sit with that. Labor Day belongs to the people who do the work. Some of them clock back in Monday to a classroom or a locker room full of somebody else’s kids. Most of us just clock back in—to a job, a team, a household that needs at least one person watching the whole field instead of only their own. The catcher’s kind of work rarely makes a headline. It’s the work that holds things together.

So be a catcher. You don’t need the gear. Be the one who turns around and sees everybody else, who moves toward the mess instead of pointing at it, who takes the hit and reaches for the mask anyway. That was never ignorance … it’s wisdom … and the world could use a lot more people willing to crouch down and catch whatever’s coming.

Where in your life could you turn around and start facing everybody else?

Connecting this quote to the story. Our greatest responsibility as parents, coaches, and leaders is not to make life easier for young people, but to prepare them with the character, resilience, awareness, and selflessness they’ll need to shape a better future.

This week’s Chasing Influence tip: Teach people to handle the next pitch, not fear the last one.

“You can be rich in spirit, kindness, love and all those things that you can’t put a dollar sign on.”

—Dolly Parton

Chasing Influence: Transformational Coaching to Build Champions for Life and What’s Your Juice? Unlock the Energy that Transforms Performance, Fuels Purpose, and Ignites the People Around You are available on Amazon and Audible!

The Picture He Didn’t Take

What is doing the right thing? What does that even mean? We hear the phrase constantly, but I’m not sure we all agree on it.

As the stories about Dolly Parton keep coming this week, so many of them circle back to the same thing: helping people, doing good, expecting nothing in return. It reminded me of something my wife did a while back. She came across a cash machine at our bank with a couple hundred dollars just sitting in it. She didn’t think twice—she walked it straight inside and handed it to a teller. I still wonder whatever happened to that lost cash, and whether whoever left it ever knew how close they came to never seeing it again.

That’s the kind of decision nobody would have faulted her for skipping. It’s the same kind I keep hearing about this week with Dolly.

You’ve seen the tributes by now. The songs, Dollywood, the millions of books mailed to kids through the Imagination Library. The story I heard earlier in the week, and loved, wasn’t really about her, yet represented everything about her. It was about a teenager who snuck a camera into a TV studio because he loved her music, and what that same camera didn’t do years later.

In 1987, Dolly hosted a variety show called Dolly. It only lasted one season, but a California teenager named Ron Davis showed up to 20 of those episodes, skipping school at times to get there. Cameras weren’t allowed in the audience, but he brought his anyway, sneaking shots from his seat all season during the show.

Dolly noticed the kid who kept showing up, walked over, and asked to see what he had. Davis handed her a stack of photos, bracing for the worst. She looked through them, reminded him he wasn’t supposed to have a camera in there, and smiled.

“I won’t tell,” with her unmistakable southern drawl.

It was a star at the height of her fame doing a teenager the small kindness of not getting him in trouble. The story gets better. Davis would later come home from school one day and his mom had a message: Dolly Parton had called. She wanted to know if he could come photograph an event at Dollywood.

He was still a teenager, and that phone call became a career—backstage photographer for Dolly, his first professional shoot at seventeen, later album covers for artists including Reba McEntire. Davis never forgot, “If not for Dolly Parton, I would not have become a photographer.”

Fast-forward to October 31, 1993. River Phoenix—23, an Oscar nominee, one of the brightest young stars in the country—collapsed outside the Viper Room in the middle of a drug overdose. Ron Davis was standing right there. Still a photographer and at the ready with his camera.

Davis watched Phoenix seizing on the pavement, ran into a nearby liquor store to get someone to call 911, then flagged down a passing sheriff’s deputy. River Phoenix was pronounced dead a short time later.

Davis was a member of the paparazzi, yet never raised his camera. By his own later estimate, a photograph of River Phoenix dying on that sidewalk could have earned him $250,000. Fellow photographers mocked him for passing it up. He never backed away from his decision. When asked about it years later on the Today show, he said he didn’t regret the choice—taking the picture was something he couldn’t have lived with. Eventually, Davis walked away from Hollywood. By 1997, he was running a newsstand in Nashville, and refusing to sell tabloids.

As we remember Dolly Parton, these stories go great together because neither needed anybody watching to happen. Dolly didn’t cross a studio floor to talk to a strange kid because she thought he’d be worth knowing someday. Davis didn’t decline to take a picture because he thought someone would write about it thirty years later. My wife didn’t turn in that cash because she thought I’d someday put it in a newsletter. There was no public recognition waiting on any side of those choices, just what felt right, done at the moment the situation could have called for doing the opposite.

We tend to think of character as something that shows up in life’s biggest, most dramatic moments. In real life, however, it’s built in decisions so small nobody’s keeping score … or maybe even noticing. It could be giving credit that you could have kept, helping the person who has nothing to offer you back, or maybe even walking away from something valuable because taking it would mean becoming somebody you don’t want to be.

There’s an old adage that character is what you do when nobody’s watching. The rarest type of character, and perhaps most noble, is what you do when nobody’s watching and doing right actually costs you something. Ron Davis had a $250,000 reason and he passed on it anyway. Dolly had nothing to gain from a kid in the cheap seats with a camera he wasn’t supposed to have. She gave him a shot anyway.

We spend so much energy measuring what people accumulate—titles, followers, wins, dollars. Maybe it’s worth keeping a more important, quiet ledger? The credit you shared, the money you turned down, the kindness nobody saw. That picture you didn’t take.

What’s the shortcut, the credit, the easy win that you’d be better off not taking?

Connecting this quote to the story. Reputation is what others see, but character is revealed by the choices we make when there is no audience, no reward, and sometimes a real cost for doing what’s right.

This week’s Chasing Influence tip: The choices that define your leadership are often the ones nobody else will ever see.

“No one can whistle a symphony; it takes a whole orchestra to play it.”

—H. E. Luccock

Chasing Influence: Transformational Coaching to Build Champions for Life and What’s Your Juice? Unlock the Energy that Transforms Performance, Fuels Purpose, and Ignites the People Around You are available on Amazon and Audible!

My wife makes delicious cinnamon rolls. A lot of times they are a special weekend treat at the cabin.

Recently it was just the two of us, so she made a small batch. A few rolls, spread across the baking sheet with room between them, covered and left on the counter to rise overnight.

By morning they looked perfect. With room to spread, they’d tripled. Sitting there in neat little islands on the pan, smooth and tall, ready for the same oven that’s baked them plenty of times before, same temperature, same time.

They came out flat.

Not ruined, you can’t really miss with cinnamon rolls (especially with chili, but we’ll tackle that debate another day). But they were low and dense when they’re usually light and fluffy. Not the rolls we know and expected.

We stared at them as if they would talk to us, trying to work out what had been done differently. It was the space.

When she makes a full batch, the rolls go in crowded, sides touching. Packed into the pan with nowhere to go but up. They hold each other up, and they hold each other in, and under the heat they climb.

These had room, so when the heat came, they took it. They spread into all that space around them instead of rising through it. And the sides that normally stay soft—the ones tucked against another roll, hidden from the direct heat—were out in the open this time causing them to crisp.

The night before, you couldn’t have told the difference. Spread out, they looked every bit as ready. They tripled overnight and looked like blue ribbon winners heading into the oven.

And then the heat exposed the difference.

We’ve all worked with people who sat in the pan like that. They have talent and do the work, but it’s on their terms and they always keep that air around them. It might be the far corner of the locker room or maybe never leaving the office. It’s the athlete who’s on the team without ever being a teammate. When the waters are calm and the temperature is comfortable, you’d never know the difference. They look as ready as anyone.

Then it hits the fan. The deadline hits. Things get hard. The season turns. A losing streak. A stretch where nothing comes easy. The heat has arrived.

And the ones with nobody pressed in close have nothing holding them up. They spread thin and harden at the edges. Then, upset with the results, point every direction but inward.

The ones packed in tight—shoulder to shoulder to find the fix, sitting next to someone who needs to be lifted on the bus, or simply lending that helping hand—these are the ones who climb.

You can feel where you sit on your own team. Whether you’ve given yourself a little room. A clean corner and comfortable inch of space on every side. Or whether you’re crowded in close enough that when the heat comes, there’s someone on either side of you, holding you to it and holding you up, climbing because you’re there.

I had high expectations for those rolls. They just didn’t get the support to meet them.

Connecting this quote to the story. We may have the ability to rise on our own, but it’s the connection, support, and closeness of others that helps us rise higher.

This week’s Chasing Influence tip: Support is easiest to overlook when things are going well and hardest to replace when things get tough.

“At times our own light goes out and is rekindled by a spark from another person.”

—Albert Schweitzer

Chasing Influence: Transformational Coaching to Build Champions for Life and What’s Your Juice? Unlock the Energy that Transforms Performance, Fuels Purpose, and Ignites the People Around You are available on Amazon and Audible!

This is the last in a series of posts from my summer travels. Next week … cinnamon rolls!

The Lamplighter

Just before dusk, a man in a long black cape and a top hat walks through Cathedral Island carrying a pole taller than he is. He stops at the first streetlamp, reaches up, and a small flame catches behind the glass. Then he walks to the next one and does it again.

Until that evening, the lamplighters I knew were hockey players. In my world, “lighting the lamp” means burying one in the back of the net and the red goal light starts flashing behind the glass. What I was now witnessing was the older kind, the literal kind, and it turned out to have a deeper story than a goal light.

I watched this lamplighter on my recent visit to Wrocław, Poland. Cathedral Island— Ostrów Tumski—is the oldest part of the city, a pocket of cobbled streets, churches, and bridges along the Oder River. Gas street lighting arrived in Wrocław in 1846, and today nearly a hundred historic gas lamps still light Ostrów Tumski. The system was restored in the 1990s, preserving a tradition that has disappeared almost everywhere else. Every night, someone still walks those old streets and lights the lamps by hand.

He moved quickly, yet he wasn't performing, as he worked around assembled tourists trailing his every step, working to keep up. He knew every lamp—where he was, where he was headed next—and he went from one to the next without a wasted step. Lamp, flame, next lamp. Nearly a hundred of them, every evening, in whatever weather Wrocław hands him.

There isn’t a light switch for Cathedral Island’s streetlights. The lamplighter doesn’t light the island all at once. He lights a lamp, and then the one after it, and then the one after that. By the time he reaches the far end of the island, the start of his path has been glowing for an hour.

We want all the light at once. The one talk, the one meeting, the one season that turns everything on. But it doesn’t arrive that way. Not on the island, and not for us. You light one person, and then you walk to the next one, and the glow builds behind you a lamp at a time.

We spend our time and energy chasing the goal light—the flash everyone sees the second it happens. We look right past the walking. But years later, what we’ll remember most is the walk.

The walking is the whole job.

He’ll be back tomorrow at dusk, pole in hand, starting at the first lamp. The island doesn’t glow because of one extraordinary act. It glows because someone keeps walking it, lamp to lamp, whether or not anyone stops to watch.

Connecting this quote to the story. The greatest reward isn’t the flash or recognition, but the chance to keep showing up and doing meaningful work that brings light to others.

This week’s Chasing Influence tip: The work no one sees creates the results everyone feels.

“Little strokes fell great oaks.”

— Benjamin Franklin

Chasing Influence: Transformational Coaching to Build Champions for Life and What’s Your Juice? Unlock the Energy that Transforms Performance, Fuels Purpose, and Ignites the People Around You are available on Amazon and Audible!

Finding Your Dwarf

I crouched on a Wrocław sidewalk to have my picture taken with two little bronze men straining against a granite ball. I didn't know their names or their story. I'd noticed a few other small bronze statues on our walk and liked this one, so we snapped a photo and started to move on. As I stood up, I noticed the line that had quietly formed behind me, waiting for the same shot. It was days before I understood I'd been kneeling next to one of the truest things in the city.

Poland’s borders have moved, its governments have changed, and entire cities have changed nationalities. Few places show that better than Wrocław. Known as Breslau through most of its modern history, it was part of Germany when World War II began. In the war’s final months, German and Soviet forces fought an 80-day battle for the city that left much of it in ruins, and when Europe’s borders were redrawn, Breslau became Polish Wrocław.

I visited last week while the city hosted the European Baseball B-Pool Championship, and there is a lot to love about the place. But the tradition that stuck with me is one most visitors walk right over.

Look down almost anywhere in the city and you’ll find them. There are small bronze dwarfs tucked onto sidewalks, perched on ledges, hiding beside doorways. There are over one thousand of them now. Some represent professions and hobbies. Others stand for ideas—kindness, solidarity, inclusion, perseverance. There are dwarfs in wheelchairs and dwarfs with white canes, dwarfs working and traveling and studying and playing music. They’re fun to hunt for, but they are more than a scavenger hunt. Their story began when life in Poland was anything but joyful.

After WWII, Poland fell under communist rule and Soviet domination, and resistance simmered for decades. Eventually anti-government slogans started appearing on walls around Wrocław. The authorities painted over them, leaving large, conspicuous patches of fresh paint where the messages had been. In 1982, Waldemar “Major” Fydrych and Wiesław Cupała decided to do something with those patches.

They painted dwarfs on them.

The idea was strangely absurd. A slogan could be censored. But what do you do with a dwarf? Paint over it and leave another patch to fill? Arrest someone for painting one? The regime tried both, and both made it look ridiculous—never more than when police hauled marchers in and found themselves demanding to know why someone had taken part in an illegal meeting of dwarfs. The authorities had tried to erase one message, and the movement used the empty space to create another.

The dwarfs multiplied, then jumped off the walls entirely as the Orange Alternative began staging bizarre public “happenings” that exposed the absurdities of communist life through humor instead of violence. During the 1988 Revolution of Dwarfs, more than 10,000 people filled central Wrocław, many in orange hats, and the police found themselves trying to control what amounted to a mass gathering of dwarfs.

Wrocław didn’t forget. In 2001, Papa Krasnal—Papa Dwarf—was installed on Świdnicka Street near the site of those demonstrations, a bronze reminder of the movement and of the small, strange symbol that had once challenged something much bigger than itself. Then the family began to grow. A few years later, the smaller bronze dwarfs started appearing, and one of the first was Syzyfki—the two Sisyphuses I’d taken my picture with when first arriving in the city. The City Museum describes them as a symbol of strength, commitment, and perseverance in pursuit of a goal.

Papa Krasnal stands for resistance. Syzyfki stand for perseverance. Others have come to stand for kindness, inclusion, work, learning, and countless pieces of the community Wrocław has become.

Somewhere along the streets of Wrocław, I started thinking about what my dwarf would represent. What would my dwarf be holding? What would he be doing? Would he be who I am right now, or the person I’m still trying to become—and would those two even be the same figure?

What would yours be?

It sounds like a goofy question until you try to answer it. Reduce everything you value, everything you hope to contribute, and everything you want people to remember about you down to one small bronze figure left standing on a sidewalk long after you’ve walked past. What would be left? For most of us that’s a long, honest piece of work to figure out, and I’m still working on mine.

The story of Wrocław’s dwarfs started with a painted-over patch of wall. Someone had tried to erase what was there, and someone else decided what would take its place. Nearly half a century later, those little figures are still telling that story. Ours are still being decided—and a good place to begin is right here, picturing your dwarf: what it would hold, and what it would stand for.

Connecting this quote to the story. In Wrocław, the Orange Alternative found humor could do what confrontation could not—strip an oppressive system of its power by making it impossible to take it seriously.

This week’s Chasing Influence tip: You may not control the wall in front of you, but you can still decide what you paint on it.

“Don’t smell the barn, boys.”

—Alec Haralovich

Chasing Influence: Transformational Coaching to Build Champions for Life and What’s Your Juice? Unlock the Energy that Transforms Performance, Fuels Purpose, and Ignites the People Around You are available on Amazon and Audible!

Smelling the Barn

“Don’t smell the barn, boys.”

Alec Haralovich had just finished his parting words to the Norwegian National Baseball Team. We were in Wrocław, Poland, this past week for the European B-Pool Championship, where the winner would earn promotion to Europe’s A Pool the following year. I’ve been gifted the opportunity to serve as an assistant coach with this group for the past several years, and Haralovich—a retired special forces Marine who serves as our general manager—has a gift for strangely perfect words at just the right moment.

Most of us know the expression one way. A horse working its way home catches the scent of the barn and finds another gear—head up, pace quickening, suddenly eager to close the distance. Runners feel it in the last mile, sales teams in the last week of the quarter. You can see the finish, so you dig in and finish strong. Smelling the barn is a good thing.

That wasn’t the barn Haralovich meant.

The same instinct has a shadow. That quickening horse can grow distracted and hard to control, so fixed on the barn that it stops minding the ground in front of it. It knows where it wants to go; it just stops paying close attention to how it gets there.

Haralovich broke a military mission into three broad movements. First comes the insertion, when you begin in good health and high spirits—excitement, anticipation, an operation studied and rehearsed until everyone knows the plan inside and out. Think of the enormous preparation, and the nervous energy, that preceded D-Day. Then comes what the military calls action on the objective: the event itself, the game or the presentation or the launch, the moment all that preparation has been pointed toward. And then comes the extraction. Getting out.

That last phase, Haralovich warned, is often the most dangerous—not because the objective has changed, but because the people pursuing it have. The end is visible, and comfort feels close. People start thinking about going home. They relax, rush, coast, or simply begin going through the motions.

Their bodies remain in the operation, but their minds are already in the barn.

You see it everywhere once you start looking. A team builds a comfortable lead and stops playing with urgency. A business nears the end of a long project and begins overlooking the small but important details. A student knows graduation is approaching and quietly checks out. A leader announces a change, then lets the energy leak away before it ever takes root. The work isn’t finished, but people start acting like it is.

This is the moment that asks the most of leaders. The plan is already made, and strategy is set. The work now is keeping people awake and reminding your team that nearing the finish and finishing are not the same thing. The European Championship would go to the team disciplined enough to stay present through the final pitch and the final out, not the one most excited to walk onto the field.*

Complacency won’t announce itself. It shows up disguised as relief, confidence, or the reasonable belief that the hardest part is already behind us. But the barn is not home until you are safely inside.

Where are you beginning to smell the barn? How will you keep yourself, and the people you influence, at full throttle until the work is truly finished?

Anyone can bring energy at the beginning. Influence is helping people carry it all the way to the finish line.

* This turned out to be exactly the case. Slovakia overcame a late-inning deficit to capture the championship over host Poland in walk-off fashion in the bottom of the 10th inning.

Connecting this quote to the story. Seeing the finish line doesn’t mean the work—or the need for focus—is finished.

This week’s Chasing Influence tip: Preparation gets you started; sustained attention brings you safely home.

“The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance—it is the illusion of knowledge.”

—Daniel J. Boorstin

Chasing Influence: Transformational Coaching to Build Champions for Life and What’s Your Juice? Unlock the Energy that Transforms Performance, Fuels Purpose, and Ignites the People Around You are available on Amazon and Audible!

Long ago, so the old parable goes, six blind men heard that an elephant had come to their village. None of them had ever encountered one, so they walked out together to learn what an elephant was.

The first man reached out and wrapped his arms around a massive leg. “An elephant is like a pillar,” he said. The second man caught hold of the tail. “You’re mistaken. An elephant is like a rope.” The third felt the trunk curling through his hands and declared the elephant was like a thick branch. The fourth touched an ear and described a great fan. The fifth pressed his palms against the animal’s side and said the others had lost their minds—an elephant was plainly a wall. The sixth ran his fingers down a tusk and swore the elephant was a spear.

Then they argued. Each man had touched the elephant himself. Each man had evidence. Each man was sure he was right.

And every one of them was correct about the piece he touched. The leg does seem like a pillar. The tail does feel like a rope. The trouble started when each man decided his piece was the whole animal.

It’s the same trap we’ve all fallen into at one time or another.

My mother used to warn me about this, though she never really talked about elephants. Her warning was about words—the absolute ones. Always and never. “You always do this.” “She never listens.” “That kid will never change.” My mom was leery of those words, and she warned us to be careful with them. Absolutes take one moment and stretch it over a whole person.

We need to leave room for maybe.

Maybe there’s something I don’t know. Maybe the other person lived that moment differently than I did. Maybe my first read wasn’t the best one.

Maybe requires a settled kind of strength—the strength to hold a conclusion loosely, to say, “Here’s what I’m seeing,” without adding, “And there’s nothing more to see.” The best leaders I’ve been around make decisions with an open hand instead of a closed fist, and when new information arrives, they let it in.

Certainty makes that hard. Certainty feels wonderful—it’s fast, it’s clean, it lets us assign blame and move on. And sometimes we need to act with certainty. But once we’re certain about a person, we run the risk of no longer being curious about them. We touch the leg and spend the rest of the season looking for pillars.

The kid who seems distracted doesn’t need us jumping to conclusions. That kid might just need one question—“everything okay?”—that costs thirty seconds and can rewrite the whole script.

Leave room for maybe. Before you finish the sentence forming in your head about the athlete you’re trying to figure out, your most difficult parent, that person who seemed so rude—leave room for maybe. It can make all the difference in your outlook, mood, relationships, and the way you care for and lead others.

Connecting this quote to the story. Once a leader forms a verdict about someone, it becomes easy to fool themselves by treating every new behavior as proof they were right.

This week’s Chasing Influence tip: Listen for words like always, never, everyone, and no one. They often signal that you have stretched one experience across an entire person or situation. Replace the absolute with a more accurate description of what actually happened.

“Clear is kind. Unclear is unkind.”

- Brené Brown

Chasing Influence: Transformational Coaching to Build Champions for Life and What’s Your Juice? Unlock the Energy that Transforms Performance, Fuels Purpose, and Ignites the People Around You are available on Amazon and Audible!

This week, I zipped my bag shut on my 25th summer of coaching VFW baseball (15 and 16-year-olds). Twenty-five summers of batting practice, lineup cards, carpools, rain delays, close plays, hard conversations, and final outs. Twenty-five summers of teaching young people how to pitch, run the bases, compete, and pick each other up. Twenty-five summers of fun and trying to make a difference.

The end of a season always puts me in a reflective mood. I replay the year—the highlights, the lowlights, the what-ifs and the if-onlys. The bunt we should have tried. The pitching change made one batter too late. How fortunate I am to have the opportunity. The calls that went our way, and the ones that didn’t. It’s funny how the second kind always outweighs the first in my memory.

That’s the one that got me thinking this past week. There’s a situation I’ve watched play out at fields all across the country, in every last one of my summers coaching.

You’ve seen it too.

Two outs, bases loaded, full count on the batter. The pitcher takes a breath and delivers a pitch that flirts with the outside corner—close enough that the catcher holds his glove there an extra beat and close enough that both dugouts have their minds made up before the umpire ever moves.

“Ball four.”

One side of the field erupts. The fence rattles, parents groan, and a coach in the dugout lets the umpire know his precise displeasure with the strike zone. Sixty feet away, with a terrible angle, and absolutely certain.

Meanwhile, the third-base dugout applauds the same pitch. Great eye … way to battle!

Same pitch with two very different verdicts. And if the teams swapped jerseys, the arguments would flip too. We want the strike when we’re pitching and the ball when we’re hitting. The zone we’re screaming about is usually the one that benefits us, too.

The longer I have coached, the more convinced I am that the most important things we teach through baseball have almost nothing to do with baseball. John Scolinos understood that better than anyone.

In January of 1996, more than 4,000 coaches packed into the Opryland Hotel in Nashville for the American Baseball Coaches Association convention. Scolinos was 78 years old, five years retired from a remarkable 44-season college coaching career. He shuffled to the stage with a full-sized home plate hanging from a string around his neck.

He spoke for 10 minutes without mentioning his adornment. Then he asked the room how wide home plate is in Little League.

Seventeen inches.

High school? Seventeen inches. College? Seventeen inches. The big leagues? Seventeen inches. And when a major-league pitcher can’t throw the ball over those seventeen inches, baseball doesn’t hand him a wider plate. It hands him a one-way ticket to Toledo.

His message not only landed with the room, it is still shared widely 30 years later. There was a coach named Chris Sperry who sat in that audience, and the account he later wrote carried the speech far beyond baseball. Coaches still reference the message. When people struggle to reach a standard, we don’t widen the plate.

Scolinos was right. The plate is seventeen inches, and it stays seventeen inches. But twenty-five summers have added a layer to it for me.

The plate doesn’t call the pitch.

Just like the colors of the plate, the rulebook defines the strike zone in black and white. Yet the rulebook has never raised its arm to call a strike. An umpire does that—a human being, crouched behind the catcher, making a judgment call on a ball darting through the air eighty-plus miles an hour.

And every umpire is different. One gives the outside corner, one squeezes the bottom of the zone, another likes the high strike. Ask any experienced player what to do about that and you’ll get the same answer: adjust.

Players can adjust to almost any zone. What they struggle to adjust to is a zone that moves.

A pitch that’s a strike in the second inning and a ball in the sixth. A corner that exists for one team and disappears for the other. A zone that shrinks when the dugout gets loud or the game gets close. That’s when trust leaves the ballpark. Hitters get confused, pitchers become frustrated, and coaches come unglued, because nobody knows what to expect.

The plate is the standard. The zone is the judgment. The people we lead need both to hold steady.

Think about how often we are the figurative umpire.

Every coach is … and so is every parent, teacher, and boss. We set the expectations, and then, pitch by pitch, we decide what actually counts. And in fairness to all the umpires out there, I know my zone has moved. I’ve repeated instructions a fourth time instead of expecting players to listen the first. And more than once, I’ve quietly finished a job someone was supposed to own, because it was just easier to do it myself, or I told myself I was modeling service in action.

None of it felt like lowering a standard. All of it feels like helping.

That’s what makes this hard. Widening the plate shows up dressed as kindness, patience, or common sense. And once someone learns the zone moves—because it got hard, life’s unfair, or impatience with the process of growth—they stop pitching to the corners of their own lives. Why hold yourself to seventeen inches when the plate can stretch on demand?

The people we lead will scout us the way hitters read an umpire.

Nobody had to teach them this. People study the zone of anyone who has authority over their lives. It’s how they figure out where they stand.

And that’s why steadiness matters more than almost anything else we bring. A demanding coach with a consistent zone earns trust—players may not love every call, but they can build on it. An easygoing coach whose zone shifts with his mood keeps everyone guessing, and guessing is exhausting. The people we lead don’t need us to be perfect. They need to know what we’ll call, today and tomorrow, for the star and for the last kid on the bench. They need to be able to dig in.

Holding a steady zone can never be the whole job, though.

When a pitcher can’t find the plate, you don’t shrug and point at it. You get to the field early and hit spots. You do flat-ground, work on the grip, catch a bullpen, and build the pitcher back up after the rough outing left his confidence rattled. The plate stays right where it is. The support is what grows.

The same goes for every standard worth keeping. Because someday there’s no uniform. The alarm goes off for a job that expects them at 7:00 whether they feel like it or not. A spouse counts on their word. A boss hands them a deadline that doesn’t disappear just because the week has become difficult.

Life will unapologetically keep its plate at seventeen inches.

Scolinos closed that day in Nashville by urging the coaches to keep their players, their families, and themselves at seventeen inches. He died in 2009 and coaches are still quoting him.

For all of us, watch where your zone drifts. Notice the pitch you call a strike for one person and a ball for another. Standards stay the same, needs will vary and change. Keep the plate where Scolinos left it, and get in the dirt to help somebody when they need it.

To watch Coach Scolinos’ talk, click here. Coach John Scolinos delivered his famous “17 Inches” speech at the 1996 ABCA Convention. Chris Sperry's account of that day, “Stay at 17 Inches,” carried it to the world and is worth every minute: sperrybaseballlife.com/stay-at-17-inches.

Connecting this quote to the story. Whether coaching players, raising children, leading groups … or ourselves, our responsibility is to hold the standard steady while giving people the support they need to reach it.

This week’s Chasing Influence tip: Don’t widen the plate. Teach, support, and believe people into reaching it.

"The only way out – is through."

- Robert Frost

Chasing Influence: Transformational Coaching to Build Champions for Life and What’s Your Juice? Unlock the Energy that Transforms Performance, Fuels Purpose, and Ignites the People Around You are now available on Amazon and Audible!

There’s an old story about a man who found the cocoon of an emperor moth and carried it home to watch the moth break free.

For hours he watched it work. The moth pushed against the silk, gained a little, rested, pushed again. Then it seemed to stall. It had forced its head and part of its body through a small opening, and there it stayed, straining against the same stubborn inch of cocoon, going nowhere.

The man couldn’t stand it. He found a pair of scissors, snipped the cocoon the rest of the way open, and the moth slipped out with ease.

But something was wrong. Its body was swollen and its wings were small and crumpled, folded against its back like wet paper. He waited for them to spread and stiffen and catch the air the way wings are supposed to. They never did. The moth spent its short life crawling, dragging a body those wings were never able to lift, and it died a few days later, having never flown.

The man had been kind. That’s the part worth sitting with. He wasn’t lazy or careless — he watched a living thing strain against something hard, and he wanted to spare it. So he took the struggle away. And the struggle was the one thing the moth could not afford to lose. The work of pushing through that narrow opening was the work that readied those wings for flight. Cut the cocoon, and you get a moth that cannot fly.

Every one of us has held those scissors.

It’s answering the question before the kid has finished struggling toward the answer themselves. Or grabbing the tool out of their hands to show them the “right” way because watching them fumble it is almost physically hard. Maybe it’s quietly lowering expectations because we’d rather they succeed at something than learn what it costs to fall short. None of that comes from a bad place. It comes from caring. That’s exactly why it’s so hard to stop.

And sometimes the cocoon we cut is our own. We let the machine do the hard thinking and call it efficiency, when what we’ve handed away are the reps that would have made us sharper. A tool can be a partner you grow alongside, or a pair of scissors you reach for to skip the struggle. It’s the same tool, but the difference is whether you’re still doing the work.

Most of us don’t set out to hold anyone back. We set out to help — to be available, to remove the obstacle, to make the day a little easier for the people counting on us. That’s a good instinct. But good instincts can drift over time if we don’t keep them in check.

Next thing we know, we step in a little too fast, a little too often, and the help starts doing the quiet work of the scissors. People stop wrestling with the problem and building the strength to carry what should be their responsibility.

People grow the way the moth’s wings do — against resistance. Confidence, judgment, the nerve to make a hard call are built by working through the strain. The steadiest groups are the ones where people are trusted with hard things, and support shows up at the right moment rather than at the first sign of struggle. Enough support to feel safe with enough room to get strong.

The most generous thing we can offer someone might be your belief that they can do the difficult thing in front of them … and then the restraint to stand back and let them. That belief is its own kind of energy and tells others, “You can do it. I have faith in you.”

What are you stepping in to fix that someone in your care needs to work through on their own?

Connecting this quote to the story. Like the moth's struggle to emerge from the cocoon is essential for its development and ability to fly, so are trials and challenges necessary for personal growth.

This week’s Chasing Influence tip: Before you solve the problem for someone, ask whether the struggle is harming them or helping them grow.

“Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom, must, like men, undergo the fatigues of supporting it.”

— Thomas Paine

Last week's post was about John Dunlap printing the Declaration through the night … carrying the idea was his part. This week is about the harder test that came after, when the celebrating stopped and the army that declared independence had to decide whether it meant it.

Next week, we will return to exploring new topics and ideas related to how we live our lives.

Chasing Influence: Transformational Coaching to Build Champions for Life and What’s Your Juice? Unlock the Energy that Transforms Performance, Fuels Purpose, and Ignites the People Around You are now available on Amazon and Audible!

After the Declaration

The rope pulled tight, and the king began to lean.

It was the night of July 9, 1776, at the bottom of Broadway in New York. Hours earlier, the Declaration of Independence had been read aloud to Washington’s army. One of Dunlap’s rough printed sheets had reached General Washington. A crowd of soldiers and sailors had assembled in a little park called Bowling Green, throwing ropes over a gilded statue of King George III on horseback.

Four thousand pounds of lead. Six years on that pedestal, watching over the city. The king’s statue was a daily reminder of who ruled and who obeyed, and it tumbled down hard.

The assembled masses sawed the crowns off the fence posts and they cut the king’s head from his shoulders. And then somebody had a brilliant irony-laden thought. Lead was hard to come by, and lead was what musket balls were made of.

So the king went to Connecticut in pieces, and the women of Litchfield spent that summer melting him down. More than forty thousand rounds of ammunition were cast from the statue of the king they’d just renounced. They’d use that lead to fight for independence.

That night must have been electric. The bells, the bonfires, the yelling, and anxious energy. Independence, declared. If the story were so simple. We all know it doesn’t end there.

Seven weeks later, the same army stood on Long Island and watched the horizon fill with British sails. It was the largest expeditionary force Britain had ever sent abroad. On the morning of August 27, the redcoats came through an unguarded pass and appeared behind the American lines, and the army that had pulled down the king came apart in a morning’s time.

Men ran as whole regiments dissolved into the marshes along Gowanus Creek. Washington’s war — and maybe the country itself — was hours from ending in the first major battle after independence had been declared.

What stood between the army and annihilation was a rear guard of a few hundred men from Maryland, under a Baltimore major named Mordecai Gist. Farmers and tradesmen, most of whom had never seen combat. Their task was simple and terrible. They were to hold off the British near the stone farmhouse long enough for the others to get across Gowanus Creek and back toward the American lines.

The Marylanders charged toward the British position near the stone farmhouse. They were thrown back, reformed, and charged again. Some accounts say they made two assaults; others say as many as six.

Washington watched it through his spyglass from a hill across the creek. The story later told has him crying out, “Good God, what brave fellows I must this day lose!”

Two hundred fifty-six of them didn’t come back. History would remember them as the Maryland 400. Most of their names weren’t recorded. Two nights later, under cover of fog, Washington slipped nine thousand men across the East River, and the army that went on to win the war survived because of an hour bought by men nobody cheered.

Over the past weeks it’s been eye-opening to revisit our history and to see how issues change — in the times and magnitude — yet lessons hold true.

I’ve been part of teams that pulled down statues. The excitement of day one of the season, the lofty goals, the new standards, the slogan on the shirts. The energy is real — I felt it.

And I’ve watched the same teams meet their Brooklyn. The first loss that wasn’t supposed to happen. The starter who got hurt. The slump where nothing worked. That's when everybody finds out if you meant it.

Every team declares who it is in the celebration. It becomes who it is in the rear guard … in the practice after the blowout, in the leader who holds the standard when holding it costs something, in the coach who keeps teaching when there's seemingly nothing left to play for.

Every team gets a night at the bonfire. Not every team holds the stone house. The ones that do are truly special.

Connecting this quote to the story. Washington wrote that line a year before Brooklyn … then he witnessed the Maryland 400 prove it.

This week’s Chasing Influence tip: The standard that matters most is the one you hold after the room stops cheering.

“Well done is better than well said.”

— Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard's Almanack, 1737

Last week’s post was about Brian Epstein seeing what the Beatles could be before anyone else … belief was his gift. This week is about the harder part that comes after, when an idea has to be carried, by hand, into a country that hasn't heard it yet.

Chasing Influence: Transformational Coaching to Build Champions for Life and What’s Your Juice? Unlock the Energy that Transforms Performance, Fuels Purpose, and Ignites the People Around You are now available on Amazon and Audible!

Before the Ink Dried

A Colonial printing press needed both hands and a strong back. By the time the candles burned low, John Dunlap had been working at one for hours.

Dunlop was a twenty-nine-year-old Irish immigrant. A Philadelphia printer trusted with Congress’s most urgent work … which on this night, July 4th, 1776, meant someone had handed him a single sheet of handwriting and told him to make a lot of it.

So he set the type, letter by letter. He inked the press, pulled the sheets, stacked them, folded them, and sent them into the world before they even had time to dry. Some copies were folded before the ink had fully set, so the margins shifted, and the form sat a little unevenly in the press. It was a job too urgent to worry about perfection.

The whole process had been rushed. “We were all in haste,” John Adams later remembered.

This is the first of a two-part series I will post over the next two weeks. The country turns two hundred and fifty this Fourth of July, and I’m going to dust off a couple of stories most people don’t know.

What Dunlap printed that night is not the document you’re picturing. The one you know, the tall parchment under glass at the National Archives with its famous signatures, didn’t exist yet. It wouldn’t be signed until August.

What most people actually saw in the summer of 1776 was one of Dunlap’s rough sheets. No one knows exactly how many came off the press, probably somewhere around 150 to 200. Twenty-six are known to survive.

These were the copies that began going out on July 5th to assemblies, conventions, committees of safety, and military commanders. On July 8th, a man named John Nixon climbed onto a platform behind the Pennsylvania State House and read the words aloud to a crowd for the first time. On July 9th, they were read to Washington’s troops in New York.

The words of the Declaration of Independence didn’t change anything. It was the actions that followed those words. Someone printed its copies through the night. Someone saddled a horse to share those copies and someone stood in a public square to read it where people could hear. Someone in that crowd was inspired to do something about it.

An idea on paper is just an idea. It needs a carrier. This is always true about the things we write down. The purpose statement, the core values on the wall, the standards we espouse.

We’ve all written plenty of them … and probably watched them sit there and collect dust. The words are never the hard part, the doing is.

It happens in the hallway, at the dinner table, in the meeting after everyone is tired, in the text you send to check on someone, in the apology you finally offer, in the standard you hold when it would be easier to look away. It happens in the drill you run for the four hundredth time, the conversation you would rather avoid, the small act of service nobody will notice, and the way you treat the person who has nothing to offer you in return.

Most of us remember the signers, not the printer. We remember Hancock, not Dunlap. But there is no Fourth of July without that original piece of paper being brought to life. Similarly, there is no team, no classroom, no family, no organization that lives by its values just because somebody wrote them down beautifully. Values live only when somebody carries them out of the room.

Two hundred and fifty years later, we have the same great example to follow. The great American experiment without follow-through would only be words.

Connecting this quote to the story. John Dunlap’s overnight printing of the Declaration was what “something must be done” looked like in real time.

This week’s Chasing Influence tip: Values have to be more than words on paper. They come to life in the people willing to carry them out of the room.

“The greatest good you can do for another is not just to share your riches, but to reveal to him his own.”

— Benjamin Disraeli

Chasing Influence: Transformational Coaching to Build Champions for Life and What’s Your Juice? Unlock the Energy that Transforms Performance, Fuels Purpose, and Ignites the People Around You are now available on Amazon and Audible!

The Gift of Belief

For many of us, we were fortunate to have a father who saw what we could be long before we could see it ourselves. Thank you!

This spring, Paul McCartney released an album called The Boys of Dungeon Lane - a record looking back at his Liverpool childhood, the years before the Beatles and the world knew his name.

In 1961, he was just one of those boys.

Then, a young man named Brian Epstein walked down the steps of a damp Liverpool basement club called the Cavern. He was twenty-seven and ran the record department of his family’s store. He had no experience in the music business; no contacts, no track record, and no reason to be there except a customer had come into the store asking for a record by this local band.

What he saw on that stage was four scruffy young men in leather jackets, playing too loud, swearing between songs, eating on stage. The group was unpolished, unprofessional, and unremarkable by most measures.

He went back upstairs and decided he was going to manage them.

Within months, he was telling anyone who would listen - record executives, journalists, his own family - that this band was going to be bigger than Elvis. People laughed at the assertion as major labels passed on them. One of the biggest, Decca, allegedly turned them down with the line, “Guitar groups are on the way out.”

Epstein didn’t waiver.

He never wrote a song or played a note on a Beatles record. He didn’t teach Paul to harmonize or write. He didn’t have anything to do with the words to Yesterday or the riff in Day Tripper. What he did was simpler, and harder. And maybe more important.

He saw something before the rest of the world could.

There’s a difference between seeing what is and seeing what could be. Most of us are pretty good at the first one. We notice the rough edges, the missed notes, the resume gaps, the talent that isn’t quite there yet. We’re trained to assess what’s in front of us, and what’s in front of us is usually unfinished.

But the people who shape lives don’t stop there. They look at someone in the raw and see what could be with some polish and belief. They look at a five-song setlist in a basement club and see a sold-out stadium.

This is one of the most underrated forms of influence. We tend to celebrate the teachers who taught us and the coaches who trained us. Those people matter. But often, the person who changed our trajectory the most wasn’t the one who taught us anything specific. They were the one who looked at us and said, in one way or another, “I see what you don’t see yet.”

Their belief became fuel before we had any of our own.

When someone treats us as if we are capable, we begin to act capable. When someone speaks of our future with conviction, we start moving toward it. Their expectations quietly raise the ceiling we live under. Sometimes people even borrow belief before they have their own.

The Beatles didn’t need Epstein for talent; it was already there. They needed someone who could see it before they fully could … and who wouldn’t stop until they believed it, and the rest of the world could hear it.

There is someone in your life right now who is closer to something than they realize. A student, a young coach, a new teacher, a co-worker, a child, a friend, a spouse, a loved one … someone who hasn’t yet caught a glimpse of who they could be.

You can be their Brian Epstein. You just have to be willing to see something they can’t see yet, and to say it out loud, and to keep saying it until they start believing it themselves. It’s the greatest gift you can give that person - the gift of belief.

Connecting this quote to the story. Epstein reflected his belief back at the Beatles until they, and the world, could see it.

This week’s Chasing Influence tip: Look for one person whose confidence hasn’t caught up to their capability, and tell them specifically what you see.

“First we make our habits. Then our habits make us.”

—John Dryden

I am grateful to the Oklahoma Athletic Administrators Association for the invitation this past week. Thank you!

Chasing Influence: Transformational Coaching to Build Champions for Life and What’s Your Juice? Unlock the Energy that Transforms Performance, Fuels Purpose, and Ignites the People Around You are now available on Amazon and Audible!

Loving the Bite

Watch someone who loves to run hills, sit in a sauna, or eat peppers that make their eyes water, and you'll notice they're not tolerating the burn. They're chasing it.

Habits work the same way.

The scoreboard resets and the season moves on. The next practice, meeting, project, or conversation gives you a clean slate. However, the way you handle setbacks—the way you respond when things aren’t going well, the way you dust yourself off when every break goes against you—these habit-forming moments don’t stay behind. They stay with you.

Circumstances are always changing. Sometimes you’re up big and life gives you a good bounce. Other times you’re grinding from behind and nothing will go your way. Either way, your habits don’t care. They just keep showing up.

That’s why how you manage when things are hard, boring, painful, or unfair matters more than most people realize. It’s not that the outcome doesn’t matter—it does, but the outcome isn’t the only thing being built every time you show up.

A study of mosquitoes, of all places, somehow helps us see how.

Researchers at Virginia Tech found that mosquitoes can be trained to like DEET. The love-it-or-hate-it stuff we spray to keep mosquitoes from biting us. After eight decades of keeping mosquitoes away, it is the most trusted repellent in the world.

And now … we find out that if a mosquito feeds on someone whose DEET has faded—still detectable, just not strong enough to repel—the insect’s brain begins to rewrite itself. It connects the smell with reward. More than 60 percent of mosquitoes returned to DEET, expecting a meal, even when there was nothing to bite.

The researchers cleverly call this a “complete reversal.” From innate avoidance to learned appetite.

Psychologists have a name for a phenomenon with some similarities in humans. Richard Solomon labeled it the Opponent Process Theory. The idea that with enough repeated exposure, an emotional response can flip entirely. What once felt aversive becomes attractive. What once felt punishing becomes something you miss when it’s gone.

That’s why some people learn to love hard workouts. Why entrepreneurs learn to enjoy risk, people love sauna bathing, and others love to eat blazing hot peppers. They’ve paired the hard thing with the feeling on the other side of it—the relief and sense that you did something hard and survived it—enough times that the brain rewires around it.

We become attached to whatever repeatedly precedes relief, reward, or familiarity. And here’s what we have to remember … the same process works in the other direction just as efficiently.

People can learn to love outrage because it reliably delivers a hit of righteous energy.

They can become attached to victimhood because it offers a familiar kind of comfort and relieves them of the weight of responsibility.

They can grow fond of drama, excuses, and being perpetually offended, not because those things are good for them, but because those things have been consistently rewarded, consciously or not.

The mosquito didn’t really learn to love DEET. It just kept finding food near it.

Humans do the same thing every day. We attach to whatever we’ve repeatedly experienced alongside something that felt like relief.

Your previous reps can save you or betray you. What are you teaching yourself to love?

Connecting this quote to the story. Over time, we become attracted to what we repeatedly reward, and every action is a vote for the habits, values, and identity we carry into the next round.

This week’s Chasing Influence tip: Winning cultures aren't built by avoiding hard things; they're built by embracing productive discomfort.

“Culture is what people do when no one is looking.”

— Herb Kelleher

Chasing Influence: Transformational Coaching to Build Champions for Life and What’s Your Juice? Unlock the Energy that Transforms Performance, Fuels Purpose, and Ignites the People Around You are now available on Amazon and Audible!

You Missed the Bus

I heard performance coach Jeremy Boone say something recently that really stuck with me. “Belonging without responsibility is entitlement. You can’t say you have ownership and act like a renter.”

Healthy cultures don’t suffer from a lack of belonging. A healthy culture can, however, suffer from confusion between expectations and standards—between what we hope people will do, and what we actually do.

That distinction hit home when my longtime coaching friend Shannon Blansette shared a story recently.

Blansette has been the head baseball coach at his school for thirteen years, and in all those years he’s been a stickler for punctuality. His players know the mantra by heart, because they’ve heard it countless times.

Early is on time. On time is late. Late doesn’t get on the bus.

Coach Blansette isn’t obsessed with time. But he is adamant about what being on time stands for—respect for your teammates, your coaches, and the commitment you’ve made to your team.

Along comes the playoffs this year and the team bus was scheduled to leave at 8:45am. Coach Blansette had forgotten some of his scouting charts, and after circling back to get them from home, for the first time in thirteen seasons, he was running late. He pulled into the parking lot at 8:47—two minutes late—to find the lot empty, the bus nowhere to be seen.

He quickly texted his captains. The reply came back: “Sorry Coach … early is on time, on time is late, late misses the bus.” They had left without him.

Coach Blansette then drove the thirty minutes to the playoff game alone. When he got there, his team gave him a round of applause. He could have been irate. Instead, He told me it was one of the proudest coaching moments of his life.

That story made me think of what I had just heard Jeremy Boone explain, “Belonging without responsibility is entitlement. You can’t say you have ownership and act like a renter.”

So many cultures run on belonging without responsibility. They feel good. People show up. There’s energy in the room. But the standards are soft. Everyone wants to be part of the team, and few are willing to live up to what that actually requires.

That’s what makes Shannon’s story so powerful. His players didn’t make an exception for him. They didn’t want to embarrass their coach, but the standard was bigger than him—and they knew it, because he had taught them so.

For thirteen years, Blansette had told his team that nobody was bigger than the rule. Then one morning, the rule came for him, and because he had lived it long enough, his players had the courage to hold him to it.

That’s not entitlement … that’s ownership!

Most leaders want ownership on their teams. Few leaders actually build it. Ownership isn’t created when people follow the rules because the boss is watching. It’s created when they uphold the standard when the boss isn’t there, or when the boss is the one running late.

That’s the difference between expectations and standards. Expectations are what we hope people will do. Standards are what we live, what we model, and what we hold each other to. Including the leader.

Anyone can enforce accountability downward. Healthy cultures hold it in every direction. People don’t believe what their leaders preach. They believe what their leaders practice. And eventually, they become what their leaders consistently permit.

When the standard you’ve been preaching finally comes for you, and it will, what will the people around you do?

Would the bus leave on time? And, how would you react?

(p.s. Coach Blansette’s team indeed won the playoff game.)

Connecting this quote to the story. Coach Blansette’s players didn't just hear the standard—they watched it being lived long enough that it became their standard too.

This week’s Chasing Influence tip: If a standard doesn't apply to the leader, it isn't a standard—it's a rule for everyone else.

“What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

A day early this week, and here's why. Today is your last chance to grab a free Kindle copy of What's Your Juice? or Chasing Influence. I wanted to make sure you saw it before the window closed. Enjoy the read, and then scroll down for this week's post on Jim Thorpe. I hope you like it!

Chasing Influence: Transformational Coaching to Build Champions for Life and What’s Your Juice? Unlock the Energy that Transforms Performance, Fuels Purpose, and Ignites the People Around You are now available on Amazon and Audible!

Wa-Tho-Huk

This time of year, courts, fields, stadiums, tracks, and courses are full of trophies, plaques, handshakes, and names read aloud over PA systems. It’s a time to recognize and celebrate impressive accomplishments.

For a few weeks every spring, recognition feels like the whole point. Maybe it is. Maybe it isn’t. This week’s message shares the story of Wa-Tho-Huk.

You may not know that name. Most people don’t. But you probably know who he became. His name in English: Jim Thorpe.

In the summer of 1912, in Stockholm, Sweden, King Gustav V placed a laurel wreath on the head of this young man from the Sac and Fox Nation of Oklahoma and said, “Sir, you are the greatest athlete in the world.”

Jim Thorpe looked at the king and said, “Thanks, King.”

At that moment of pagentry, accolade, and celebration … that was Jim Thorpe. No theatrics, witty reply, or headline-generating moment. Just a man who stayed true to who he was, even with the world watching.

But to understand why that moment matters … and why it still matters today … let’s go back a little further.

Jim Thorpe was born on May 28, 1888, in a one-room Oklahoma cabin in what was then labeled Indian Territory. He was a member of the Sac and Fox Nation. It wasn’t an easy childhood. By the time he was nine, he had lost his twin brother to pneumonia. His mother died when he was eleven, and his father when he was sixteen. Thorpe was sent, as so many Native American children were at that time, to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania. It was an institution built on the explicit mission of stripping Indigenous children of their language, their culture, and their identity. The school’s founder described his philosophy with stunning cruelty: “Kill the Indian, save the man.”

That was the world pressing down on Jim Thorpe from every direction. And yet something in him would not let it happen.

At Carlisle, he became one of the most electrifying football players in the country. He played every sport he touched with a recklessness and joy that looked natural, almost effortless. In the summer of 1909, between school sessions, he headed to Rocky Mount, North Carolina, and played semi-professional baseball for a small regional league, making a meager $25 a week.

By 1912, Jim Thorpe could be argued as being the best all-around athlete on the planet. At the Stockholm Olympics, he entered both the pentathlon and the decathlon. He won both. His decathlon victory was so dominant it redefined the event. After King Gustav placed the wreath on his head and spoke those now-famous words, the crowd roared for minutes.

Jim Thorpe, the kid from a one-room cabin in Indian Territory, was the greatest athlete in the world. And the world knew it. Then, they took the medals back.

A newspaper in Worcester, Massachusetts published a story revealing that Jim had played semi-professional baseball in North Carolina in 1909. Under the strict amateur rules of the time, accepting payment for athletic participation made an athlete ineligible for Olympic competition. The Amateur Athletic Union investigated. The IOC concurred. The consequence of making $25 a week was being scrubbed from the record books.

Thorpe wrote a letter to the AAU. He explained that he hadn’t understood the rules, that he had played ball as so many other young men did without any thought of his amateur status. He asked for understanding.

He was denied.

Jim Thorpe kept his head up, signed with the New York Giants and played six seasons of Major League Baseball. He played professional football and became the first president of the league that would eventually become the NFL. He kept showing up, and he kept competing. Thorpe brought his full effort to every arena that would have him — which wasn’t a given at the time.

There’s a danger in seeing ourselves only through the reflection of how institutions, critics, or other people define us. Jim Thorpe refused to let his Olympic records — and disappointments — define him.

He died in 1953 and never got the medals back in his lifetime.

In 1983, thirty years after his death, the IOC partially restored his recognition. It wasn’t until July 2022 — one hundred and ten years after his historic victories in Stockholm — that the International Olympic Committee officially updated the record to name Jim Thorpe as the sole gold medalist in both the decathlon and the pentathlon.

It took 110 years to get it right.

We all have our own version of this. Maybe not at this scale, but in ways that cut just as deep. You did something remarkable. And someone with authority found a reason to question it, diminish it, or erase it. In moments like that, the instinct today is to rage, hold a grudge, feel wronged, look for someone to blame, or declare that the world has it out for you personally.

The truth is, Jim Thorpe lived in a world that did have something against him. It wasn’t an excuse; it was a fact. He had every reason to burn with it.

Yet he didn’t.

We don’t all face what Jim Thorpe faced. But we do all get to choose our path — through the setback, the slight, the stripped title, the award that went to someone else, the recognition that never came. The path remains ours to pick.

Jim Thorpe took a different path and kept showing up regardless of what any scoreboard or record book said. The medal was taken. His mettle was never theirs to have.

Your worth carries the same great value; you don’t need a medal or ribbon to validate what’s good about life, the joys of each day, and the love around us.

This past Thursday would have been Jim Thorpe’s 137th birthday. The IOC finally got it right. Jim Thorpe always did. So should you.

Connecting this quote to the story. True success isn't determined by medals, records, or recognition. It’s determined by the peace of knowing you gave your absolute best—even if others fail to acknowledge it.

This week’s Chasing Influence tip: When others misjudge your value, keep showing up anyway. Consistency outlasts criticism.

What's Your Juice? Book Discussion Guide

Contact Troy Urdahl at troyurdahl@chassing-influence.com for bulk purchasing (15 or more) discounts for your book clubs and/or professional development opportunities.

About this Book Discussion Guide

Welcome to the discussion guide for What’s Your Juice?, a professional learning experience built around story, reflection, honest conversation, and action to be used as a leadership tool, with coaches, or student-leaders.

Every session is designed to help participants experience the book’s core message: the energy we bring shapes our reality, influences others, and transforms the groups we lead. Participants will leave each session with greater self-awareness, renewed purpose, and at least one specific behavior they are ready to practice immediately.

About the Book

What’s Your Juice? explores the invisible but powerful force each person carries into every room, relationship, challenge, and team. Your juice — the unique mix of your energy, effort, attitude, mindset, motivation, and expectations — determines how you respond to adversity, how you perform under pressure, how others experience your leadership, and how groups rise or fall together.

Through historical examples, scientific research, personal stories, and practical assessments, the book challenges readers to understand, own, protect, and share their juice with purpose. The book’s three-part architecture moves from the inside out:

Part I — How Your Juice Defines Your Reality (Chapters 1–5): Your internal energy dynamics

Part II — How Your Juice Influences Others (Chapters 6–7): Your outward leadership impact

Part III — The Power of a Group’s Juice (Chapters 8–10): Collective energy and culture

What You'll Gain

• Identify the energy you bring into rooms, meetings, practices, and relationships

• Shift from unconscious reaction to intentional response

• Strengthen belief, optimism, resilience, and self-efficacy

• Maintain control of your response when circumstances cannot be controlled

• Create conditions for flow, purpose, and sustained performance over time

• Understand how expectations — spoken and unspoken — shape the people you lead

• Motivate through ownership, meaning, autonomy, competence, and relatedness

• Recognize how group energy can lift, drain, pressure, or transform individuals

• Navigate conflict and build psychological safety in teams and organizations

• Build a personal Energy Roadmap for leadership, coaching, and life

In this Discussion Guide

For the Introduction and each of the ten chapters, you will find six sections:

1. Experience Starter — A quick activity or prompt that demonstrates the chapter theme before it is discussed

2. General Questions — Conversation starters anchored to specific pages and stories in the text

3. Leadership Questions — Prompts for leaders to use and consider

4. Coaching Questions — Prompts specific to coaches and those who directly develop others

5. Reflection and Assessment — One personal reflection prompt connected to the chapter’s assessment tool

6. Ideas for Action — One clear 24-hour challenge and a curated multimedia resource to extend learning

   Click here for the WYJ? assessments!

“How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.”

— A.A. Milne

Chasing Influence: Transformational Coaching to Build Champions for Life and What’s Your Juice? Unlock the Energy that Transforms Performance, Fuels Purpose, and Ignites the People Around You are now available on Amazon and Audible!

The Letter You Haven’t Written

Earlier this spring marked 22 years since Pat Tillman was killed in Afghanistan. He walked away from a multimillion-dollar NFL contract to enlist after 9/11. If you’re not familiar with Tillman’s story, that tells you most of what you need to know about him. Before he shipped out for his final deployment, he quietly placed a sealed letter on the dresser for his wife, Marie. Left there with the hope she’d never have reason to open it.

He called it a “just in case” letter.

It’s a sobering and remarkable story. Not because the idea is sad, although it is, rather because of what that kind of letter forces a person to do. It filters through everything that doesn’t matter and leaves you staring at what does.

It’s a question for all of us — especially this Memorial Day weekend.

If you had to write that letter tonight, what would make it onto that page?

I don’t mean what sounds right. Not the things we rehearse when someone puts a microphone in front of us. I mean what’s true. When time feels short, even hypothetically, we get serious and we get real. We don’t talk about our possessions, titles, or impressive exploits that fill our days.

We get clarity and we think about people — our relationships — and what difference we’ve made in this world.

Who would you write your letter to? Your spouse, kids, a parent, or a friend? When you think of that person, what would you want to tell them?

My guess is it wouldn’t be a list of your accomplishments. Most think to how they helped others and how they made others feel. Whether we showed up. Whether the people closest to us knew that they mattered. No matter the level of success, in the end it’s not about being remembered for what we achieved.

And if that’s true, it raises a harder question than the letter itself.

If you already know what matters most ... what are you waiting for?

We operate on a quiet assumption that the people we love can feel our intentions even when we don’t say them. That our presence does the work our words never quite get around to. Maybe it does. But there’s something a letter does that presence alone cannot. It says: I thought about you on purpose and wrote these words. I wanted you to have them. That lands differently and the people who hear it feel the difference.

When I imagine writing mine, I still don’t know how I’d fill the page. I’m still working on that. But I do know I will start with what I’ve been given — the people and the moments with them. I think about the people who believed in me before I could see it in myself. About what I’ve wanted them to know and kept meaning to say.

The clarity that feels reserved for life’s most urgent moments is already available to us. We don’t need a tragedy or a diagnosis or a deployment to find it. We just have to stop assuming tomorrow is guaranteed and start treating today’s ordinary conversations like they might be the ones that matter most.

Maybe the exercise isn’t really about the letter at all. Think of it as an honest accounting of what matters, who matters, and what's still left unsaid. What would yours reveal?

The men and women we honor this weekend understood something about time that most of us are still learning. They made their choices — about service, about sacrifice, about what was worth everything — with full knowledge that tomorrow wasn’t promised. The least we can do is take that seriously.

Your legacy isn’t sealed at some distant finish line; it’s being written right now, in the conversations you choose to have and the ones you keep postponing. In the people you prioritize.

Who deserves to hear that they matter, that you care about them, or that you are grateful for them? Write the letter before it’s too late.

Connecting this quote to the story. The words we share and the love we express continue to live inside others long after we're gone.

This week’s Chasing Influence tip: Don't assume people know how much they matter to you, tell them while you still can.

“You’ve always had the power, my dear. You just had to learn it for yourself.”

— Glinda the Good Witch

Chasing Influence: Transformational Coaching to Build Champions for Life and What’s Your Juice? Unlock the Energy that Transforms Performance, Fuels Purpose, and Ignites the People Around You are now available on Amazon and Audible!

Staring Out the Window

Every one of us knows someone who seems to have an answer for everything that’s wrong in their life. The boss. The refs. Their childhood. Their luck. Their teammates. The economy. Maybe, if we’re honest, sometimes that person is us.

We’ve all looked through the window and found someone or something else to blame for where we are, how we feel, or why things didn’t work out. And to be fair, sometimes the world is unfair. Bad breaks happen, people let us down, and circumstances can be incredibly difficult.

But if it’s always someone else’s fault, you’ll never get better.

Improvement begins the moment you believe you can improve. That’s where growth starts. It isn’t talent or resources, and you don’t need perfect conditions. You need that belief.

In Good to Great, author Jim Collins talks about the idea of windows and mirrors. When things go wrong, leaders look in the mirror first. When things go right, they look out the window and give credit to others.

Every day, whether we’re coaching a team, raising kids, building a business, trying to stay healthy, or just trying to become a little better than we were yesterday, we’re making a choice of looking in a mirror or through a window. The window is easy, but the mirror is what gives you the feedback you need.

The window tells you people are out to get me … nothing ever works out … I can’t catch a break … this is just meant to be.

The mirror asks you what can I do better … how did I contribute to this … what can I learn … what’s one thing I can control right now? Albeit harder, that is a much more productive conversation. It’s also the conversation that leads to something meaningful.

One of the best frameworks I’ve heard comes from Mark Gibson. He asks three simple questions: What do I want? How am I going to get it? And when am I going to do something about it?

Most people get stuck on the third question.

Because “someday” feels safe. We’ll start after the season, after vacation, after things calm down, after the new year, or after life becomes easier.

But improvement doesn’t happen in “someday.” It happens the moment someone decides: I’m going to take ownership of my life now. That’s how growth works. You have to believe improvement is possible before you’ll ever put in the effort required to pursue it.

And maybe that’s the real danger of always looking through the window. Blame feels protective in the moment, but over time it quietly convinces us we’re powerless.

The mirror does the opposite. The mirror reminds us we still have influence. Still have agency. Still have a choice. Still have room to grow.

That doesn’t mean beating yourself up or carrying guilt for everything that goes wrong. It means refusing to surrender the future to excuses.

One of my favorite lines from What’s Your Juice? says: “Your beliefs shape everything — your confidence, your performance, your potential.” That’s true in sports, leadership, parenting, relationships … in life. Because eventually, the stories we tell ourselves become the lives we live.

So maybe today is a good day to stop staring out the window.

Maybe today is the day to look in the mirror — not with shame, but with ownership. To ask: Do I want to improve? Do I believe I can improve? And if the answer is yes … when am I going to do something about it?

Hopefully today. Growth starts the moment we stop looking for someone else to blame.

Connecting this quote to the story. Growth begins the moment we stop waiting for someone else to steer our lives and take ownership of the role we played in getting us to where we are today.

This week’s Chasing Influence tip: The fastest way to improve is to spend less time looking for blame and more time looking for responsibility.

“It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows.”

— Epictetus

Chasing Influence: Transformational Coaching to Build Champions for Life and What’s Your Juice? Unlock the Energy that Transforms Performance, Fuels Purpose, and Ignites the People Around You are now available on Amazon and Audible!

Waiting for Orders

In March of 1974, somewhere in the Philippine jungle, a man stepped out of the jungle. He’s thin, weathered, carrying a rifle he hasn’t put down in decades. His uniform is worn but intact, his posture is rigid, and his eyes are steely with resolve.

He’s been waiting, not to be rescued, but for World War II orders he never received.

Nearly thirty years earlier, Hiroo Onoda had been given a simple command: hold your position, never surrender, and never stop fighting. Onoda seems to have taken these orders pretty seriously … and he followed them to the letter. When leaflets were dropped from planes telling him the war was over, he thought it was enemy propaganda. When his own family sent messages begging him to come home, he assumed they’d been coerced. When former comrades searched for him and pleaded with him to stand down, he turned them away too—because none of it came from the one person who had the authority to end it.

Then, in 1974, that person finally came. Onoda’s former commanding officer, now an elderly man living a civilian life, made the journey into the jungle, stood in front of his soldier, and issued the only order that could end the war. Stand down.

Onoda wept and laid down his rifle. Just like that, the war was finally over. It didn’t end with a climactic battle, but rather with a long-overdue change in beliefs.

For nearly thirty years, the truth had been delivered to him in every form imaginable. However, long before any of those leaflets fell, Onoda had decided what truth was allowed to look like. His belief became a filter, screening out anything that contradicted it. He was certain of that truth, and that certainty made him unreachable.

His story is incredible and unbelievable in many ways. The pattern is not.

About a century earlier, a Hungarian physician named Ignaz Semmelweis noticed something that should have been obvious to everyone around him. Women in maternity wards were dying at alarming rates—especially where doctors moved directly from performing autopsies to delivering babies. His solution was simple: wash your hands. When doctors in his ward began doing so, the death rates dropped nearly overnight.

Yet, amazingly, the medical community rejected Semmelweis's findings and recommendations. The implications of his findings meant doctors had been unknowingly causing harm, and they were unwilling to accept that as truth. So they made arguments against him and continued on. Semmelweis died discredited. They couldn’t adjust their beliefs, no matter the evidence or the harm. It was the same filter, in a different jungle.

There’s a part of Onoda’s story that’s easy to skip past, but we shouldn’t. During those thirty years, he was still fighting a war inside his own mind … and in the jungle around him. Filipino civilians and soldiers were killed. His loyalty caused real harm, making this more than a story about remarkable persistence. It’s a story about what happens when commitment outlasts truth.

We have all seen versions of this that didn’t happen in hospitals or jungles. They happen in conference rooms, team meetings, and side conversations. A leader clinging to a strategy that stopped working years ago, who doesn’t know how to call it off. A team executing a plan everyone privately knows is broken, because no one wants to be the person who says so out loud. A person staying in a role, a relationship, or a version of themselves they’ve already outgrown—waiting for someone else to give them permission to move on. It’s not about effort or discipline. It’s about being clear-minded enough to let the signal get through and to notice and adapt to the ever-changing world around us.

Belief is the most powerful tool we possess. It can carry you through things that would stop most people in their tracks. But when belief stops adapting, it stops serving, and when it hardens into our identity, it stops listening altogether. Truth remains available; we just need to know how to recognize it when it’s standing right in front of us.

Are you still fighting a war that’s already over? And, are the people around you able to reach you if you are?

Connecting this quote to the story. Onoda’s unwavering loyalty to a single belief, that the war was still being fought, made him unable to recognize the truth even when it was repeatedly presented to him.

This week’s Chasing Influence tip: If your team can’t challenge the plan, the plan becomes the problem.