“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.

“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.”

— Shunryu Suzuki

What’s Your Juice? Unlock the Energy that Transforms Performance, Fuels Purpose, and Ignites the People Around You is now available on Amazon and now on Audible!

Parts of this week’s story are shared in Chasing Influence: Transformational Coaching to Build Champions for Life. (Thanks, Missy Townsend!)

The White Belt

Over the course of thirty years and hundreds of millions of bags, Kansai International Airport in Osaka, Japan, hasn’t lost a single one of them. When NPR reported it a couple of years ago, most people assumed it must be an exaggeration or a fun story. It wasn’t.

Tsuyoshi Habuta, the airport’s chief of baggage operations, takes the job very seriously. “Luggage is precious to passengers,” he explains. That belief shows up in everything he does. Fragile items are hand-delivered, bags are placed on the carousel with handles facing outward, and every piece of luggage is tracked, counted, and checked … multiple times.

The luggage record of Kansai Airport is a perfect example of commitment to mastery, the pursuit of steady growth, getting a little better—every day.

The Japanese have a word for this. It’s kaizen … continuous improvement through small refinements and relentless attention to detail. While the kaizen philosophy took hold in post-World War II Japan, rooted in American quality-control measures, legendary stories of kaizen go back much further.

An apocryphal tale from the late 1800s tells of a young educator named Jigoro Kano, who created a new martial art—Judo. He introduced the belt system, white for beginners, black for masters. Over time, Kano became the highest-ranked practitioner in the world. A 10th-degree black belt. A lifetime of mastery.

And then, near the end of his life, he made a final request. He asked to be buried … in a white belt. Not the symbol of mastery, but rather the symbol of a beginner. Because even at the end, he believed he still had something to learn.

That single decision might be the most powerful lesson he ever taught.

A paradox even the great leaders and coaches grapple with is understanding that mastery isn’t a finish line. A black belt doesn’t mean you’ve arrived. It means you’re finally ready to start paying attention. Being a leader doesn’t mean it’s time for others to serve you. It means it’s time for you to serve.

The leaders who leave the deepest mark aren’t the ones with all the answers. They’re the ones still taking notes, asking questions, learning when no one is watching … and serving.

That’s what makes the Kansai Airport so special. It isn’t talent or technology that makes the difference. It’s something each and every one of us has the ability to possess: a belief. A belief that no detail is too small, no process is above improvement, and nothing—no matter how ordinary—is beneath our care.

What would change if we led like that? What might change if instead of trying to be the expert in the room, we sought to be the one still learning?

It’s a lesson for all of us. Stay curious, open, and never be too proud to wear a beginner’s belt.

Connecting this quote to the story. Mastery begins when we let go of the need to be the expert.

This week’s Chasing Influence tip: The best leaders model learning, not knowing.

“Treat a person as they can and should be, and they will become what they can and should be.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

What’s Your Juice? Unlock the Energy that Transforms Performance, Fuels Purpose, and Ignites the People Around You is now available on Amazon and now on Audible!

Our Monster Study

At the height of the Great Depression, hundreds of thousands of American children lived in orphanages. Some had lost parents; many others had been placed there by families who simply couldn’t afford to feed them. There were no parents to look out for these children. No one to ask questions, push back, or take them home if something felt wrong. The young kids were dependent on the adults around them.

Which made them, as researchers of the era well understood, convenient subjects.

Imagine one of these kids in an Iowa orphanage in the 1930s. He doesn’t have much, but he does have one thing that comes naturally … his words. He talks, laughs, and tells stories without a second thought.

Then the adults around him start paying close attention to the way he talks.

They begin pointing out hesitations and stutters that don’t exist. They interrupt him more often and correct him mid-sentence and circle back to every small stumble. Over time, something begins to shift—not in his ability, but how he sees himself.

A new story starts to take hold. Something must be wrong with him. His words aren’t right and can’t be trusted. And before long, the voice that once came easily starts to lock up. The fluency disappears, and the confidence that used to carry him forward fades with it.

Unfortunately, this wasn’t an accident. It was a real experiment.

In the late 1930s, a University of Iowa speech pathologist named Wendell Johnson recruited orphaned children and split them into two groups. Half received encouragement and positive reinforcement. The other half were told, falsely, that they showed signs of stuttering, and then had their speech picked apart relentlessly, week after week.

Many in that second group developed real speech problems, along with emotional damage they carried for the rest of their lives. Johnson kept the study buried for decades, and when it finally surfaced in 2001 after Johnson had passed away, it was given a name that still feels too accurate: The Monster Study.

It’s easy to read a story like this and assume it belongs to a different time, under a different set of rules.

However, Wendell Johnson never saw himself as a monster. He believed he was doing meaningful work. What it seems he never fully recognized was what it means to hold influence over someone who trusts you; someone who has no reason not to believe what you tell them about themselves.

Doubt changes more than how people see themselves. It changes how we see them, too.

When we expect someone to struggle or fail, we subtly begin to treat them differently. We offer less support, even if we don’t realize it, we scrutinize more closely. We tend to jump in sooner, limit their opportunity to work through challenges, and often ease off the encouragement that helps people grow.

The person on the receiving end feels it all, and over time, it adds up. They start playing it safer and hesitate more. They shrink in moments where they used to step forward. And before long, they begin to confirm the very expectations that were placed on them.

We see this dynamic play out in sports all the time. Players whose coaches genuinely believe in them tend to get better instruction, more consistent feedback, and more room to develop and grow. Players who are quietly written off often receive less support, and more often than not, their performance reflects it.

The Monster Study is an extreme example, but the underlying truth shows up in much smaller ways every day for each of us … in practice, in the classroom, and around the dinner table.

Wendell Johnson thought he was running an experiment. He was … and so are you. What you believe about the people around you is already shaping them.

Connecting this quote to the story. The beliefs and labels we place on others often become the very identity and potential they grow into.

This week’s Chasing Influence tip: Think about the most important people in your life right now … your players, your kids, your team. What story are they telling themselves about who they are, and how much of that story came from you?

“Clarity precedes success.”

— Robin Sharma

What’s Your Juice? Unlock the Energy that Transforms Performance, Fuels Purpose, and Ignites the People Around You is now available on Amazon and now on Audible!

Know What You’re Looking For

January 2011. St. Olaf College, Northfield, Minnesota.

I enjoy speaking opportunities and sharing new ideas with different groups. My three assistant coaches and I had just wrapped what I thought was one of the better presentations we’d given. Forty-five minutes on how we’d built a successful baseball program—the culture, the buy-in, some big wins. The coaches in the room were engaged. The energy was good. And I had one final move, it was a video clip I’d recently discovered that I was convinced would close the talk with a laugh and end our presentation on a high note.

There was just one problem. No A/V speakers.

The clip was in Italian and subtitled, but I felt the audio mattered. So the St. Olaf staff scrambled, found external speakers, got everything wired up, and we were off. I clicked to my final slide, leaned into the moment, and delivered my closing setup:

“In closing, I’ll leave you with these final thoughts. All of you possess the knowledge and tools to excel. It’s where you place your priorities, and what you emphasize within your program can make all the difference. You hold the secret in your hands—it is up to you to show them the way. Let me illustrate.”

I hit play.

A minute later: total silence.

Not polite silence or contemplative silence. Just … energy-draining pin-drop silence. A 45-minute presentation—one I was proud of—ended without so much as a polite chuckle.

I sheepishly closed my laptop. Thanked the room and filed that video away where I wouldn’t have to see it.

For fifteen years, I didn’t think about it (I may have even repressed it!).

Then, while preparing for a new presentation this past week, I found it again—buried in an old folder, exactly where I’d left it. I pulled it up and watched it. And I still thought it was funny, and it had a point worth making. I still believed in the clip and couldn’t believe it flopped so badly.

My wife did not share my confidence.

She thought trying it again was a questionable idea. In fact, we put a bet on it— that no one would laugh. With that friendly wager, I had some stakes on the line and something to prove. More than that, I had fifteen years of experiences to help me understand why it had failed the first time.

So here’s what I need you to do before this post goes any further. Watch this one-minute clip to help me settle my bet.

(You can click here if the link above didn’t work.)

Apologies for my attempts at humor :)

But when I showed that clip to a room full of coaches a week ago—same type of audience, same video, fifteen years later—they laughed heartily and clapped as the presentation came to a close.

My wife owes me.

The video hadn't changed. It was the same clip, Italian comedy, donkey, and punchline. What changed was what I brought to the clip this time.

The second time, I told the room they had to laugh—because I had a bet with my wife riding on it (the bet’s rules said nothing about my ability to do this—sorry, Rebecca!).

Suddenly, the room was invested, and there were some stakes for all of us. Before I hit play, I told them exactly what lens to watch it through. I didn’t leave the interpretation up to chance and I controlled the frame. When it was over, I gave the the punchline they’d been primed to receive:

In 2011, I handed them a video and hoped they’d figure it out.

In 2026, I handed them a lens first, and the video did exactly what I had originally thought it could.

The content was never the problem. It rarely is.

What I’ve learned after decades of coaching and leading is that people don’t struggle because they lack the tools. They struggle because they haven’t been shown how to look at what’s right in front of them. That’s our job. Not just to have the answer, but to help people find the angle, lift what’s in the way, and see clearly. Just like the man in the video. He was solving the problem in front of him, and he knew what he was looking for.

Preparation and framing matters, and so does our clarity of intention. The quality of how you show up … how you set the table, how you guide the eye, how you create the conditions for people to receive what you’re offering … that is the work.

Fifteen years is a long time to sit on a lesson. But some things are worth the wait—as long as you’re willing to figure out what you were missing the first time.

What are you looking for? And more importantly, are the people you lead, coach, and serve able to see it too?

Connecting this quote to the story. People won’t see the lesson until you help them prepare for it. The first time I showed the video, the audience wasn’t prepared to understand what they were seeing, but the second time, they had the needed lens and could see the message that had been missed the first time I delivered it.

This week’s Chasing Influence tip: Don’t just give people the answer—help them see it.

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

— Annie Dillard

What’s Your Juice? Unlock the Energy that Transforms Performance, Fuels Purpose, and Ignites the People Around You is now available on Amazon and now on Audible!

Still on the Air

It was the Fourth of July, and Uncle Jerry was ready.

He loved the holiday the way only a Korean War veteran who had spent his life learning history could love it—it meant something. The family was assembled on the beach by the lake, young and old, and Jerry carried a bulging bag of fireworks down to the dock. It would be a majestic display, the kind that would make his mother, Grandma Violet, beam with pride and exclaim, “Well, isn’t that something!”

Then a spark from his punk fell into the paper bag.

What happened next has been talked about and debated for nearly fifty years. Fireworks erupted in every direction. Kids ran for cover. Grandma Violet dove behind the embankment. And my godfather—hard-working, proud Jerry, a man who never wore shorts—jumped right in the lake.

For about twenty years afterward, he didn’t admit that any of it had ever happened.

What the fireworks don’t tell you is what his hands could do when they weren’t fumbling a lighted punk. Among many things, Jerry was a leatherworker. When I was a kid, he made me a belt. It wasn’t any ordinary belt; it was a full Hulk Hogan WWF championship-style belt, the kind any kid of the 80s would wear like a true Hulkamaniac. Made by hand, with care and love.

Jerry passed away this week at 93, after a full and wonderful life.

Researcher Sonja Lyubomirsky describes lasting happiness quite simply. The experience of positive emotion, combined with a deep sense that your life is good. Not perfect or easy, but good. Jerry had both. Not because his life was without adversity. He served in Korea, worked hard, and lost loved ones too soon. But he was oriented toward life in a way that generated joy around him, even if it meant diving for cover along the way.

That kind of life doesn’t happen by accident. It’s a choice, made daily, to show up and contribute.

Researchers who study aging have consistently found that what people want most at the end of their lives isn’t about recognition, status, or a résumé. It’s the deep desire to pass something forward, to know that what you did and knew and loved will outlast you (something called generativity). This drive to shape the next generation is one of the strongest predictors of purpose and life satisfaction in older adults. At the end, what matters is impact. How you helped, what you passed on, who carries something of yours forward.

Jerry did this for decades from behind a microphone.

He was a radio man by trade. He gave farm reports and sat behind that mic putting his voice, his knowledge, and his stories out into the world so others could learn and benefit. He once told his listeners he was thinking of starting a coin collection, and the pennies came rolling in. Long before podcasts and platforms, Jerry knew that stories are only worth something when they reach people.

The Hulk Hogan belt reached me. I hope the fireworks story reaches his grandchildren’s grandchildren. The farm reports reached farmers who needed to know what was coming.

Jerry would broadcast his stories.

We are all broadcasting something. Every conversation is a transmission. Every time you sit with someone earlier in the journey and share what you’ve learned, you’re doing what Jerry did behind that microphone. And every time you stay quiet because the moment feels small, or because you don’t think your story matters enough, you’re leaving the airwaves empty.

Jerry was a coin collector, a leatherworker, a veteran, a radio man who loved horses and history and his family. He made things with his hands that carried his love forward, and he told his stories so others could learn.

Performative influence will fade. Lived influence becomes a fireworks story that lasts fifty years.

What are you broadcasting? And who needs to hear it?

Connecting this quote to the story. What truly lasts isn’t the moment itself, but the stories, values, and impact we passed on to others … long after we are gone.

This week’s Chasing Influence tip: The way you show up today becomes the story someone else tells tomorrow. Make it count.

“The monotony and solitude of a quiet life stimulates the creative mind.”

— Albert Einstein

What’s Your Juice? Unlock the Energy that Transforms Performance, Fuels Purpose, and Ignites the People Around You is now available on Amazon and now on Audible!

A Reboot is Required

My best thinking almost never happens at my desk.

It shows up in the shower, staring at a campfire, or on a long bike ride without earbuds. I’ll even admit standing at the toilet has generated more than a few breakthroughs I’m not prepared to explain.

With my mind free of distraction, a thought surfaces—it might be a connection previously unmade, a new path forward, or an unexpected answer to a question I’d been grappling with.

For a long time, I thought it was the universe providing an answer. The idea just seemed to come to me at the right time.

There’s a better answer, and science has it.

In the late 1990s, neurologist Marcus Raichle was running brain scans, expecting to find that the brain would quiet down during rest. What he found was that certain brain regions actually light up brighter when people aren’t focused on tasks. Rather than idling down, the brain shifts into a different kind of work. Raichle called it the Default Mode Network (DMN) since it seemed to be what the brain does by default when you step back and give it some room.

What happens in that space? The things that matter most.

The Default Mode Network is where we do our deepest creative thinking. It’s where we connect ideas that don’t seem related on the surface and find the human wisdom that AI can’t reach. It’s also where we process emotions, develop empathy, think about the people around us, imagine the future, and ask the bigger questions about who we are and what we’re doing here. Research tells us that the DMN is central to how we develop a sense of purpose in our personal and professional lives.

And right now, most of us aren’t letting our Default Mode Network run.

Every quiet moment has become an invitation to reach for a phone. The line at the coffee shop, the few should-be quiet minutes before sleep, the quick walk at work. As soon as boredom arrives, we jump on our phones and the Default Mode Network is silenced.

That has consequences. The DMN needs idle time to activate; if we are giving the brain a constant stream of external input, the deeper work never happens. We’re constantly consuming … and quietly losing the ability to think for ourselves.

This happened to us slowly without even realizing it. We didn’t see what we were giving away by constantly seeking stimulation. Social media, video games, and our entertainment platforms are engineered to fill the spaces where the brain’s most important work takes place.

The fix doesn’t need to be drastic. You don’t need a retreat, a vow of digital silence, a regimen of forest bathing, or an overhaul of how you live. You need what boredom used to give you for free.

Leave the podcast behind on your next walk. Let the shower be quiet. Sit in the car for an extra two minutes after you park and let your mind go wherever it wants to go. When boredom arrives, sit with it rather than fill it. When you do, be sure to keep something nearby to capture those thoughts and ideas when they arrive, because the Default Mode Network doesn’t hold its deliveries long.

The best ideas I’ve ever had showed up in the quiet. I would bet the same is true for you. Not at the desk, not in the meeting, not mid-scroll, but in the space between. That’s when our brain does exactly what it evolved to do, when given the chance.

You already know how to reboot a frozen computer. Your mind deserves the same courtesy.

Connecting this quote to the story. When we stop filling every moment, we create space for the answers we’ve been searching for to find us.

This week’s Chasing Influence tip: You know how to reboot a frozen computer. Your mind might be waiting for you to do the same.

“What is important is seldom urgent, and what is urgent is seldom important.”

— Dwight D. Eisenhower

What’s Your Juice? Unlock the Energy that Transforms Performance, Fuels Purpose, and Ignites the People Around You is now available on Amazon and now on Audible!

The Trap of the Urgent

I had this Post-it note on my desk for the longest time with an idea for future exploration. It simply said: Eisenhower Matrix. I’m not sure exactly when I wrote it. It’s been long enough that it isn’t so sticky anymore, it’s started to fade, and the corners have turned. Every now and then I’d look at it, think yes, I need to do that, and then something more pressing would show up and I’d move on.

So here we now are. The note has finally won. And I have a new appreciation for its irony.

Eisenhower had a note of his own.

He had written it the night before the invasion, folded it, and kept it in his pocket. It accepted full personal responsibility if D-Day failed. While thousands of details screamed for his attention—changing weather reports, incomplete intelligence, the staggering logistics required to move 150,000 soldiers across the English Channel—Eisenhower had already done the thing only he could do. He had made the decision and quietly prepared to own the outcome, whatever it was. His attention was on what mattered the most.

Later in life, Eisenhower distilled his approach into a simple framework, known as the Eisenhower Matrix. It sorts the demands on our time into four categories: urgent and important, important but not urgent, urgent but not important, and neither.

Most of us bounce between the urgent categories. Emails, notifications, deadlines, requests … our days fill quickly with things that feel pressing but don’t really move our lives forward.

I’ll be honest, for those who know me well, practicing patience can sometimes be a challenge. And I think I know why. Years of working as an activities director has programmed me to live in the urgent. The job demands it. There are scores of details that must be attended to … and accurately. One mistake can mean a team doesn’t show up, referees aren’t scheduled, a bus never arrives. And if that happens, a game doesn’t happen—a very public mistake that impacts and upsets hundreds of people, some of whom may have traveled a significant distance for an event that simply isn’t there. Most jobs don’t carry that kind of time-bound, public accountability. It trains you to be a firefighter, rushing from one burning issue to the next, and after enough years, urgency stops feeling like pressure. It starts feeling like purpose.

Someone put it this way recently, “The best thing about banging your head against the wall is the way it feels when you stop.” We laugh because we recognize it. Most of us spend entire days trying to finish urgent things, and we’ve confused the relief of stopping with the satisfaction of living in the moment.

Eisenhower knew that the most meaningful work, the kind that shapes who we become and what we leave behind, rarely screams for attention. It waits in that second quadrant: important but not urgent. And if we keep ignoring it, it doesn’t stay quiet forever. Urgency has a way of showing up loudly later when importance is neglected now.

The important things will never fight for your attention the way the urgent ones do. They don’t have that kind of voice. They need you to choose them.

Great leaders are disciplined about protecting space for what matters most—to think, prepare, and invest in others—because they understand that influence is built in important moments, not necessarily the urgent ones.

I’m glad I finally picked that Post-it note back up. The life you want, the relationships you value, the legacy you hope to leave—they rarely come from reacting. They come from choosing.

The fires will always be there. What I’ve learned—sometimes the hard way—is that the most important work has never asked me to hurry.

Connecting this quote to the story. Eisenhower’s success came from intentionally prioritizing and protecting time for the most important decisions, which would shape the outcome.

This week’s Chasing Influence tip: Consciously guard time for what is important before urgency steals it from you.

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”

— Marcel Proust

What’s Your Juice? Unlock the Energy that Transforms Performance, Fuels Purpose, and Ignites the People Around You is now available on Amazon and now on Audible!

The Shot Nobody Planned

Christmas Eve, 1968. William Anders was looking out the window of his Apollo spacecraft orbiting the Moon when something unexpected appeared on the horizon.

At first, it was just a sliver of color against the gray landscape. Then more of it rose into view. Anders grabbed his camera. Click. The photograph he captured would become one of the most viewed images in human history. It is called Earthrise.

Anders was part of Apollo 8, the first crewed mission to orbit the Moon, and by any measure the mission was already historic. The goals were to test the spacecraft, photograph potential lunar landing sites, and prove the journey was possible. It had taken hundreds of thousands of people working together to get three astronauts to that moment.

Nobody planned the photograph. It wasn’t on a checklist. It was someone being fully present in an extraordinary moment, who had the awareness to recognize what he was seeing—and then the instinct to act.

The ripple that followed is staggering. That singular image transformed how humanity saw itself. For the first time, people didn’t see a map with borders and nations—they saw one small, fragile world floating alone in an endless void. Something shifted in the collective consciousness. Within 16 months of the photograph being shared, Earth Day was celebrated for the first time, the Environmental Protection Agency was established, and the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts were passed.

As Anders later reflected, “We came all this way to explore the Moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered Earth.”

He went to the Moon to complete a clearly defined mission. He accidentally changed the world by being present for a single unplanned moment.

Anders showed that your most powerful ripple may not come from your most prepared moment. It may not come from the presentation you rehearsed, the plan you built, or the agenda you executed perfectly. It may come from a quiet, everyday morning when you said exactly the right thing to someone who needed it. Or from a conversation you almost skipped. It might be a moment you never saw coming, but were fully present for.

Four hundred thousand people made Apollo 8 possible. But it was a single person, looking out one window at the right moment, who created the image that outlasted the mission itself.

Most of us will probably never orbit the Moon. But all of us are showing up to moments every day—whether in classrooms, locker rooms, conference rooms, living rooms, or Zoom calls—that carry more potential than we realize. These moments exist for all of us … are we present enough to recognize them when they arrive?

You can’t plan the shot that changes everything. But you can be ready to take it.

Think about the most meaningful impact you’ve ever had on someone—the moment that mattered most to the people you lead or serve. Was it a carefully planned scheme, or was it something smaller, quieter, more human? What does that tell you about where your real influence lives?

Connecting this quote to the story. The greatest influence we have can come from simply being present enough to notice the moment.

This week’s Chasing Influence tip: Influence doesn’t come from the moments you prepare for; it often comes from moments you’re present enough to recognize.