These two sentences may change your thinking
Jack Nicklaus
Trent Dilfer
Full disclosure: I’m competitive by nature.
Probably a little TOO competitive sometimes. Maybe you are, too.
Maybe you’re like me when you head out on vacation. You smirk at the estimated travel time offered by your GPS system — then you try to beat that time. Scratch that: You attempt to DESTROY it.
Not that I’ve been successful.
I’ve tried. Lord knows I’ve tried. Yet there’s ALWAYS something preventing it. Construction. A blinding rain storm. An overactive bladder. Trucks.
So I didn’t make good time this year. But I sure had one.
It’s not often I get to spend 24 hours in a car with three of my favorite people. OK, only one person — my wife, Sally — was actually in the vehicle with me. The other two filtered through our speaker system as we drove.
And I’m a better man on this side of the journey.
Here are the links so you can listen to the full interviews with Dr. Henry Cloud and Trent Dilfer yourself. But to give you a taste of how they transformed my thinking, I’ll deconstruct just one line from each of their podcasts.
At first glance, they’re pretty ordinary. But if applied, they carry extraordinary weight.
“Teach me the game again.”
Who said it: Dr. Henry Cloud, an author, speaker and leadership consultant.
Cloud was relaying the story of a dream come true: He got to play 18 holes with Jack Nicklaus, one of the greatest golfers to swing a club. But there’s more. Cloud spent some time with Nicklaus following the round and peppered him for wisdom on high performance, mindset and fame.
“So I was asking him all sorts of questions. And I said, ‘Did you make any big swing changes?’ ”
Nicklaus laughed.
“No,” he answered. “I would only make adjustments to get back to who you are and the way that you're formed."
As evidence, Nicklaus pointed back to 1979, his worst year on the professional tour. “I don’t think I won a tournament,” he recalled.
You know what Nicklaus did during his struggles that year? He paid a visit to his childhood coach, Jack Grout. Here’s what he asked him.
“Teach me the game again.”
I was stunned when I heard that line, so I rewound the podcast to be sure I wasn’t mistaken. This is the legendary Golden Bear, after all. The one who still holds the record with 18 major championships. Did he really seek out his childhood coach to teach him how to play again?
Yep.
“Let's start with the grip and then I want to go to the stance. And he (Grout) went back to those fundamentals that grounded me,” Nicklaus reflected.
Shortly afterward, he went out and won two majors by wide margins.
Nicklaus humbled himself and went searching for answers. Yet he wasn’t seeking any shortcuts or new-age methods. He just wanted to be reminded of what he already knew. What he had acquired decades beforehand.
Learn the proper skills
Train relentlessly to develop those skills
Trust the skills when you are in competition
Never forget the fundamentals
Nothing could be simpler.
Nothing works better.
But only if we do the work.
“Daddy, can’t you just be my daddy?”
Who said it: Trent Dilfer, a Super Bowl-winning quarterback with the Baltimore Ravens, former ESPN analyst, and now head football coach at Lipscomb High in Nashville.
When they go well, car rides to and from athletic events can be a cathartic bonding experience for both parent and child.
Or they can be brutal.
Trent Dilfer remembered one such trip with his daughter.
Though just 14 and a freshman, Maddy Dilfer was already a starting setter on her school’s volleyball team and her dad arrived to pick her up from practice. As they were leaving the parking lot, he could see she had been crying. She was upset about drama at school and issues with older teammates.
“Immediately, I went into ‘Fix Mode,’ ” Dilfer admitted.
Of course he did. Don’t all fathers?
“And I’m KILLING it,” he continued, sarcastically. “I’m giving her EVERY tool to fix EVERY problem she has.”
Which made Maddy weep uncontrollably.
“Daddy, can’t you just be my daddy?” she asked.
Dilfer was broken.
“I never wanted to be THAT dad.”
Translation: His role in the moment was meant to be Nurturing Father. Instead, he confused it with Challenging Coach.
So Maddy suggested an idea to keep those roles separate. Since Dilfer is bald, the solution was obvious. When Maddy wanted him to be her coach, he would literally slip on the ball cap he always kept on the dashboard of his vehicle. If his daughter didn’t request the hat, he would simply be dad.
“So that’s the rule. I am dad until you ask me to put on the coach’s hat and when you ask for the coach, I will physically put on the coach’s hat, and now I’m coach,” he told her. “Now, we got to have different boundaries. I can rip your tail. I can tell you you’re being a whiny little brat. I can tell you you’re a bad teammate and you got to receive it that way.”
She agreed to the arrangement. When the hat was on, he would bring the heat like Nick Saban or Tom Izzo.
When the hat came off, he would simply listen. And offer a comforting presence. Or talk about school or movies or music.
He would be her daddy.
For the next four years, Dilfer noted, there wasn’t one instance where he overstepped his dad boundary. As a result, their relationship flourished as it never had before.
There’s so much to learn during our parenting journey. And our kids are often the greatest teachers.
So, perhaps, EVERY parent of a young athlete would be wise to follow Trent Dilfer’s lead.
Be a daddy (or mommy) to your young athletes 99 percent of the time.
Then coach ’em up the rest of the way.
Only when asked, of course.
(Tim Kolodziej is the creator of EnspireU.com and author of this piece. You can email him here.)