A coach should never be afraid to ask questions of anyone he could learn from.
Interpretation
A good coach is open to learning from others, regardless of their status.
This quote emphasizes the importance of humility and continuous learning in leadership, particularly in coaching. A successful coach recognizes that knowledge can come from various sources and that asking questions is a vital part of growth and improvement, both for themselves and their team.
In practice
In a coaching seminar, this quote could be used to inspire new coaches to adopt a mindset of inquiry.
My dad was a very quiet person, and unbelievably tough. But my grandmother gave me my first look at negative thinking to bring about positive results. When I was just a little guy, anytime I came to my grandmother and said I wish for this or that, Grandma would say, 'If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.'
Your biggest opponent isn't the other guy. It's human nature.
People want national championship banners. People want to talk about Indiana being competitive. How do we get there? We don't get there with milk and cookies.
When we're playing a good scoring center, we tell our team that it is not our defensive man's job to stop the center. It's the responsibility of our perimeter people to stop the ball from going inside.
Failure, to me, is not having the desire to try. Having the desire to try is in it own way success.
I'm not sure that an athlete is prepared to be a role model. He has a lot of attention paid to him that he shouldn't have, and then the athletes tend to think of themselves as better than they are.
Work hard to seem infallible and others will work to find our flaws. Admit our shortcomings and others will work to help us be infallible.
Whenever I counsel someone who feels called to be an evangelist, I always urge them to guard their time and not feel like they have to do everything.
We should not be focusing on quick solutions. The really important concern for policymakers everywhere is to prevent disasters - that is, the outlier events that matter the most.
Open, frank communication is the lynchpin to teamwork. A fractured team is like a fractured bone; fixing it is always painful and sometimes you have to re-break it to heal it fully - and the re-break always hurts more because it is intentional.
In every society some men are born to rule, and some to advise.
The responsibility of leadership is not to come up with all the ideas but to create an environment in which great ideas can thrive.
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