Ask any client of mine and you will know that I love sports. And more than just about anything I love the coaches. I always dreamed of being a great football coach. The truly great coaches in sports generally have one over-riding principle that makes them successful in winning their respective championships. . . they coach their players to become better people more than they coach them to be better players.
Many of the things I tell my clients when coaching them toward a more compelling future, or trying to get them to change their perspective on mid-life in some way, has previously come from the mouth of a great athletic coach. Well, today, one of the greatest athletic coaches to ever live and one of my greatest idols has died.
John Wooden was 99 years old when he died. He created arguably the greatest sports dynasty in history at UCLA when he won 10 NCAA National Championship in Basketball (including 7 in a row!). He was beloved by his players, assistant coaches and just about anyone who he came in contact with. His family adored him. He reached the summit of his profession (10 times!). He has written several best selling books. He was married to a woman he adored for 53 years until she died in 1985. He would write her a love letter every single month, a practice he continued for 25 years after she died.
With much honor and humility I give you the ten things I learned from John Wooden that I want every one of my mid-life clients to know and apply in their lives starting today:
1) Be more concerned with your character than your reputation because your character is what you really are, while your reputation is merely what others think you are.
2) Don't give up on your dreams or your dreams will give up on you.
3) Learn as if you were to live forever, and live as if you were to die tomorrow.
4) Wooden's definition of poise: "Not being thrown off stride in how you behave or what you believe because of outside events."
5) Adversity is the state in which man most easily becomes acquainted with himself, being especially free of admirers then.
6) Do not let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do.
7) Failure is not fatal, but failure to change might be.
8) If you're not making mistakes then your not doing anything. I am convinced doer's make mistakes.
9) Things turn out best for the people who make the best out of the way things turn out.
10) The most important key to achieving great success is to decide upon your goal and launch, get started, take action, move.
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Great post!
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