"The closed mind is seemingly comfortable because it often only represents a state of maturational arrest."
-Dr. David R. Hawkins
The biggest difference between a coach that calibrates in the 500s and a coach that calibrates below 200 is how they approach their process.
Conviction is needed when you’re selling it to your players in many cases, however, it looks different in the lead-up to those moments…
Here’s the contrast…
The Force Coach defends what they are doing year after year.
The In-Powered Coach questions what they are doing year after year.
Why the difference? Great question if you’re asking…
There is a difference between conviction and certainty. The presence or lack of humility is the ingredient to look for.
Humility is not available at the lower energy levels where the ego dominates. Therefore humility is not available to the Force Coach.
“This is what we’ve always done” dominates below 200.
Brandon is quoted in many different interviews saying, “I don’t have all the answers, we are experimenting. We are figuring it out.”
This is the level of humility available to the 500+ coach.
The illusion of powerful coaching is knowing and having all the right answers. (This is force).
The reality of power is in not knowing and being willing to try, iterate, and make improvements to the process year over year.
An imperfect process can compound.
A Force Coach who thinks their process is perfect is stuck where it is.
Hawkins says it this way:
Certainty is the consequence and the fulfillment of the require ments of subjectivity. The quality of 'realness' is itself a pure and elective condition. Therein, however, lies the trap of illusion. The dentral problem of illusion is not that it is unreal or fallacious, but that it seems real, as noted by Socrates 2,500 years ago. Thus, even certainty is a primary illusion that is often clung to out of fear, doubt, or uncertainty (Arehart-Treichal, 2004). On the other hand, with maturity, doubt can be accepted and reconceptualized as being necessary to progress and therefore a useful tool for investigation and growth.
The closed mind is seemingly comfortable because it often only represents a state of maturational arrest. Denial, on the other hand, is only a temporary fix because it is based on a vulnerable premise. The difficulty with a closed mind is that it is innately prideful. Maturity entails the capacity to live with the unanswered and uncertainty and take pleasure from the fact that it is a stimulus to learning and further growth and leads to progressive discovery.
The mature mind knows that it is evolving and that growth and development are satisfying and pleasurable in and of themselves.
Maturity implies that one has learned how to be comfortable with uncertainty and has included it as a legitimate ingredient. Uncertainty leads to discovery whereas skepticism is stultifying.
You may notice a problem… It’s just a perceptual one.
Read the last 2 sentences of what Hawkins wrote again. What do you notice?
Uncertainty is seen as ‘weak’ in sports leadership when in reality, it’s a strength.
Brandon is as In-Powered as they come. Uncertainty is strength in the light of truth.
Uncertainty and humility lead to something you’ll want to be called even less than ‘weak’ by our industry. But this is also valuable and powerful regardless if the ‘many’ don’t see it that way…
It is more valuable to be ‘divinely stupid’ than to have strong opinions that are also strongly held.
The In-Powered Coach lives in divine stupidity.
Check this video out on YouTube, (click the link to watch in Youtube, it’s just Hawkins talking at a conference, I promise)
Hawkins says, “The more lectures, you attend the dumber you will get.” Others say, “The more you learn the more you realize you don’t know anything at all.”
He continues by saying “ I have heard such and such is true, but now through my own inner work, I will arrive at my own conclusion.”
Things will work in some contexts and not work as well in other contexts.
To change Hawkins's words slightly to apply to coaching:
The more seasons you coach, the dumber you will get
With changing context, year over year with:
Players changing (graduating, transferring, incoming freshman)
Coaches changing(leaving, getting promoted/fired)
Roles changing (new players become ‘leaders’ which changes the dynamic)
Changing context means nothing is going to work exactly the same anyway. There is no copy and paste. Your team changes when anything changes. Your team changes after one speech, one shift, one game, one minute…
What am I getting at?
Nobody knows exactly how to play any of this… And if they think they do they don’t have enough humility to truly be one of the great leaders.
The only way to find out is through ‘being’ it and being in it.
It takes experiments to iterate and arrive at better and better truth each year.
If you want to see what an ‘uncertain’ but strong coach looks and sounds like. If you want to hear divine stupidity and deep levels of humility…
Listen to Brandon talk below. (He calibrates above 540 as a coach). He coaches In-Powered.
And just like he says, “We’re figuring it out.” With him, that phrase will always stay present tense. With humility, you never arrive at “We’ve figured it out.”
Always ‘figuring’ never ‘figured’.
I’d like to end with another passage from Hawkins's 5th book:
In reality, one cannot know at age twenty-five the information that is accrued by age fifty. Everyone thinks, "If I had only known that, I would have done it differently."
Thus, with humility can be seen that every given moment includes limitation. What we were is not what we are now. Mistakes are intrinsic to the learning process, which is the fate of the human condition itself. Because the mind's awareness is limited, it compensates by substituting presumptions (an educated guess) and therefore, operationally, choices and decisions are based on the seemingly best option, as stated by Socrates' dictum.
To hear true humility and learn, watch this: