I just picked up Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book & have been listening to it non-stop – love it.  What I love about Malcolm’s books are that, not only, are his books well-researched, but he is master storyteller.  If you pick up the audio version, you get him reading the book to you.  It is fantastic!

Check out his book titles:

• The Tipping Point
• Blink
• Outliers
• What the Dog Saw

So you have probably noticed that I have been incognito, disappeared, not on the web, etc.  Well, I have been here, I have just been quiet.  It has been a busy time with work, a conference, & some church stuff.  I am back, but it may be a little slow going.  Hang in there & keep coming back.  Thanks.

Seated upon a hard driving motorcycle, eighteen inches off the wheel in front of him, Jay “Bird” Dobyns was working undercover for the ATF infilitrating one of the most notorious OMG’s (Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs) — they were simply known as the Hells Angels.  In No Angel: My Harrowing Undercover Journey to the Inner Circle of the Hells Angels, Jay Dobyns details the deep undercover experience he and several other ATF agents embarked on getting inside the closely knit group of outlaws.

Each page is riveting.  Each conversation, each drug or gun deal outlined for the reader to experience right along with “Bird” as he was known to the HA crew, is written with vivid memory.  He recounts how on early assignments he traveled back and forth to an UC (undercover) assignment and would come back and coach is son’s T-Ball team.  As he dove deeper into the Hells Angels lifestyle, he had a more difficult time switching between devoted husband and father, and the illegal gun purchasing Hells Angel.

You can feel the pressure that Dobyns was under with each carefully chosen word or phrase.  The blow ups between the boss & him.  The cons that led to other cons, that led to other cons, that came back to the first con, and having to keep them all straight as to not give away his true identity.  His relationships with ATF brass, his teammates, his family (real & Hells Angels) all had a significant impact on who he was & who he was becoming.

This book dives into a real experience of life as a UC for the ATF, and in some cases the perils of the grueling work.  This book does not hold back on the language or present a false reality of his work.  If you enjoy true life stories of crime and intensity, then this book is right up your alley.  This book will get your heart pumping & remind you how good a life you have it in some cases.  Pick this book up today!

Marcus Buckingham (@mwbuckingham) has done it again with his latest book release Find Your Strongest Life.  This book is primarily targeted for women as the subtitle indicates – “What the Happiest and Most Successful Women Do Differently“.  Just as in previous releases (Now, Discover Your Strengths and The Truth About You), Marcus pulls from his years of research in to the strengths revolution.  His research shows that although women have more opportunity, more advantages then forty years ago, they are less happy today.  This book begs to answer the “why” question and provide an opportunity to show how each person can excel in their strength role.

He points out that there are roles that women are born to play and are stretched and pulled in different directions and want to be “all things, to all people“.  In previous strength tests, the goal was to identify your five core strengths that defined you, each one being separate.  In this book, he states that they want to pull your strengths together to show what your Lead and Supporting roles would be.  These roles include:

• Advisor – “what is the best thing to do?”
• Caretaker – “is everyone okay?”
• Creator – “what do I understand?”
• Equalizer – “what’s the right thing to do?”
• Influencer – “how can I move to act?”
• Motivator – “how can I raise the energy?”
• Pioneer – “what’s new?”
• Teacher – “what can she learn from this?”
• Weaver – “with whom can I connect?”                                     (p. 102-119)

Each person is unique and the Strong Life test helps identify the Lead and Supporting roles of the individual.  One of the fascinating points of the book is that he argues that women should strive for imbalance, not balance.  Their lives are always trying to fit into a perfectly balanced life – each part being given equal billing when that just isn’t the case.

This book is chocked full of valuable information including some practical, “How-To’s” to help guide your journey as your review your life, find your Lead and Supporting roles, and strive for imbalance while not freaking out your friends and family.  Sprinkled throughout the book are stories that showcase the principles in the book, whether success or failure or taking the long way around to seeing their strengths.

This is a book that needs to be on every Human Resource desk, in the coaching and training department, and widely read among friends and family.  This book has the potential to revolutionize the way women approach life, business, and family when they act within their Lead and Supporting roles.  Pick it up today!

When was the last time you fell down?  I don’t mean, hey I tripped hit the ground and bounced right back up, hoping that no one noticed, but really fell?  Would the Russian judge give you a “10” for your fall?  Previously, I have discussed my own slips and trips as a coach, but I think there is value in discussing some of falls.  The goal is that through the process you will learn at each stage so that success can be achieved.

In 1995, I was leading the Girls Cross Country program at LA Baptist High School.  I was scripting all the workout whether they were drills or normal runs.  I had a good team of girls who worked hard.  However, sometimes no matter how hard you work, you just are not going to perform your best on a given day.  If that were the case, no one would ever lose in baseball or football or any other sport for that matter.

As we entered our peak season, I tapered the workouts to focus on speed and short distances versus the long run that formed the base and bulk of their yearly training.  As we headed into our League Championship meet, we were running good, but then the unthinkable happen – we had a bad day.  That year we finished in fourth place, which isn’t too bad if it weren’t for the fact that the top three teams move on to the Division Prelims.  That was the first year in about ten years that a girls team from the school had not made the Division series.  As you can imagine, I was crushed.  Our team was crushed.  Parents were in shock.  Other schools were equally as shocked.

As I re-calibrated myself over the next few months, I was determined to not repeat that fate the next year.  I spent more time planning the workouts.  I studied what other good coaches were doing.  I studied my own athletes with greater diligence.  I was determined to redeem myself.

This fall was not easy to take.  I mean this fall was one that kept me down for a bit, but it did not take me out of the game.  A good coach will realize how a fall can help create focus, passion, clarity and determination for creating success.  I labored over this effort for months.  When we began work during the summer of ‘96 for the upcoming fall season, all of the workouts were complete.  Each day was scripted with a plan and a new focus.  I don’t think the girls were ready for what was ahead, but I was!

You might be thinking, well, that’s great Dave, but how can that help me.  Here’s how:

• Step away from the fall – put the fall out of your mind for awhile-shift gears, do something different
• Review the fall – it is important to take stock of how you fell
• Create a goal – what is your endgame, your end goal?
• Craft a plan – create a plan that focuses on getting you to the goal
• Execute the plan – in order to reach the goal, you have to execute the plan
• Adapt – don’t be afraid to adapt the plan, sometimes your greatest success happens when you go off-script
• Enjoy – have fun!

These are some guiding principles that helped me focus in on having a great next year.  I hope that these principles help you as well.

Question:  Think about your fall, how have you bounced back?

Just got my new iPod Touch.  Got a killer deal with all corporate discounts & recycling fees.

My friend told me on Sunday that his dog had gotten into an unfriendly discussion with a little black friend with a white stripe.

Unfortunately, no one won in that situation except the skunk. House stinks, clothes stink, couch stinks & even the food stinks.

Moral: don’t make friends with furry little black animals with white stripes.

So. . .my 60GB (5th Gen) is starting to fail, so I am getting this –>

Earlier I posted about my coaching slips.  If you walk on ice without skates you slip and slide all over the place, coaching was like that for me.  As I got further into my career, it was like putting on that first pair of roller skates.  You quickly pick up the skill and you think you’ve got it, and then you find yourself crossing your foot over around a turn and not getting it quite over and you see the skating rink floor rising to meet you.

By year three, I had two seasons of assistant coaching, both the boys and girls teams, under my belt and I learned the value of how to put a periodization chart together (running plan).  That plan developed further when I took over as jumps coach during the track season, and here came a little more slips, but with much more grace.

My greatest gift as a coach was my ability to realize when athletes needed to rest.  Some coaches believe that if you push hard enough and work the plan that everything will be okay.  The truth is, that’s not true at all.  Athletes & people need rest.  They need to recharge.  Coaches need to have that foresight.

As I made judgement calls on when to rest my athletes, sometimes I was right and sometimes I was wrong.  Some weeks I had worked them too hard and their tanks were empty.  When they needed to find another gear, it just wasn’t available.

Each trip was insightful.  Each time, I saw the ground rising to me, I looked for what I did wrong and right.  The goal is to determine what things I did right more than I did wrong.  Marcus Buckingham challenges:

Exploit your strengths (the right things)

When I realized that understanding an athlete’s good days and bad days was one of my strengths, I learned to look for those triggers.  Understanding those triggers, ultimately, led me to develop a winning formula, but it wouldn’t happen for a few more years.  In life and business, I use this methodology to help me succeed and win with people.  My trips early on, helped me develop my methodology, but it wasn’t until I fell a few times that I really began to succeed.

What tripping experiences helped shape your life, career or experiences?

These days there seems to be a huge emphasis on being a coaching leader.  My thought is, is that some people are born to coach and some are not.  Some may be great tacticians and some can see the process and manage through the process.  Sometimes people possess these skills together while others flounder in the waves when it comes to using their, not so God-given, people skills.

Coaches, whether athletic, business or life, have to be able to see the big picture as well as the finer details.  They need to be able to adjust and shift gears when the direction has you chasing your tails.  The best coaches, in my opinion, are those that inherently can see these things and shift.

When I began my coaching career at LA Baptist, as an assistant cross-country coach, I did it because a friend asked me.  For years, I had been running and towards the latter end of my high school career I lost focus and didn’t care.  Presented with a challenge, I did just enough to get by, but that certainly wasn’t going to land me anywhere near a scholarship or anything else.

Those first few years, I spent more time listening, observing and making a lot of mistakes.  I would push people too hard when they weren’t ready.  I would pick the wrong person who was last in a drill.  I would get beat by the girls during a workout (hey, we had fast girls).  I would let people slide on some workouts.  I slipped so many times I lost track, some days I think I spent more time reviewing my mistakes then I spent doing any real teaching.

Coaching is a process.  Some people think that coaches just come up with this stuff, but the truth is, they, we have all made mistakes in the past that lead to success in the future.  If babies didn’t learn to crawl before they walked, then they would be face planting so long they would say forget it.  Slips serve a purpose to help prepare us for the trips, falls and eventually the successes.

What were your slips that helped change your path?