Diana Cutaia is the founder of Coaching Peace and the author of the new book, "Protect Your Confidence", a year long journal style book in which Diana shares why confidence isn’t something you build It’s something you protect. In the book, readers will rediscover the confidence they’ve always had and protect it from the noise that tries to chip away at it.

Diana's coaching experience includes serving as the head women's basketball coach at Curry College and as assistant women's basketball coach at Mount Holyoke College. She was also the head women's basketball coach at Norwalk Community College where she took the women's basketball program to National Standing in only four years. Her Panthers finished three seasons ranked #1 in the New England Region and among the top eight in the Nation.

Prior to starting Coaching Peace, Diana was the Director of Athletics and Sport-based Initiatives for Wheelock College where her unique approach to sport was featured on the front page of the Boston Globe, NCAA On Campus, and Athletic Management Magazine. Diana also began the first ever academic program in Sport-Based Youth Development at Wheelock College. Over the years, Diana has presented to colleges on topics ranging from diversity and gender equity, sportsmanship and decision making, and Title IX.

On this episode Mike & Diana discuss why confidence is not something to be constructed but rather something to be safeguarded. Diana explains how societal perceptions of athletes often romanticize the idea of unwavering confidence, leading to detrimental effects on their mental well-being. We delve into the importance of recognizing and protecting one's intrinsic confidence amidst external pressures and failures. Coaches will gain insights into practical strategies for fostering a supportive environment that nurtures both individual and communal confidence, ultimately enhancing performance and personal growth in various contexts.

Follow us on Twitter and Instagram @hoopheadspod for the latest updates on episodes, guests, and events from the Hoop Heads Pod.

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Grab your notebook before you listen to this episode with Diana Cutaia, founder of Coaching Peace and the author of the new book, Protect Your Confidence.

Website - https://coachingpeace.com https://www.protectyourconfidence.com/

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/dianacutaia/

Email - diana@coachingpeace.com

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This kind of romanticized view of what we have of the confident athlete is the athlete that walks in, that doesn't take any crap, keeps persevering.

Even if they're injured, they get up.

Nothing sets them down.

That's not human.

We have a romanticized view of what a confident athlete looks like and because we've romanticize this and we've created this idea, we are actually doing less to protect and connect athletes back to their confidence.

Diana Cutia is the founder of Coaching Peace and the author of the new book Protect yout Confidence, a year long journal style book in which Diana shares why confidence isn't something you build, it's something you protect.

In the book, readers will rediscover the confidence they've always had and protect it from the noise that tries to chip away at it.

Diana's coaching experience includes serving as the head Women's basketball coach at Curry College and as an assistant women's basketball coach at Mount Holyoke College.

She was also the head Women's basketball coach at Norwalk Community College, where she took the women's basketball program to national standing in only four years.

Her Panthers finished three seasons ranked number one in the New England region and among the top eight in the nation.

Prior to starting Coaching Peace, Diana was the Director of Athletics and Sport based Initiatives for Wheelock College where her unique approach to sport was featured on the front page of the Boston Globe, NCAA On Campus and Athletic Management Magazine.

Diana also began the first ever academic program in sport based youth development at Wheelock College.

Over the years, Diana has presented to colleges on topics ranging from diversity and gender equity, sportsmanship and decision making and Title nine Give with Hoops is the first platform turning basketball analytics into fundraising impact Every stat tells a story and now every story drives sponsorship, engagement and team growth.

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Grab your notebook before you listen to this episode with Diana Kutaia, founder of Coaching Peace and the author of the new book Protect your Confidence.

Hello and welcome to the Hoop Heads Podcast.

It's Mike Cleansing here without my co host Jason Sunkel tonight, but I am pleased to welcome back to the Hoop Heads pod for her second appearance, Diana Kutaya from Coaching Peace and author of of the new book Protect yout Confidence.

Diana, welcome back to the Hoop Heads pod.

Thanks my friend.

I really appreciate being here.

I always love this podcast.

I loved when I was on the first time and excited to be back again to talk about some of the things that we're doing around confidence.

For sure.

I am thrilled to have you back on and I had an opportunity to read your book over the last couple days and I am looking forward to the conversation that we're about to have about confidence because I do feel like it is an area of one's own psyche.

Whether you are a basketball coach, whether you are a player, whether you are just a human being.

It is something that impacts all of us in all walks of life, whether it's our profession, whether it's our personal life, whatever it may be.

So let's start there with where does the idea for writing a book about confidence?

Where does that come from?

Is it a lightning bolt moment where boom, just one second the idea comes to you?

Is it something that was a slow build to the idea that you were going to write a book about confidence?

Where does the idea come from?

Diana yeah, if you would have asked my 10th grade English teacher, would Diana be writing a book one day, I can absolutely say that she'd say, I don't know.

I think most of the feedback that I got at various Points were, your ideas are great, but you should really work on your grammar.

So I never anticipated that I would write a book.

I always wanted and thought that I would share some ideas around my own experiences.

You know, I run a, now a consulting company that works with professional athletes, professional teams, as well as, you know, college level and youth level sports, as well as corporate teams and nonprofit teams.

Anywhere where there's a group of people coming together to try to do it better, right?

And I didn't anticipate ever writing something, but I thought, oh, I have so many experiences, I want to share those experiences.

And, and several years ago I was talking with folks and somebody in passing had mentioned something and said, oh, just another way I protect my confidence.

And I had never heard that before.

And I pressed them on it and I was like, wait, I'm sorry, what is, what did you just say?

And they didn't really have like a full explanation of it at all.

But it was so fascinating to me that I started to look at everything through that lens.

And then I just started to ask all my friends who are my biggest research subjects all the time.

You know, I'm, I see thousands of people in the course of a year.

So I'm constantly now asking people, hey, how do you protect your confidence?

What do you do to protect your confidence?

And I don't even really understand.

I start looking up confidence, I start reading a bunch of research around things and it's really just a, like in interest at this point.

I'm fascinated by it.

As a coach, I was fascinated by it.

And now as I'm going through this, like, epiphany of things, I'm really fascinated and I start to notice a trend.

I start to see things where many of, in particular the women executives, C suite folks who are running major corporations and or teams or whatever were telling me things that just didn't seem to make sense.

Like, I feel like an imposter.

I don't think I belong here.

I feel so, such a lack of confidence when I walk into a room.

And I thought, oh, there's something here that doesn't make sense to me.

Why are they feeling this way?

Why does it look like this?

So during spring break, every year is usually my slowest time.

And several years ago I sat down, I thought, I'm just going to start writing like a worksheet for this.

I don't even know what I'm going to do, but I'm going to start writing.

And that's what I did.

I just started writing and for two weeks I kept writing and I had about 90 pages at the end of that two weeks and it was raw.

I didn't really know what I was writing, but I just thought, I'm just going to write all the different ways that I think you can protect your confidence based on the things that I have heard or seen over my, you know, 45 year career.

40 Year career.

And as I looked over it at the end, I was like, oh, there's something here.

And interestingly, I actually didn't define confidence until I went back and looked at everything and I looked at all the research and I looked at what people were saying the definition was, and I thought, we're not capturing this.

We're not capturing this at all.

You know, the, the premise is always, and I'm sure you've heard it, you probably could name 10 times where someone said to you growing up playing sports, whatever you did, you need to build your confidence.

You need to get a little bit more confident in that.

Like it's something that's external that you have to go find, hurry up at a store.

It's transactional.

I get it when I do something, that's how I get it.

And I was like, nah, that's not what it is.

We all have the capacity for confidence.

It all, it already exists, you know?

I don't know.

You have children, correct?

I do.

I have three.

Okay.

Okay.

So I can tell you that like you, you know this more than anything.

Did they need to build confidence when they were 2, 3, or did they just have it?

They were like, do you see me?

Look at the, look at how fast I am in these shoes.

Do you see the way I jumped off that couch?

Absolutely.

There's no question that they will tell you everything that they're doing.

And it doesn't matter how mundane that thing is that they just did.

It is the greatest thing that has ever been done in the history of humankind.

So yes, children do not lack confidence.

There is no question about that.

Exactly.

And you know, the, the human development specialists and everything will tell you where that is in the stage.

And there is that, you know, kind of like very ego driven stage where everything is through me.

I'm looking at my lens, I understand all that.

But there's something innate that felt like, oh, we already have that sense in ourselves of self trust and self worth.

And those are the things that I think were kind of like the, the cornerstone of what confidence is.

But it's not only that.

So as I began to do more research, as I began to like really listen and watch and pay attention.

It kind of felt like it was a three legged stool that it actually we were connected to our confidence which already exists, which there were connected to it.

When there are three things in balance, our sense of worth and self trust.

We know who we are.

We are not defined by anything other than our understanding of ourselves.

Number two was our abilities and it wasn't the mastery of skills, it was the acquisition of skills.

Like the more skills we were able to acquire and continue to be learning the better.

But it was also this third one that I think is the thing that is the most challenging for people at times which is humility.

And when folks, you know, I'm a Gen Xer.

So when people said be humble it was really about being small.

Be quiet, be small, don't you know, don't draw attention to yourself.

And the way I was looking at humility was this idea of more than more.

What more do I need to learn?

What more do I need to understand about myself?

What more can I give?

Not at my own expense, but what am, what capacity do I have in that?

And when those three things, worth, ability and humility are in balance, that's when you're most connected to your confidence.

And there are things that try to extinguish your confidence every day.

There's things that are, are trying to extinguish it.

And that is where the term protect your confidence came in.

I'm going to ask you, do you have a person who in your life, friend, partner, maybe it's your own kids, maybe it's a former coach who is what we would kind of call a confidence protector.

And that's somebody who number one loves you for just you being you.

Right?

Is someone who will remind you of the things that you are really good at when you forget.

And number three, the person who tells you honestly when you're just not meeting what you should be.

Sure.

I mean I think the number one person in that capacity probably is my wife who again is always supportive of good ideas.

But when I have a bad idea, is always willing to call out the idea or to at least give me constructive criticism and feedback on an idea.

Hey, have you thought about this?

Or oftentimes just in the course of conversation we may be talking about something and she'll say hey, have you ever thought about it from this perspective?

Or here's an idea that maybe you should consider that supplements what you're thinking about.

And so I think when you have that you get that validation, right?

And I think that's kind of what you're talking about, where you can.

You can hear from somebody that, hey, your ideas are good, but, hey, maybe we can add to them or, hey, you're off base.

But here's another way to be able to look at it.

And I think when you have that.

When you have that sounding board of somebody who is supportive and yet at the same time is willing to tell you the truth now, you know that the reason why they're either giving you the positive feedback or the criticism is because they are supporting you and they believe that you can do whatever it is that you're trying to.

To do.

And that's the way that I typically feel when I'm having a conversation with my wife in terms of protecting my confidence.

It's, yeah, I believe in the ideas.

I believe in you.

Maybe your approach right here is different from how I would approach it.

And maybe you should think about this.

And sometimes that just, again, gets you off of the path that you have for your thoughts.

And now I can move over here and add to my idea with some of the things that that person, in this case my wife, has contributed.

Yeah, that's a beautiful example.

And what she's doing for you, she's helping you.

We always say, like, it's very easy to fall into a hole at times.

And when you're in the hole, right, that could be a space where you just spin around negativity, but it also could just be a space where you only see what you brought in the hole.

Right?

So sometimes we need, like, a little bit of a catalyst, someone to shift our perspective.

Hey, did you think about this or what about this?

And that's a beautiful way of also protecting confidence.

And there's a big difference between protecting confidence and protecting ego.

And I'm using kind of ego in the term of, like, that very fragile sense of ourself and who we are.

Right.

I'll give you an example in a sport context, doing a workshop.

And a parent was in the workshop, who is also a coach.

Coach.

And said, yeah, you know, my son was playing in a game the other day, and after the game, he came out, you know, and he came out to the car, and we were crying.

He was all upset.

And he said, I really stunk today.

I was the worst today.

And, you know, they turned around, they said to their son, no, you weren't.

No, you were great.

You really were.

You were great.

And they said, so is that what you mean?

Am I protecting his confidence?

And I was like, no, you're protecting his Ego.

Because actually what you're telling him isn't the truth.

Right.

And it's not.

It doesn't matter if he was good or not good.

That's irrelevant of where it is.

What's most relevant is his perspective on how he's playing and to get more understanding of what that is.

Why do you think you stung?

Oh, well, you know, I didn't make any of my free throws today.

Yeah, you're right.

You didn't make any of your free throws today.

And what can you do next time?

Do you want to work on it?

Is it important to you?

Yeah, I really want to work on it.

Okay, you continue to work on it.

So maybe next time you try to get 20, 30%, but I think you can do it.

I actually really believe you can do it because I've seen you work hard and I know you can.

And I am here to help you if you want.

Right.

So I'm not telling you something that isn't true or not affirming what you might feel.

But I'm also not contributing to that negative self talk about who you are, what you're about, all of that.

I'm being honest with you about the things that potentially you need to work on.

Now, I get in the car the next day and I. I don't say potentially.

I'm.

I stunk today.

I say, oh, I'm disappointed that I didn't make as many free throws, but I feel like I'm working at it.

So I'm.

I'm going to get there.

And I do have some work that I need to do.

And it starts to shift the language of how you talk to yourself, and it protects that confidence that we need so much.

I work with so many teams where that is the thing that I see is missing.

It's not some strategy.

You don't have to come up with a new plan.

You don't even have to recruit a new player.

All you have to do is center back to that sense and that connection of confidence that you have so that the mistakes don't seem like they are.

You know, it's the end all, be all, and the successes don't get us so elated that we can't actually focus on our own improvement.

I think something that goes along with that.

Diana, as you were talking and at various points during my reading of the book, you talk a lot about how the confidence of an individual is connected to the greater context of where that person is, whether it's the culture, whether it's the team, whether it's the business, whether it's the people in the.

There.

There's a connection between.

It's not just me and my confidence in this bubble, right?

There are these other things around me that have an impact.

And that's kind of like the story that you just told.

But one of the things that struck me as I was reading and then again as you were just talking is I. I think about from a coaching perspective, right, where if I have a team of players or I'm talking to an individual player, I'm talking to the entire team.

And part of my job as a coach is to help you to be able to improve.

And in order for me to help you to be able to improve, I have to point out areas that we need improvement in.

But when I do that, I also have to demonstrate to my player or my team that I am not saying, hey, you're not doing this right.

Figure it out and then come back to me.

I'm saying, hey, this is what we need to improve.

I'm here as your coach to help you to be able to improve in that area, whether you're an individual, whether you're a team.

So, yeah, I'm giving you what you need in a sense of telling you, hey, this is what you need to work on.

But I'm not just leaving you on an island by yourself.

I'm saying we're going to work on this together.

We are together.

A group, a team.

We're going to figure this out together.

And I think a lot of times when I see coaches, I don't know if get in trouble is the right way to say it, but we're.

There's not that quality relationship that it can become a team where you have a group of players over here and you have a coaching staff over here, and it's an us against them mentality, as opposed to a situation where, hey, we're the coaching staff, we're trying to help you to get to this level and we're giving you ideas of what you can work on.

And then we're going to be here to help facilitate that improvement, which I know is one of the things that ability to improve and learn is something that is very important to somebody who's protecting their confidence is understanding that I may not already be perfect, but I am striving to learn and to grow.

And that's, I think, part of the role of a leader a coach is to be able to not only point out what someone needs to improve upon, but then also be there to assist with, hey, here's the plan.

Here's what we're actually going to do to try to help you improve.

And that's when you start to see that confidence of I'm not there yet or we're not there yet as a team.

But our coach believes that we can get there.

And our coach has a plan for us to get there that's going to help us to develop more confidence.

It's so spot on what you're saying, right?

We talk about like there's kind of like two different types of relationships that you can have.

You can have relational relationships, like relationships, protective relationships, relationships with athletes, or you can have conditional relationships, the relationship where I'm going to be behind you, I'm going to support you, I'm going to show you love, respect, approval, attention.

When you do what I want you to do, when you perform the way I want you to perform, right?

When you respond to me the way I want you to respond to me.

And what that then teaches an athlete is this relationship.

My worth and my value is only based on how I perform and the things that I do.

And that it is not a relationship based on my inherent worth as a human being.

It is only about my performance.

So then what I'll try to do is manipulate my performance in whatever way I can.

That might mean that I am not supporting my other teammates the way I need to, that my other teammates.

Now that sense of at times comparison can feel threatening.

So now I create even division among that.

The relationship that you're talking about becomes so super important.

And the idea that we are working together, often people, people think that collaboration means consensus and collaboration is just what you're talking about.

Like we are problem solving together.

Together as a coach, I'm coming in and I want to figure this out just as much as you do.

The tone in which we use when we are talking to athletes will either be a protector of their confidence or an extinguisher of their confidence.

And the words we use matter.

They matter so much.

So when you're talking to an athlete, number one, if you want an athlete to understand, you want anyone to understand and be okay with accepting feedback and getting feedback and being able to learn, there's two things that have to happen.

Number one, they have to know that you care about them unconditionally, that you care about them no matter what they do, right?

And that is consistency.

You just have to show up all the time as as much as you possibly can.

Number two is you have to teach that skill.

So you have to teach that feedback is a gift.

When you get it, it is like I am giving you something.

So you're kind of like, it's almost like that.

Yes.

And you are doing an amazing job in that.

However, I'm noticing that, you know, just when you get that pressure, you're not responding to the pressure, and that's usually when you're losing the ball.

Okay, so here's what I want you to do.

I want you to focus on that one thing now that actually can help.

And I really feel like you can do this.

So.

And you're going to.

You may make a mistake a couple of times.

I want you to just stay with it.

I want you to persevere as you're in there now, I'm with you.

I'm telling you what you're doing.

Right.

I'm also telling you what you're doing, what you could be doing better.

But I'm also then telling you that I believe that you can do it because I want you to believe that you can do it.

Right.

And that's like that key of things.

One, one of the ways to do this, I do this with, like, the young athletes that I've coached will be, you know, doing a drill or something.

And I hate people saying good job because good job means nothing.

Good job at what?

Breathing, Standing up?

I don't know, what did I do a good job at?

So I will say, wow, you did that really well.

Before I tell you what it is, what do you think you did?

Well, I want to know what do you think it is that I'm like, showing?

Right.

No matter what they say.

I agree.

No matter what they say.

Not that I'm trying to lie or be sneaky to them or this is a manipulative thing, because it's a yes and right.

So they might say, oh, and this has happened to me a couple of times.

I'll say, you know, I'm thinking you use the right for foot when you were making, you know, that move, you finally like, were going on the right foot.

And they might say, you know, I. I just felt really good about it.

Like, I just, I had like the confidence that I needed, or I, you know, held the ball the way I was supposed to.

It's not that those things are wrong.

Those things are right.

Now I have a yes and yes.

And you also did that.

That's correct.

Great.

And now I'm constantly teaching them to see what's good in what they're doing, but in that, I'm teaching them actually to self reflect and think about what did I do?

Well?

Oh, well, I use my foot, Is that it?

Right.

And if they say, oh, well, I, you know, held the ball the, the way I was supposed to, and that wasn't entirely correct, I'll be like, tell me what you think.

What's like, you say you held the ball really the way it was supposed, you were supposed to hold it.

What did that look like to you?

Well, I put both hands.

You did, you're right.

And you held it pretty tight.

Well, next time even better, put them on the sides so that you really can hold the ball a little bit better.

So now I'm building in that muscle so that they can start to take that critique.

But if I give a critique all the time and I say, hey, I told you that you needed to hold the ball tighter, that's why the ball's getting taken away from you, are you going to do it or you're not going to do it?

I am not.

Now, number one, you've taught me one thing.

Number that I don't know how to critique myself.

I have no ability to understand what I'm doing.

I still potentially don't know what I'm doing wrong.

Because if you told me to do something and I'm still doing it incorrectly, I'm not willfully doing something incorrectly.

I am really not understanding how to do it and you are not helping me.

So your kind of framing of we're in this together, we're trying to solve this together, is what coaching is.

But we often don't think of that as coaching because we think of coaching in what we see, which is the kind of high level coach who potentially is, you know, in the face of the athlete telling them something when really that's not, that's, that's not the complete picture of what coaching is.

Yeah, I agree with that a hundred percent.

So much of what we see publicly, we don't see what goes on behind the scenes in terms of the relationship building.

And there are times where different coaches and different players can interact with each other in ways that when you don't understand the full picture, you may get a story out of that small snippet of video or audio or whatever it may be that may not tell the whole picture.

I still just come back to again, what you said, that for me, when I look at successful teams that I have been a part of or that I have seen or that I have friends who have coached teams, almost inevitably you have a coaching staff and a group of players who are on the same page.

They are in the same boat, rowing the same direction.

Everyone has the same goals.

And the coaches want the players and the team to be better.

The players and the team want feedback from the coaches to be able to help them to improve and get better.

And then that is all of the people moving in the same direction in the same boat.

And then when you have teams where it's not going well, you end up with the players over here on one side saying, man, coaches have no idea what they're doing.

They don't believe in us, they don't trust us.

Let's just do what we do over here.

And we're going to try to win in spite of the coaching staff.

And then the coaching staff is saying, all these guys, they just.

They don't buy in and we can't get them to do what we want them to do and this and that.

And then everything implodes because the relationship just isn't there.

And so the secret sauce of.

I always say, right, that coaching is an art and it's a science, right?

The science of it is I can drop some plays on a chalkboard.

I can X and O, I can do this.

That's the science.

The science at this point is pretty easy because you can find and talk to coaches.

You can see on YouTube or TikTok or X or wherever.

You can find all the X's and O's that you want.

But it's the art of coaching, the ability to develop that relationship with your players so that you can continue to build their confidence and help them to grow and get everybody working together towards the same goal.

And that's what the best coaches do.

Everybody has different methodologies of how they get there, but ultimately, your players have to believe in you, believe in what you're doing, and believe that you have their best interest at heart.

I love what you said about just the fact that the playing time, right, and the performance is something that cannot be tied to the value of our relationship.

I have a guy who comes on the podcast all the time.

He's a high school coach at Bolingbrook High School in the state of Illinois.

His name's Rob Brost.

And I'm going to totally butcher Rob saying.

So Rob, apologize if you.

If you're listening, but basically the idea of his saying that, he always says it's, is if the amount of time that you play, how you play, and there's one other thing.

If that is having an impact on our relationship, then you are in the wrong place, because your value to me has nothing to do with how many minutes you play, how well you play.

The relationship has to do with you as a human being.

And he says that all the time.

When I have a mod, and it's always something that strikes me.

And again, when you were talking there, the first person, he was the first person that I thought of in terms of somebody who, again, I have a relationship with you outside of your performance as a basketball player.

And whether you're our leading scorer and the kid who never comes off the floor or you're our 15th guy who never plays a minute during the game, my relationship with both of those two guys should be similar.

And when I have that now, I can protect both players confidence in a.

In a different.

Right.

In a different way.

Yeah.

And each one has a different.

Each one has a different need.

But I'm giving them what they need because I value them beyond what.

What they can give me on the basketball court.

And then you build that relationship and connection back to them.

Right.

So now they feel like it's not that I have to buy into a system or I have to buy into a program, but I have to feel like I am connected to myself, to others.

That's the biggest thing that I see is when people, when teams feel connected, they feel a sense of connection to their own confidence, and they feel a sense of responsibility and connection to protecting the confidence of their teammates.

Teams thrive.

They thrive so much in that.

Because that sense of identity.

Right.

That I am.

We are here together, and you're going to tell me the truth.

You're going to be the one that's honest with me.

And that means that when you're honest with me about what I'm not doing well, I know that when you're honest with me, you will also tell me what I am doing well.

And there is that, like, just amazing feeling that you get when you know you are in with somebody who truly cares about you.

Right.

Like every relationship should matter and the ways in which those relationship matters.

And then when you get that feedback, it feels like a gift.

When someone says, you know, I once said to a leader that I was.

I was coaching.

I said, I think you can do better than what you're doing.

I think that as a leader, you have the skills and the abilities, because I've seen that, and I think you're dialing it in a little bit.

I think you can do better.

And at first they were like, I thought, I may not get a phone call back.

But we built a rapport, we built a relationship.

And about a week later, they Called me back and they said, you know, thank you for saying that because I actually could do better.

And when you said it, I knew it because I have an understanding of myself and I self reflect.

And I knew it and I thought, wow, she sees it too.

And it took me a week to sit back and do that.

And that's that sense.

When we talk about that sense of worth, your abilities and your humility.

When I'm constantly assessing what I could be learning, what I could be better at, then I honor feedback.

I don't own it.

And there's a big distinction and difference, right?

So I facilitate 200 different sessions with different groups over the course of a year.

As good as I might think I am, I am probably making mistakes left and right.

And I remember about six months ago, after a session, I was speaking with a gentleman and he said, I said, so how do you think, you know, it was an off site thing that we had done for a team.

I said, how do you think that went?

How you feeling?

He said, you know, I honestly didn't love the way you facilitated that last session.

I felt like you let some conversations go on a little bit too long.

And he was kind of like giving me this, you know, feedback.

And his, his tone was a little bit like, yeah, yeah, I didn't like it, you know, and, and at some point I would say maybe five years ago, not that long ago, I probably would have left there and been like, ugh, I'm a terrible facilitator.

I don't even know why I'm doing this.

Like, I'm not good at this.

I need to get better.

I can't believe that.

But instead what I did, because I spend so much time protecting my confidence is I honored his feedback.

I honored the fact that in that moment I was not good for him.

And I also during the session was thinking, oh, I should probably, I should probably cut this conversation off.

This is going too long.

And I was like, ah, I'm going to take a risk and see where it went.

It didn't land the idea that because I can actually look at myself through a lens of what do I need to get better at?

Then when somebody gives me feedback, I get to discern and decide, huh, do I want to take some of that in?

That that actually might be true.

And I can take some of that in because it doesn't immediately take away my worth.

I don't apply it to 40 years of work ahead of that.

I apply it to that moment.

And that's the thing when your identity is so connected to your sport, then your performance and that lack of becomes your identity, right?

We always say, you know, oh, wow, you.

You love the game.

You know, you.

Basketball is life.

Everything I do is about this.

My identity now becomes fused with the sport.

So when I am not good, if someone tells me I am not good, they are not just saying, I'm not good at basketball, they're saying, I'm not good.

And that's why you have to be like, it's okay to play and also be you.

And your worth is not connected to your play.

That is not, you know, and that's the disconnect we have thought for so long.

Then when we tell somebody, like, you're a baller, like, that's what you do.

Like, that's what I was like, yeah, I want that.

You know, I want to be that.

And I'm like, oh, no, Diana's more than that.

She's always been more than that.

But I need to believe that and understand that.

So when those moments come when you say, I don't think you did that as well, then I can live in the moment and.

And I don't apply it to everything about myself.

So coaches are constantly extinguishing confidence.

They don't even realize it because they are actually creating, as we talked about, like earlier, you talked about the conditions that people are in.

They're creating the conditions that extinguish confidence.

Makes total sense.

It really does.

And I think, again, I can apply this in so many different ways in my own life.

I can think back to when I was a kid, and I was probably pretty close to what you were just describing in that a lot of my identity, I tied up in being a basketball player.

And thankfully, most of the time as a basketball player, I was successful.

So I didn't have to necessarily protect my confidence because most of the time, things went well for me.

That's not to say that I. I didn't fail, because I did.

But most of the time, things went well.

But yet, at the same time, my identity, in a lot of ways, was tied up in the game, especially externally.

Right.

That people at my high school or people that knew me in one area thought, hey, that's Mike the basketball player.

And then as you continue to grow up and you continue to mature and you become this multifaceted person, you come to realize that, yeah, my performance is important to me, and I want to be at my best when I'm playing.

But if I don't play as well as I would have liked, there are still, all these other parts of me that are valuable, it's not just who I am as a basketball player.

And so that's something that I think comes from maturity.

If you're coming from within you.

I also think if you have a good coach or you have a parent or you have somebody around you, a trusted adult, that they can help you to steer and see that there's more to you than just the sport.

And so that's thinking back again to when I was younger.

That's something that applied.

And then the other thing, like you're talking about with giving a presentation and having somebody give you a critique.

So basketball camp I've been doing for whatever this summer, I think is 34 years, I've been doing basketball camp.

And I have a system that I use, and I've done it for 34 years, and for the most part, I feel like it's been successful.

But every once in a while, I tweak something or I change something or there's something that I do a little bit differently.

And a lot of times, what will happen is maybe once a year or twice a year, I'll have a parent that will raise a question or bring to me something that is a critique about, hey, I noticed this.

Why don't you do this differently?

And there's a part of me that, just like you said, when you get that feedback, you're like, oh, I must.

I must be the worst camp director that ever exists.

You know, I can't believe, you know, here's this.

Here's this person that's unhappy with something that I did.

I want to make this person happy by changing what I do.

I, I, I don't have confidence in.

And then I stop and I think, and I come back and I'm like, I've been doing this for 34 years.

I've had thousands upon thousands upon thousands of kids come through the camp over the course of time.

I must be doing something right.

But let me take what this person said and see if there's any validity to it and see if there's something that I can use to improve.

So, like you said, I, I hear the feedback, but I don't let it come in and impact everything that I've done.

I don't let it bruise that confidence.

I don't let it take my confidence away.

But I do utilize the criticism or the feedback to see if there's an opportunity for me to improve.

And it goes back to what kind of has been the theme so far of this conversation, which is There's a self awareness of understanding who I am, what I do, how I do it, and when I have that within me, it allows me to have the confidence to be able to understand that, hey, I know I've put in the work and the time and I'm doing all these things and that allows me to hear somebody say, hey, have you thought about it this way?

Or here's something that didn't work for my kid.

Maybe it's not working for some other people who don't come and say something about it.

Let me reevaluate that particular practice.

And sometimes I come to the conclusion that it just wasn't right for that person and I'm not going to change.

Sometimes I think, oh, you know what, that's a valid point, that maybe if I did do it differently, everybody would get more out of it.

So I think it's just again, a matter of understanding who you are feeling confident in that and then that allows you to accept the confidence, which is, I think, what, what your story got across.

And I think those were the two things that came to mind while, while you were talking about that particular aspect of being confident and accepting criticism.

I love both of the things that you're talking about because I think they're super important to like highlight.

The first of which is like, well, I, you know, I probably didn't have that much because things pretty much went my way.

I'd venture to say that things may not have gone your way all the time, but that actually your balance of perspective in that those experiences led you to believe the totality of it was good.

Right?

Like when you have balance, then when we look at the complete picture of something, we can say, hey, sure, there were times when, you know, I lost some games, maybe things, but like, actually it was a really good experience.

I had good outcomes in that.

So I think that's super important to think about like that the other thing is like that idea when we are.

When feedback is given as a tool for connection and a tool for learning.

And that's where it should be given for coaches, right?

Not as a punitive tool, not as a. I'm dysregulated as a coach.

So now I can't control myself because I'm so focused on the outcome and you are my ticket to the outcome and you're not reaching what I want you to do.

Right now I'm giving you feedback, which basically is just, I'm unloading on you because I'm upset around what's happening.

I'm not going to take your feedback.

I'm not going to think about it, but what you just said is so important.

When I can take it and be like, huh, Is there some validity to this?

I need to think about it, but it doesn't wreck me.

And I don't think like, oh, my gosh, I'm awful.

Because, you know, someone or someone's in your life trained you and gave you a model for what that looked like.

Just like, for me, like, I have a model of what that looks like, and I start to practice it over and over again.

And then I realize, oh, I can actually protect my own confidence.

I can listen to what you're saying.

And the distinction is this.

When I first started talking about this, a couple of folks were like, well, you know, if you're gonna just honor feedback and not own it, like, if you have to be discerning about it, isn't that just mean that you're just dismissing it and then you're just dismissing feedback?

And I was like, no, that's what we do when we protect our ego.

That's when we do when we feel fragile and we don't want to accept that.

And if you have folks that are constantly on your teams being defensive, right, not just one person, but, like, consistently being defensive around it, that's on you, not them, probably.

Right?

That's the conditions that you've set up have made it where.

Where any amount of feedback doesn't feel like a gift, it feels like a threat.

And now my brain's telling me, this is a threat.

You need to defend against this.

You know, when you were talking, one of the things that came up for me, that is such a big thing for me.

I knew this coach one time who at halftime of games would come in with and he would score the offense, defense things, he'd be like that.

You got to be minus C minus.

You know, we need to do better here.

And it was like this very.

What I think he might have thought of is objective way of looking at the first half and what happened.

And it used to bother me because I would think, well, what's your grade?

Are you critiquing you?

At any point as a coach, do you walk in the locker room and say, you know what?

I didn't do a good job on the scout.

I didn't think that they would be, you know, running that.

That defense.

And we didn't prepare for that.

So on me, let's correct that now.

Let's make it.

Instead, what we do oftentimes is we walk into locker room.

And we're like, hey, you know what?

Sometimes the scout isn't right.

Sometimes you got to adjust to things and you're not adjusting.

And I need you to adjust, right?

And now what we do is we constantly put it on our athletes as opposed to actually taking some responsibility.

When you get that adversarial relationship with someone in a team, that adversarial relationship gets set up because you actually are cultivating this character now that is the adversary.

You've made that happen by the ways in which you give feedback and coach.

I remember the great Pat Summit, most amazing coach to this day.

I think she's probably hands down one of the best women's basketball, probably best basketball coaches.

I remember I got to work with her at various points.

I worked at her campsite, but the first time I met her, she was doing a book signing, New York City.

And I, I came, went down to the book signing and I was like, so excited.

I got this book and I was like holding it, shaking.

And I was like, coach Summit, can I please?

You know.

And you signed my book?

And she was like, yeah.

And she said, what do you want me to write?

And I said, well, I'm a brand new coach.

I was 22, I'd just become a head coach at a junior college.

I knew nothing.

And I was like, I'm a brand new coach.

What should whatever give me advice?

And she said, love your players, love the game, teach every day.

That was her motto.

She would constantly tell us, you are a teacher.

More than anything, you are constantly.

And if you people can't learn, that is not about them not being able to learn as much as it about you not teaching them in a way they can understand it constantly think.

If you have to say it five different times, say it five different times.

And I never forgot that there was something so magical about it that how can we continue as coaches to just.

If someone doesn't know how to do something that's not on them entirely.

If they're trying to, great.

If they continue to try, that's not them.

If they can't do it, it's us.

Oh, let me think about it differently.

We use juggling a lot.

I teach juggling a ton.

Like, you know, three balls juggling in the air.

And I teach it for a whole variety of reasons.

It talks about, you know, we talk about self determination, we talk about motivation, we talk about stress.

There's so many different ways that we use juggling with teams.

And it's so interesting to me.

So there's one person that for 20 years ago, I was doing a juggling workshop.

She couldn't figure it out.

And she says to me, I'm just not good.

You're just move on.

I'm not gonna go.

Well, we're still in contact, and I still, every once in a while, are like, hey, I think I came up with a different way of teaching you.

What if you tried this, this and this.

And in my mind, until I am no longer to do the able to do this, I will be able to teach her to juggle.

Like that is it's it.

Yes.

It's like an ongoing joke with us.

But I feel this tremendous sense of responsibility.

How many coaches are doing that?

How many coaches are going to a room and saying, hey, my kids aren't getting it?

Well, maybe I'm not teaching it right.

One time I gave my college kids a midterm exam, and I think they were nervous and scared about it, but it had nothing to do with them.

It had everything to do with me.

So I asked them to draw out the plays, and then I asked them to define the words that I had been using.

Some of the language that I had been using in it.

I still have it.

I like, how did not.

You know, I wrote it out it with hand.

Hand wrote it.

And many of them gave me definitions that were completely not what I had ever talked about.

Right.

If I said, like, you.

I think one of them is like, make a vision pass around, you know, here.

And they like.

They were like, I don't know what that means.

It means keep your eyes open, you know, or like, lead pass down here or whatever it might be.

The language that I was using was different than the language they understood about what certain plays were or certain things that was on me.

It was such a big moment for me because I thought, here I have been doing this for so long, and sometimes I will yell the same thing over and over and over again.

And I might as well have been speaking German because nobody understood what I was saying.

And do we define like.

Let me ask you a question.

Do you know what shoulder width apart is?

It's the one thing that always bothers everybody.

Is it with everybody?

Everybody's shoulders are different lengths, right?

So if I'm trying to be specific, it's not really the most specific term that you can come up with.

Probably no.

And is it inside the shoulders, outside the shoulders?

Where should my feet be?

Right.

When we say square up to the basket, does that actually.

What does that entirely mean?

We say it and then we demonstrate.

But we don't actually define what those words are.

And then kids have no understanding of the language that we're using, but they're embarrassed to ask because you'll say, I've said it 15 times.

And that, you know, I think one of the things that I found interesting over the course of doing the podcast, Diana, is I've talked to a number of different coaches who have gone as far as to create a dictionary of terms that they use with their team and literally printed it out and given it to players where, here's the list of vocabulary of the things that are important that you need to have.

And I know that for myself.

And again, this goes back to a self awareness piece that one of the things that I am not very good at is that defining a vocabulary or to take it one step further, I'm terrible at naming drills during practice.

Best coaches, right?

They have.

We're running.

We're running the North Carolina drill.

We're running the Tennessee drill.

We're running what everybody.

You.

You yell out Tennessee.

Everybody knows what that is.

It takes them two seconds.

They're into it.

I'm the coach who's like, all right, we're going to do that drill, remember, where we have four lines and you're over here and.

And then the pass gets made there and they already know it.

We've done it all the time.

I just don't have a name for it.

So then I end up wasting 30 seconds or whatever to try to explain it every time.

But I think the point that you're making again, right, is that if you define those things, it makes it easier.

If you don't, then your players are coming back to you saying, we're not understanding this because you haven't defined it well enough.

And then if I'm self aware and I'm taking that feedback from my players, then I have to make a change and I have to do something different in order to be able to get them to understand what it is.

It's.

I think it's.

Think it's the John Wooden saying that if they haven't.

If they haven't learned, then you haven't taught, right?

That you haven't done.

You haven't taught it, you haven't taught it correctly.

Just like you with the woman and, and the juggling, right?

You just keep looking for different ways to be able to get the message through to whether it's your entire team that doesn't get it.

Maybe it's just one player that you have to figure out a way to do it differently as a teacher.

Right.

I spent 30 years teaching whether it was in the classroom or in the gym.

And there are some kids that get it naturally the way that I want to teach it.

And then there are other kids that I got to come up with something different because they're not getting it the way that I taught it to the whole group.

And maybe this kid needs something just a little bit different.

And so I think that again, looking at it through the lens of I have to figure out what I need to do differently in order to meet the needs of the players that I'm coaching.

And that's not to say that again as a coach, you can't change everything that you do.

For every single person there's some.

Obviously the players have to come just the same way you meet them or they are.

The players have to come meet you where you are to some degree.

It's a, it's a two way street there.

But I do think that it still comes back to me over and over and over again that if I'm self aware and then I'm intentional about what I do, but based off of that self awareness, that's going to take me a long way in being able to build my players, protect their confidence and help them to do the things that they need to do.

If I'm willing to self evaluate and then make changes based on that self evaluation, that my confidence is such that I know I'm not perfect, I've prepared, I've done what I need to do in order to be able to get out on the basketball court and teach our offense or run this drill or whatever.

But yet I can still go through an experience and learn that.

Ooh, maybe I can teach that a little bit differently or maybe I can tweak that drill just a little bit.

We can get even more out of it.

And that's what I learn.

And I have to be humble enough.

Right.

To be able to recognize that I didn't do it perfectly.

There's something that I can add to it to make it better.

And I think that self awareness piece is.

I keep coming back to that all the time.

That to me, if you're aware of what you're doing, it just allows you to grow in ways that I don't think people who just go through life and they're never stopping to reflect about what it is that they're practicing in their life or in their profession, they miss out on a lot of growth and opportunity to have a greater impact on the people around them.

I wholeheartedly agree with you.

And there is a level of humility that I think we've lost a little bit in coaching.

That idea of understanding our own flaws at times, understanding our own opportunities to learn and being kind of a student all the time.

And that doesn't mean learning new plays.

It doesn't mean, you know, all that stuff, which is what I call new learning, as opposed to the idea of adjusting and changing.

That's the hardest thing to do.

New learning is easy.

It's just putting new information in.

I don't have to filter it in any way and I don't have to reflect at all.

So we have tons of coaches that go to coaching clinics all the time around things, and they're just this consumption of new ideas and new learning and they go back and they take that as opposed to having that self reflection of looking at, going to those clinics, looking at things and saying, oh, wow, I've been doing that potentially incorrectly for this athlete or my team.

I wonder how I could do that differently.

And the more we can somewhat acknowledge that, you know, we live in this very weird system in sport which basically is the coach is all knowing, they, they make no mistakes and you cannot question them.

And it's very militaristic in some ways.

Like, it's very rooted in like kind of that idea of compliance and discipline.

And that's how we're successful.

This generation is railing against that.

That is not the system that they want to be in.

They want to be in a system like just what you're saying.

You do a drill.

You're not great at naming the drills, right?

Well, this group of young people coming up would love to be asked, hey, we just did this drill.

I don't have a name for it.

Do you have a name?

What could we use?

Right?

And now it's this very interactive way of being a part of the program as opposed to just being a pawn in a program.

And I think that's the shift that we have to make because again, there were this, this kind of romanticized view of what we have of the confident athlete is the athlete that walks in that doesn't, you know, take any crap that's like, you know, just keeps persevering.

Even if they're injured, they get up like that, nothing sets them down.

You know, that's, that's not human.

We have a romanticized view of what a confident athlete looks like.

And because we've romanticize this and we've created this idea, we are actually doing less to protect and connect athletes Back to their confidence.

We are actively extinguishing it.

We're creating all these opportunities where we're tying their worth to who they are, where they're comparing things, where we are giving them feedback only and giving them attention at times, only when they're either really good or they're really bad.

And that like building what you talked about earlier, that building relationship is never in there.

And we're missing opportunities to also just enjoy coaching.

I mean, you were a teacher, you were a coach.

I bet at the end of the day you stayed in it because there was a, you enjoyed it.

There was joy that was there.

And the joy came from the kids, not from the accolades or the press or, you know, we didn't have social media, all that kind of stuff.

It was that, just that joy.

And when you build that joy in yourself, you build that joy in them.

And I'm far more likely to want to participate and buy into something where I feel joy.

That doesn't always mean fun.

Fun and joy are two very different things.

Don't we want to create those opportunities now?

You, you know, creating joy is one of the greatest protectors of confidence.

It gives space to actually be present and be full in a moment.

And at the end of the day, I just feel like that's what we need to do, you know, especially young people.

I do feel like coaching, in all honesty, Diana, is, is definitely moving in that direction.

I'm not sure how fast it's moving in that direction, but when I, but when I think about the coaches that I played for, specifically I think about my coach that I played for in college, there was really zero back and forth dialogue of a coach coming to me and saying, hey, what did you see?

Or hey, what are we doing out there?

Is there something that you're seeing that we could do differently?

Or hey, in practice, what, what do you feel like helps the team be better or what does the team need today?

Like those conversations did not take place ever.

It was, this is what we're doing, this is what you're going to do.

And I don't really care what your input is or isn't.

This is what we're going to do.

And I talked to so many coaches today who tell me that I talk to my players, I try to get their feedback, I try to get their input.

And I do think the coaching profession, profession is beginning to shift in that way.

Much more so than it was again back when I was a player, whatever.

Now, 35 years ago, completely a different, a different set of scenarios.

But I do think it's moving in, in the right direction when it comes to that.

And like you said, I think when you, when you create that feeling of joy, you're going to create an athlete who not only is happier, but you're going to create one that's going to ultimately perform better.

I think this is, this myth is starting to go away, but I think for a long time there was this idea that playing with joy or having these relationships or connections or, or having conversations back and forth where it wasn't the coach from on high telling everyone, hey, this is what you have to do, that those softer things didn't always equate to winning.

And I think people are now starting to see that you can be a relational based coach and you can do some of the things that we're talking about.

You can coach with joy and still you can win.

Right?

You look at Steve Kerr with the warriors or you think of Pete Carroll on the football field and we can go through a whole bunch of different examples, right?

Like there's, there's so many, there's so many coaches that that's sort of the philosophy that they come at it with that have had a tremendous amount of success at the highest level.

And I think that's where ultimately we want to get to.

Because again, when you protect someone's confidence, you give them the ability to not only be a better performer in whatever it is that they're performing in, whether that's basketball or something else, but you also just again demonstrate their worth as a human being.

And I think that as somebody works through your book, as I'm reading through it and I'm thinking about how I would use this in my own life, I'm seeing how just as I go through each one of the chapters of the book and each one of set up as a week and AS4 seasons.

I'm going to ask you about that in a second.

But as I'm going through and I'm thinking about how I'm going to go about writing these things down and thinking about them, it still comes back to, again, I got to have that self awareness.

I've got to look at what are the things that are protecting my confidence, what are the things that I can continue to do that are going to get me to where I want to go.

So let me go back to the book and you have the book organized into, into four seasons over the course of a 52 week year.

But tell me how you came up with the idea for organizing it by seasons and what that process was like, for putting together that part of the book.

Yeah, I appreciate that.

So I wanted.

I kind of kept putting it into four sections in some ways.

And it was like, I'm connecting back to myself.

It's like that returning kind of home.

I'm expanding and like really understanding myself.

And then I wanted also some areas to focus on.

It's not just about protecting my confidence, but it's also about how communities protect how I protect the confidence of others, but how communities protect each other's confidence and the ways we do that.

And communities in this book can also just be seen as larger teams where a team is a community of people that are coming together in some ways to achieve something.

And I wanted to section it off in that because I wanted to actually give people space to be like, okay, I'm enough.

I'm going to focus on these 12 weeks.

And I put it in weeks because of just what you're saying.

It's a lot of self reflection, a ton of self reflection.

And that takes some time.

So it wasn't just like, sit down, read the book, do this in a day, do the next one in a day, do that.

Because, number one, that's sometimes too much self reflection.

Like, sometimes we need a little bit of space in between if we're constantly evaluating ourselves in some ways.

And I wanted it to feel like it was something that you could kind of just think about during the course of the week and be.

See it in different contexts, see it in different environments as you move through your week.

We are in the process, I'm in the process of writing the second book.

We're almost done with it, which is solely focused on sport.

But even in the meantime, what we're doing with this book is actually we've created some guides that we're going to put up in the next couple of weeks for coaches or teams or book clubs, whatever it might be, these facilitation guides to actually do this with people.

Because honestly, as much as I think it's great to do it by yourself, I think it's even better to do it with others.

Social learning as adults is so much better than just sitting and consuming something.

But if you're sitting with your team and you're talking about this, then you're actually, number one, building connection.

You're already protecting confidence and you're giving your athletes another opportunity to learn about each other.

Where do I.

What do I feel about this?

What do I need in these moments?

All of that.

And I think that's just super important.

You know, at the end of the day, I'm not going to be on Oprah's book club, you know, around anything.

But I really do want to start a movement of connecting people back to something they already have, which is that sense of confidence.

And if there is no legacy, I leave that.

And like the understanding that your worth.

You have worth before you were even born.

You know, I bet you loved your kids before you even saw them, right?

They had value and worth before they even stepped on this planet.

And if we can transfer that value and worth inherently back to ourselves, there's so much that's gonna, you know, it's.

It's just so valuable.

One of the things that you wrote about that struck me as I was going through was when you talked about understanding fundamentally who you are and asking yourself the question.

Before there were outside influences of the culture, of.

Of a person, of a group, of my workplace, before all those outside entities had their say about who I am or who I should be, I had an innate sense of who I was before all those outside influences got to have their say.

And you kind of talk about how you keep trying to come back to right, to protect your confidence.

You keep coming back to understanding who I am.

And then once I understand who I am, then that allows me to go out and interact in the world as my true self.

And that was something that struck me because obviously, we're all inside of our own head, and there are all times where sometimes we put forth something that we feel like we want to fit in, so we're kind of being this person who's maybe not our true self just so we can fit into this environment or so we can get this opportunity, or we think that someone wants us to be this.

So we kind of morph into that, even though we know deep down that maybe that's not exactly who we are.

So just talk a little bit about why that was such an important part to put into the book and how you think that might apply to, again, coaches, sports, just your experience with that.

I. I think being in sport as much as I can, all the way up through the professional level, especially seeing athletes who have recently retired or had stopped playing because of injury.

I saw how devastating it was that they really struggled to figure out, what do I do next?

Not because of a job, but because of an identity.

I don't know who I am without this.

There were people that, you know, we work with a lot of businesses that at times have layoffs, and a lot of those executives at the end are like, this is all I've known.

This is who I am.

I don't know myself.

And when you connect back to who you are, when you truly have a sense of self, then you can have affinity to those experiences.

Loved playing my sport.

Loved being the CEO of this tech company.

Loved that was meaningful to me.

But I exist.

Even if those things go away.

And the existence isn't a shell.

It's not.

I have to redefine myself.

It already is there.

And now I know, now I get to take on all of that.

That is me.

And go to the next thing.

And the next thing I will bring my full, complete self.

You know, I was lecturing in a college grad course several months ago, and an athlete was in the sports industry and a student asked me, you know, what do you think?

Like, do you have any advice on how we can get jobs and the ways that we should interview and what should we do and all of this.

And I said, this is gonna, this is easy for me to say because I'm in my 50s now, so I've like lived my, my life.

I said, but I wish that I had known this when I was, you know, your age.

And what it is, is no matter what you do, do not listen to all the people that say you should do this, this, and this during an interview.

You should, you know, talk like this or you should say this or whatever.

I said, you should do as much research as you can.

You should have an understanding of the business.

Just like anything, if you walked into someone's house for dinner, you wouldn't be like, oh, what are your names?

Right?

You would know as much as you possibly could about them.

You'd ask questions, you want to be curious, all of that.

Do not be anybody other than yourself, and don't feel like you have to be somebody other than yourself because once you start to be somebody else, it's very hard to go back to who you are, and it's very hard to connect back to that.

And it's the same with athletes.

Once we ask them to start being somebody other than who they are, right?

Once we connect our love, affection, attention, connection, whatever it might be, to just their performance, then they lose their sense of self.

And the challenge with that is I see it on the collegiate level, I see it on the professional level.

When you get to that place in that, then what happens is you don't know how to negate, navigate, setback.

When you are, have adversity, it becomes such a challenge to you because it is about not just you're not succeeding.

It is so directly tied to who you are and your ability to get love, attention, affection, recognition, sense of belonging that you lose yourself.

So the more we can help athletes connect to themselves and be themselves, right.

It means that if you have an athlete that is quiet and that is not a vocal leader in some ways, then stop trying to change them and start changing the system so that they actually can lead in the way that works for them and allow them the space to do that.

Right.

So how can I and allow them space to try?

Well, I'm going to try to like, use my voice a little bit more, you know, in this.

But the more that we, we try to change people because of an image we have of who they should be, then we take them away from who they already are.

And unfortunately, the world's going to do that anyway.

It's going to tell you how to look, it's going to tell you how to behave, it's going to tell you the relationship that you should be in, the relationship that you shouldn't be in.

Like, we already have that set up.

So if you can actually create a space where that doesn't happen, great.

You're just creating one more protective layer for that.

You know, young athlete or employee makes sense, right.

I think if you have a sense of who you are, it allows you to make better decisions in your life.

And you're not going to chase, oh, there's something over there.

Oh, there's something over there because.

Right.

You have, you have, you have a knowledge of who you are and what you're about.

And again, that goes well beyond sports and is a valuable skill tool, however you want to phrase it, for someone having a successful life.

And when you have the ability to understand who you are on a deeper, fundamental level, part of it is just in today's world, Diana, I feel like we're so go, go, go.

We so often have a screen in front of us that, and I know this is true in my own life that there's so many things that I either, quote, have to do, get to do, want to do.

Right.

The ability to sometimes just sit down and do the self reflection that we've been talking about.

Just sit with your own thoughts for five minutes is.

Yeah.

Like there are, there are days where I get to the end of the day and I'm like, you know, I have this like little journaling thing that I do that takes me maybe, it maybe takes me five minutes maybe.

And there are many days where I get to the end of the day and I'm like, didn't even spare five.

And like, I'm retired.

I'm like, I couldn't even.

I couldn't even find five minutes to, like, do my little journaling thing to really think about my day or whatever.

And in today's world, we really have to.

Again, I don't care.

Player, coach, business person, teacher, lawyer, whatever.

Like, the ability to just sit with your own thoughts for five or 10 minutes in a day or go for a walk without your headphones on or whatever, and just have time to think.

I feel like we don't carve up.

I know for me, like, I don't carve out enough time to just think instead.

I'm kind of always do, do, do instead of think, and then maybe I'd be a more productive doer or I'd be working and doing more things that might be more beneficial.

And so I do think that part of that is just getting the time to think about who you really are and who you really want to be.

And then how does that impact, again, whatever your profession is?

If you're a coach, do you ever spend 10 minutes just thinking about, hey, who is it that I am?

What is it that I want to do?

Where.

Where am I not connecting the dots that I need to connect the dots?

And look, I get it.

My life is the same as everybody else's in that there's always something else I could do or something else I can look at.

But I do think for anybody in any walk of life that just being able to, you know, step back and take a deep breath and just kind of figure yourself out is.

Is really the first step, I think, to.

To protecting your confidence.

Yeah, it's so true, that ability to just reflect.

I don't work out with music, so every morning I work out and I have zero music on.

My partner thinks I'm nuts.

And they're always like, it's so boring.

I don't know why you're doing that.

And it is.

I come up with the greatest ideas sitting in that space.

I have the best thoughts just working out and not having my head filled with something else.

Like, it's my thinking time.

So, yeah, sometimes just taking the time to quiet the noise actually allows the loudest voice in your head to come in, which is that positive, creative voice that we just don't hear sometimes.

Yeah, it's so true.

And it's not.

It's not easy to do.

And to go along with that, I want to ask you one question, more question about the.

The book itself.

In terms of just the organization of it.

So one of the things that you have at the end of every week is the confidence record, which is just a repetitive set of questions that the person is going to reflect on as they read each one of the weeks and kind of go through the.

The activity and the prompt and really thinking about it.

So how did you come up with.

I don't want you to go through each question one by one, but just how did you come up with the list of questions?

What was the process for thinking about what are the most important questions that I needed to have repeated at the end of each week for someone to reflect on?

Yeah, I'm so glad you asked because it's.

It was something that I kept going back on over and over again.

And, you know, I felt like, just like I'm a coach at heart.

That's what I've done.

I'm a.

You know, here I am talking about my own identity.

But, like, in that sense, like, the thing that brings me the most joy is coaching.

So I kept thinking, what.

What's the thing that helps us when we're learning?

Right?

And it is the.

The repetition of something and not just the repetition in the same environment, but the repetition in different environments.

So, like, as we expand our learning, we should be able to take in new and different information, right?

The more I understand my own confidence, my own worth, I should be able to ask the same question and almost get different answers.

So part of it was about that, for sure, and then part of it was also that each week I wanted people to identify the things that.

That were potentially extinguishing.

And the.

The goal is kind of twofold, one of which is the more awareness you have to the things that you identify as confidence extinguishers, the things that are coming for my confidence, then the more I can avoid them, right?

Or at least not avoid, but at least, like, work with that and have an understanding.

Like, oh, there's that thing.

It's coming again, right?

So I know and I.

And I can predict.

And what's predictable, even if it's stressful, is something I can manage.

What is uncertain and unpredictable at times can feel overwhelming in some sense.

But I also have a bit of a theory.

I haven't tested the theory, but I'm, you know, interested to see that over time, if you start to acknowledge your extinguishers and you start to acknowledge the ways in which you're protecting your confidence, over time, you will see less and less, you will have less extinguishers because you actually Will kind of cultivate a life where you've protected yourself, right.

So some of those extinguishers, you can't.

The world around us, we cannot necessarily change.

We're still humans on the planet.

But there might be people in your lives who you realize, wow, that's that friend.

You know, I always felt like there was something off, but now I realize like every time I'm with them, they're the ones coming and trying to extinguish my confidence.

Right.

A group that you're with, you might be like, this is just not the, the way that I do that.

Something that you do every day.

You're like, wow, you know, I go into this environment and actually I don't have to and I'm doing it.

I'm not quite sure why.

But then just as your point that self awareness actually helps you kind of cultivate a life that really helps you stay connected to your own sense of confidence.

I felt like when I was going through that, if I were filling that out, if I had read the book not in two days, but if I had gone through the proper process of doing it for a year, what struck me is that I would find kind of what you're saying, but I felt like I would find patterns, right.

Of this theme keeps repeating itself or this extinguisher keeps rising to the top.

And if I keep seeing it week after week after week, then I'm doing what you're saying, that maybe now I'm self reflective again.

And I say, well, this is something.

How can I get less of this?

How can.

Maybe I can't eliminate it completely because of whatever, but how can I get less of this in my life?

And looking for things positive, negative.

But I just kept thinking as, as I saw those questions repeated at the end of each week.

I kept thinking if I was doing this the way it was intended, I would see patterns.

And in those patterns I could then make adjustments in my behavior, where I go, who I'm with, all those kinds of things that you just talked about which would enable me to improve my life and protect that confidence.

Like, like the book's about, like the theme of the book.

Yeah, I'm going to, I'm going to steal your word.

I like the word pattern better.

I think it, it does it, it talks about when we can identify those patterns that we set up, then we can also potentially change them if we need to or just have awareness.

Right.

If going to see, you know, a relative is something that is a confidence protector, I can't avoid their relative I can't avoid them.

But I know when I walk in there the things I need to be saying to myself and have the understanding that I need to have, that's.

That's very different.

Yeah, absolutely.

I think we could probably talk for three more hours and continue to go even deeper into confidence.

But I feel like we've given people a really good sense of a.

What the book is about and be giving them some actionable things that they can think about.

And to me, that's been the most valuable part of our conversation.

Before we wrap up, Diana, I want to give you a chance to share with people where can they find the book?

Where can they find out about more.

Find out more about you, what you're doing with coaching.

Peace.

Just lay out all the places where people can find you, find the book, social media, email, whatever you feel comfortable with.

And then after you do that, I'll jump back in and wrap things up.

Fantastic.

Well, thank you, my friend.

If people are interested in the book, we are really committed to local independent bookstores.

So we're working through local independent bookstores.

However, you can purchase and get the book on our website, which is just ProtectYourConfidence.com and please pay attention to that website.

Keep coming back.

We're going to start putting more information up there.

We're going to put a.

Our guides up, our facilitation guides up there soon as well so that people can come in and if they want a facilitator, facilitate a group or a book club or something along those lines.

So again, it's ProtectYourConfidence.com at CoachingPeace, not just CoachingPeace.com we do a ton of workshops as well as retreats, off sites, team buildings.

And we do things really differently than what a lot of people see.

We really help people build those connections and better understand how they can, to use your word, set patterns up within their systems, their teams, their organizations that work most effectively for those teams so that they help reach the outcomes that they want to reach.

So reach out if there's anything that folks would like to do around any of that.

But I'm also just really excited if people get the book and they have feedback, good, bad or indifferent, I want to know, I really want to understand how people are using this book and the ways in which it's helpful and if there are things that potentially we can do differently.

I do plan on probably putting out a second edition at some point as well, just around this.

So I'm excited to hear from folks for sure.

For anyone who's out there in our audience listening, if you pick up a copy of the book, you are definitely going to learn more about yourself by going through it as it's intended, week by week.

And really, if you listen at all to the conversation tonight, you know how important the idea of being self aware and the reflection that you will do as you go through the book.

And I think that any coach who's out there that if you go through the exercises in the book that you will, as I said a few minutes ago, you will find patterns in your life of things that are adding to your confidence and you will find things that are attempting to erode your confidence and in finding out what those things are, then you can make changes in your life to again improve and protect your confidence.

So Diana, again, really well done on the book.

Congratulations on it.

I really enjoyed going through it and I can tell you that I'm going to try to go through it as it's intended, not just you, for over two or three days to prepare for a podcast.

But I'm excited to do that because as I've said many times over the last hour and a half, I think being self aware and trying to reflect is one of the things that as I get older that I try to carve out time to improve my life.

And I think that this book can definitely improve anyone's life who goes through and does it the way it's intended.

So kudos to you for doing that.

Thank you for taking the time out of your schedule tonight to join us and talk about it.

And to everyone out there, thanks for listening and we will catch you on our next episode.

Thanks.

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