ďťżHi Everyone and welcome back to the Hockey Journey Podcast, episode number 74, Leadership (Part 2), Presented to you by Online Hockey Training dot com. I'm your host Coach Lance Pitlick. If you're new here, please make sure you subscribe, so you won't miss out on any future episodes.Â
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As the first snowfall of the winter has been deposited here in Minnesota, that can mean only one thing, the hockey season has begun. Being around the game of hockey my whole life, for a majority of the years, I was tied to a team each season, as a player till 32 years of age or as a youth hockey coach for 17 years after that.
A hockey season can have so many story lines by spring time. Individuals and teams might have nothing but success and flow the entire year, but that would be the experience of the minority, as most of us travel a road that is packed with extremes in the next 4 to 6 month that will test our character and resolve.
I remember being on or coaching several teams, where I thought we really had a chance to do some damage, only to have the team be decimated by injury or sickness at critical times where we couldn't recover. Covid was the perfect example of this, as it forced teams to not think too far in the future, and they learned how to really battle when their backs were up against the wall.
During some of these tough stretches, there are some positives and new characters that emerge, as top players may be out, a secondary player gets more minutes, opportunity and all of the sudden flourishes and takes their game to another level.
I never noticed it as a player, but as coach, you see things from a different perspective. As I worked my way up to the older levels of coaching, peewee, bantam and high school, it became pretty consistent, there are 2 types of players, players who lead and players who don't.
Leaders are not better hockey players than non-leaders. Some verbally lead, by being the funny guy, the chatterbox and always keeps things light. Others lead by an incredible work ethic in practices and games. But where you really saw who the leaders weren't, was when in a high pressure cooker tournament or rival game and it goes into overtime.
There are players who say they want to be on the ice, a chance to be the hero, but they really don't and would prefer to be a spectator over possibly being the goat. But there's another group of players who want to be on the ice. They have a different confidence that sets them apart, and I don't know if it's because they aren't scared or nervous, or have they figured out that if you want to have a chance at the big prize or moment, you have to be willing to risk it all.
Sometimes the moment is a pass, shot or save. Other times it could be making a diving clearing play, or standing in front of a slap shot in the dying seconds. All big moments take courage to accept the challenge and do the best you possibly can do.
Some of you out there may already be on a path of leadership, others maybe haven't thought about it much, until now. What I'd like to do with the rest of this episode, is share with you some quotes from some books that helped me learn more about what leadership is and how to acquire more leadership qualities. I considered myself a quiet lead by example type player, but by no means am I an expert in the field. But, there are many that have made the topic of leadership their life's work and I'd like to share with you some of their most important and impactful findings, with the hope that the wisdom you're about to hear will help you become a little better version of yourself!
For the following books I'm going to reference, know that I'm only scratching the surface of all the learning nuggets in each of the titles. If something resonates with you from a certain book, by the end of this episode, I highly encourage you to pick up a copy of your own and read it in its entirety. I'll put the links to each of the titles in the description. Ready to get our leadership on? Let's begin.
Book Number One
On Becoming a Leader
By Warren Bennis
Quote #1
âOn Becoming a Leader is based on the assumption that leaders are people who are able to express themselves fully. By this I mean that they know who they are, what their strengths and weaknesses are, and how to fully deploy their strengthsand compensate for their weaknesses. They also know what they want, why they want it, and how to communicate what they want to others, in order to gain their cooperation and support. Finally, they know how to achieve their goals. The keyto full self-expression is understanding oneâs self and the world, and the key to understanding is learningâfrom oneâs own life and experience. Becoming a leader isnât easy, just as becoming a doctor or a poet isnât easy, and those who claim otherwise are fooling themselves. But learning to lead is a lot easier than most of us think it is, because each of us contains the capacity for leadership. âŚÂ At bottom, becoming a leader is synonymous with becoming yourself. Itâs precisely that simple, and itâs also that difficult. So letâs get started.â (End Quote)
Quote #2
LEADERSHIP: LETâS START WITH THE BASICS (V + P + I + T + C + D)Â
âLeaders come in every size, shape, and dispositionâshort, tall, neat, sloppy, young, old, male, and female. Nevertheless, they all seem to share some, if not all, of the following ingredients:Â
⢠The first basic ingredient of leadership is a guiding vision. The leader has a clear idea of what he or she wants to doâprofessionally and personallyâand the strength to persist in the face of setbacks, even failures. Unless you know where youâre going, and why, you cannot possibly get there. ...
⢠The second basic ingredient of leadership is passionâthe underlying passion for the promises of life, combined with a very particular passion for a vocation, a profession, a course of action. The leader loves what he or she does and loves doing it. ...
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⢠The next basic ingredient of leadership is integrity. I think there are three essential parts of integrity: self-knowledge, candor, and maturity. ...
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⢠Integrity is the basis of trust, which is not as much an ingredient of leadership as it is a product. It is the one quality that cannot be acquired, but must be earned. ...Â
⢠Two more ingredients of leadership are curiosity and daring. Leaders wonder about everything, want to learn as much as they can, are willing to take risks, experiment, try new things. They do not worry about failure, but embrace errors, knowing they will learn from them. Learning from adversity is another theme that comes up again and again in this book, often with different spins.âÂ
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Bennis continues: âBroad education, boundless curiosity, boundless enthusiasm, contagious optimism, belief in people and teamwork, willingness to take risks, devotion to long-term growth rather than short-term profit, commitment to excellence, adaptive capacity, empathy, authenticity, integrity and vision.â (End Quote)
Quote #3
SELF-INVENTION = KEY TO LEADERSHIPÂ
âI cannot stress too much the need for self-invention. To be authentic is literally to be your own author (the words derive from the same Greek root), to discover your own native energies and desires, and then to find your own way of acting on them. When youâve done that, you are not existing simply in order to live up to an image posited by the culture or by some other authority or by a family tradition. When you write your own life, then no matter what happens, you have played the game that was natural for you to play. ... it is your task to break out of such limits and live up to your potential, to keep the covenant with your youthful dreams.â (End Quote)
Quote #4
LEADERS TRUST THEIR âBLESSED IMPULSEâ (DO YOU?)Â
âA part of whole-brain thinking includes learning to trust what Emerson called the âblessed impulse,â the hunch, the vision that shows you in a flash the absolutely right thing to do. Everyone has these visions; leaders learn to trust them. I want to remind you here of something Norman Lear said regarding the profound influence that Emersonâs Self-Reliance had on his growth as a leader: âEmerson talks about listening to that inner voice and going with it, all voices to the contrary. I donât know when I started to understand that there was something divine about that inner voiceâI certainly didnât in high school, college, or even in young manhoodâbut somewhere along the line, I appreciated that, too. How is it possible that as a writer I can go to bed a thousand times with a second act problem and wake up with the answer? Some inner voice. To go with thatâwhich I confess I donât do all the timeâis the purest, truest thing we have. And when we forgo our own thoughts and opinions, they end up coming back to us from the mouths of others. They come back with an alien majesty. . . . So the lesson is, you believe it. When Iâve been most effective, Iâve followed that inner voice.â Following the âblessed impulseâ is, I think, basic to leadership. This is how guiding visions are made real.â (End Quote)
Bonus Quote #5
EXPRESSING YOURSELF VS. PROVING YOURSELFÂ
âSome people are born knowing what they want to do, and even how to do it. The rest of us arenât so lucky. We have to spend some time figuring out what to do with our lives. Vague goals, such as âI just want to be happyâ or âI want to live wellâ or âI want to make the world a better placeâ or even âI want to be very, very rich,â are nearly useless. ...What do you want? The majority of us go through life, often very successfully, without ever asking, much less answering, this most basic question. The most basic answer, of course, is that you want to express yourself fully, for that is the most basic human drive. As one friend put it, âWe all want to learn how to use our own voices,â and it has led some of us to the peak and some of us to the depths. How can you best express you?â (End Quote)
Bonus Quote #6
TRUST: 4 INGREDIENTS TO GENERATING + SUSTAININGÂ
âThe underlying issue in leading from voice is trustâin fact, I believe that trust is the underlying issue in not only getting people on your side, but having them stay there. There are four ingredients leaders have that generate and sustain trust:Â
1. Constancy. Whatever surprises leaders themselves may face, they donât create any for the group. Leaders are all of a piece; they stay the course.Â
2. Congruity. Leaders walk their talk. In true leaders, there is no gap between the theories they espouse and the life they practice.Â
3. Reliability. Leaders are there when it counts; they are ready to support their co-workers in the moments that matter.Â
4. Integrity. Leaders honor their commitments and promises.Â
When those four factors are in place, people will be on your side. Again, these are the kinds of things that canât be taught. They can only be learned.â (End Quote)
Bonus Quote #7
WORLD-CLASS LEADERS: WILL YOU BE ONE OF THEM?Â
âBecoming a leader is not an orderly path. It is a fitful, often painful process that involves wrong turns and dead ends before great strides are made. Usually some transformative event or experience is central to finding oneâs voice, learning how to engage others through shared meaning, and acquiring the other skills of leadership. FDRâs lifetime struggle with polio was most certainly his crucible of leadership. Instead of simply enduring hard times, we have to seize every opportunity for transformation they afford. In recent weeks, as the stock market rocked and rolled, I thought of what Abigail Adams had written to John Quincy Adams in the turbulent days of 1780: âThese are the hard times in which a genius should wish to live. . . . Great necessities call forth great leaders.âÂ
It is significant, I think, that Adams chose the plural, leaders. . . . It is easy to forget that we need more than one gifted leader at a time. At the founding of the United States, when our population was less than 4 million, we had six towering leaders: Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison, Franklin, and Adams. Now that we number more than 304 million people, we are surely capable of yielding at least 600 world-class leaders in this country alone. Will you be one of them?â (End Quote)
Book Number TwoÂ
Lead Yourself First
Inspiring Leadership Through Solitude
By Raymond M. Kethledge and Michael S. Erwin
Quote #1
âTo lead others you must first lead yourself. That, ultimately, is the theme of this book. Leadership, as Dwight Eisenhower defined it, is âthe art of getting someone else to do something that you want done because he wants to do it.â That does not mean that leadership amounts to using people; like anyone else, a leader must recognize that each person is an end in himself. It means, instead, to make others embrace your goals as their own. But to do that you must first determine your goals. And you must do that with enough clarity and conviction to hold fast to your goalsâ even when, inevitably, there are great pressures to yield from them. To develop that clarity and conviction of purpose, and the moral courage to sustain it through adversity, requires something that one might not associate with leadership. That something is solitude.â (End Quote)
Quote #2
SOLITUDE IN THE INPUT AGEÂ
âSolitude has been instrumental to the effectiveness of leaders throughout history, but now they (along with everyone else) are losing it with hardly any awareness of the fact. Before the Information Ageâwhich one could also call the Input Ageâleaders naturally found solitude anytime they were physically alone, or when walking from one place to another, or while standing in line. Like a great wave that saturates everything in its path, however, handheld devices deliver inmeasurable quantities of information and entertainment that now have virtually everyone instead staring down at their phones. Society did not make a considered choice to surrender the bulk of its time for reflection in favor of time spent reading tweets or texts. Yet, with an awareness of what we have lost, each of us can choose to reclaim it. And leaders inparticularâwhose actions by definition affect not only themselvesâhave more than a choice. They have an obligation. A leader has not only permission, but a responsibility, to seek out periods of solitude.â (End Quote)
Quote #3
SOLITUDEâS BIG 4Â
âClarity is often a difficult thing for a leader to obtain. Concerns of the present tend to loom larger than potentially greater concerns that lie farther away. Some decisions by their nature present great complexity, whose many variables must align a certain way for the leader to succeed. Compounding the difficulty, now more than ever, is what ergonomists call information overload, where a leader is overrun with inputsâvia e-mails, meetings, and phone callsâthat only distract and clutter his thinking. ... Solitude offers ways for leaders to obtain greater clarity. A leader who thinks through a complexproblem by hard analytical workâas Eisenhower did before D-dayâcan identify the conditions necessary to solve it. A leader who silences the din not only around her mind, but inside it, can then hear the delicate voice of intuition, which may have already made connections that her conscious mind has not.â (End Quote)
Quote #4
MLKâS MORAL COURAGEÂ
âKing had been told the same thing. And he knew that the parallel went a step further. Black Americans have long identified with the Israelites of the Old Testament, who were persecuted by the pharaoh. After Moses leads the Israelites out of Egypt, they wander the desert for forty years. Finally God tells Moses to âget thee up this mountain,â from whose top God says he will allow Moses to see the Promised Land. And God says he will give this land âunto the children of Israel for a possessionâ (Deuteronomy 32:48-49). But God will not let Moses himself go there; instead, God says, Moses will die on the mountain. Moses then climbs up the mountain, sees the Promised Land, and dies.â (End Quote)
Bonus Quote #5
FOMO <- GET OVER ITÂ
âIn some quarters there is a âfear of missing outâ: a fear that, if one unplugs from e-mail or news services or social media even for a few hours, theyâll be less current (a few hours less, to be exact) than their peers. And indeed that is true. But tracking all these inputs is surrender to the Lilliputians. One simply cannot engage in anything more than superficial thought when cycling back and forth between these tweets and work. And most of the inputs are piecemeal, and thusworthless anyway. As with our obsession with smartphones, one needs to make a choice about whether to engage in this kind of practice. And no one serious about his responsibilities will choose to engage in it.â (End Quote)
Bonus Quote #6
HOW TO CHANGE THE COURSE OF HISTORY (<- LETâS!)Â
âThe effect of this solitude upon Churchill is hard to overstate. Churchill was a romantic who believed his nation was centered upon principles thatâas Churchill himself put itâwere at first a distant glimmer through the primeval mists, but that, as the centuries marched forward, emerged as gleaming ideals, whose light then shone across the centuries that followed... Churchill believed further that great men, possessed of the great emotion that these ideals inspire, could change the course of historyâand that he was such a man. And thus, night after night, as Churchill paced back and forth across his study, he delivered not only to his readers, but to himself, a verbal history that inspired unshakable convictions within his soul. Churchillâs study of history gave him perspective as well. Churchill saw his time and his own actions in the sweep of history, whose protagonistsâking Arthur and Alfred, among othersâ struggled against evil and adversity in their time just as he struggled against those things in his. Their example reassured him in times of deep adversity; and the vibrancy of their legend, centuries later, revealed to him that in great adversity there is opportunity for lasting honor andgloryâthat, even âif the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years,â as he put it in June 1940, his own deeds might yet be remembered.â (End Quote)
Book Number Three
It Worked for Me
In Life and Leadership
By General Colin Powell
Quote #1
âI love stories. In the course of my career, I gathered a number of them that mean a lot to me. Most come from my military life. I was in the military from age seventeen, as an ROTC cadet, until I was a retired GI at age fifty-six. Others came from my service as Secretary of State or National Security Advisor. Yet others came to me as I just wandered through life. In this book I want to share with you a selection of these stories and experiences that have stayed with me over the years; each one of them taught me something important about life and leadership. I offer them to you for whatever use you may wish to make of them. As you will see, there are no conclusions or recommendations, just my observations. The chapters are freestanding. You can read them straight through or jump in anywhere. Everyone has life lessons and stories. These are mine. All I can say is that they worked for me.â (End Quote)
Quote #2
THE THIRTEEN RULESÂ
âShortly after I arrived at FORSCOM (Armâs Forces Command), Parade magazine, the longrunning Sunday supplement with a readership of more than fifty million people, asked to do a cover story about me and my new assignmentâone of those short personal articles aimed at Americans reading their Sunday newspapers over coffee. ... Its author, David Wallechinsky, a highly skilled journalist, needed a hook to close the piece. One of my secretaries, Sergeant Commie Brown, urged him to ask me about the couple of dozen snippets of paper shoved under the glass cover on my desktopâquotes and aphorisms that I had collected or made up over the years. David called and asked if I would read off a few. Thethirteen I read him appeared in a sidebar in the article. After they were first printed in Paradeâto my great surpriseâthe Thirteen Rules caught on. Over the past twenty-three years, my assistants have given out hundreds of copies of that list in many different forms; they have been PowerPointed and flashed around the world on the Internet. Here are my rules and the reasons I have hung on to them.â (End Quote)
Hereâs the super quick look at the list:Â
1. IT AINâT AS BAD AS YOU THINK. IT WILL LOOK BETTER IN THE MORNING.Â
2. GET MAD, THEN GET OVER IT.Â
3. AVOID HAVING YOUR EGO SO CLOSE TO YOUR POSITION THAT WHENÂ YOUR POSITION FALLS, YOUR EGO GOES WITH IT.Â
4. IT CAN BE DONE.Â
5. BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU CHOOSE. YOU MAY GET IT.Â
6. DONâT LET ADVERSE FACTS STAND IN THE WAY OF A GOOD DECISION.Â
7. YOU CANâT MAKE SOMEONE ELSEâS DECISIONS. YOU SHOULDNâT LETÂ SOMEONE ELSE MAKE YOURS.Â
8. CHECK SMALL THINGS.Â
9. SHARE CREDIT.Â
10. REMAIN CALM. BE KIND.Â
11. HAVE A VISION. BE DEMANDING.Â
12. DONâT TAKE COUNSEL OF YOUR FEARS OR NAYSAYERS.Â
13. PERPETUAL OPTIMISM IS A FORCE MULTIPLIER.
That's a pretty solid list don't you think?
Quote #3
PERPETUAL OPTIMISMÂ
âIn the military, we are always looking for ways to leverage up our forces. Having greater communications and command and control over your forces than your enemy has over his is a force multiplier. Having greater logistics capability than the enemy is a force multiplier. Having better-trained commanders is a force multiplier. Perpetual optimism, believing in yourself, believing in your purpose, believing you will prevail, and demonstrating passion and confidence is a force multiplier. If you believe and have prepared your followers, the followers will believe.â (End Quote)
Quote #4
IT CAN BE DONEÂ
ââIt can be done.â This familiar quotation is on a desk plaque given to me by the great humorist Art Buchwald. Once again, it is more about attitude than reality. Maybe it canât be done, but always start out believing you can get it done until facts and analysis pile up against it. Have a positive and enthusiastic approach to every task. Donât surround yourself with instant skeptics. At the same time, donât shut out skeptics and colleagues who give you solid counterviews. âIt can be doneâ should not metamorphose into a blindly can-do approach, which leaves you running into brick walls. I try to be an optimist, but I try not to be stupid.â (End Quote)
Bonus Quote #5
THE ZONE OF CALMÂ
âFew people make sound or sustainable decisions in an atmosphere of chaos. The more serious the situation, usually accompanied by a deadline, the more likely everyone will get excited and bounce around like water on a hot skillet. At those times I try to establish a calm zone but retain a sense of urgency. Calmness protects order, ensures that we consider all the possibilities, restores order when it breaks down, and keeps people from shouting over each other. You are in a storm. The captain must steady the ship, watch all the gauges, listen to all the department heads, and steer through it. If the leader loses his head, confidence in him will be lost and the glue that holds the team together will start to give way. So assess the situation, move fast, be decisive, but remain calm and never let them see you sweat. The calm zone is part of an emotional spectrum that I work to maintain.â (End Quote)
Bonus Quote #6
PLANS: TO BE REVISED THE MOMENT EXECUTION STARTSÂ
âPlans are neither successful nor unsuccessful until they are executed. And the successful execution of a plan is more important than the plan itself. I was trained to expect a plan to need revision at the moment execution starts, and to always have a bunch of guys in a back room thinking about what could go right or wrong and making contingency plans to deal with either possibility. The leader must be agile in thought and action. He must be ready to revise a plan, or dump it, if it isnât working or if new opportunities appear. Above all, the leader must never be blinded by the perceived brilliance of his plan or personal investment in it. The leader must watch the execution from beginning to end and do what it tells him.â (End Quote)
Bonus Quote #7
FEAR AND FAILURE: ARE ALWAYS PRESENTÂ
âI probably learned as much from failures and my naysayers as from my supporting rabbis. Failure comes with experience.I recall a few years ago speaking at an elite and very highly structured Japanese high school. The kids were from good families and mostly very bright. After my remarks, designated kids from the honor roll lined up to ask me questions typed out on cards and fully vetted by their teachers. After the first couple of questions, I turned away from the line and invited questions from anyone in the audience, with my eyes particularly focused on the back rows, where I used to try to sit. One girl about thirteen years old raised her hand, and I called on her. âAre you ever afraid?â she asked. âI am afraid every day,â she continued. âI am afraid to fail.â How brave she was to ask that question in public in a very structured Japanese high school. Yes, I told her. Iâm afraid of something every day, and I fail at something every day. Fear and failure are always present. Accept them as part of life and learn how to manage these realities. Be scared, but keep going. Being scared is usually transient. It will pass. If you fail, fix the causes and keep going. The room was deadly silent. Every one of the young high achievers had the same question before their mind, even if they were too scared to put voice to it.â (End Quote)
I told you we were going to get our leadership on! What colossal idea jumped out at you? General Colin Powell's "Thirteen Rules" is a good place to start. For me, what really stuck out was that there are some parts of leadership you can't acquire, you have to earn!
Well that concludes another episode of the hockey journey podcast.  I canât thank you enough for stopping by and listening. I hope you enjoyed this second podcast on leadership. If you think thereâs someone in your circle of family and friends that might like this episode as well, please share it with just one person, it will really help me in growing this hockey community.
Again, I appreciate you being here, donât forget to subscribe, rate or submit a review, I hope to see you back here soon, and do me a favor, make someone close to you smile today. All the best my friends!!
