Good day leaders,

Today I will add some notes from Chasing Excellence by Ben Bergeron. 

As mentioned before, I know some coaches feel they do not have a great deal of time to read so I have created keywords (themes) for you to find, depending on your interest and need, throughout this post. So hit Command+f on a Mac or control+f on a PC to find something specific within one or more of the themes I have created. Additionally, if you are reading this on your phone, turn it sideways (landscape view) for a more reading-friendly view. The themes are as follows:

• Quotes
• Adversity
• Becoming the Best
• Clutch
• Confidence
• Control
• Deliberate Practice
• Excellence
• Expectations
• Grit
• Humility
• Mental Toughness
• Positivity
• Process
• Work Ethic

Quotes

• "Gentlemen, we will chase perfection, and we chase it relentlessly, knowing all the while we can never attain it. But along the way, we shall catch excellence." - Vince Lombardi (Pg. 21)
• "There are no secrets, there are no tricks. If anything, it's the opposite; Whether you are a pro athlete or a guy running a business, or driving a truck or going to school, it's simple. Ask yourself where you are now and where you want to be instead. Ask yourself what you're willing to do to get there. Then make a plan to get there." - Tim Grover (Pg. 30)
• "Whatever the endeavour, I've come to the conclusion that the most successful people have some of what we call natural talent, but no so much that it makes them complacent. They're brimming over with the character traits that promote patient, persistent, hard work. Their physical talents are sufficient to persuade them that they can be as successful as they want to be, but only if they work very hard and work very smart." - Dr. Bob Rotella (Pg. 31-32)
• "Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work." - Thomas Edison (Pg. 33)
• "Today I will do what others won't so tomorrow I can do what others can't." - Jerry Rice (Pg. 47)
• "Never whine. Never complain. Never make excuses." (Pg. 65)
• "It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change." - Charles Darwin (Pg. 82)
• "Exceptional competitors understand that the primary competition is themselves. They understand that the biggest struggle is always the one within, the struggle to bring their best physical and mental self to the competition floor and maintain that presence until they cross the finish line." - Bob Rotella (Pg. 92)
• "Only those who have the patience to do things perfectly will acquire the skills to do difficult things easily." - Friedrich Schiller (Pg. 121)
• "Don't think about winning the SEC Championship. Don't think about the national championship. Think about what you need to do in this drill, on this play, in this moment. That's the process: Let's think about what we can do today, the task at hand." - Nick Saban (Pg. 125)
• "I will maximize my minutes by thinking, acting, training, and competing with excellence, regardless of circumstances." (Pg. 175)
• "In any game played with the body, it's the head that counts." - James Kerr (Pg. 181)
• "Vision without action is a dream. Action without vision is a nightmare." (Pg. 193)
• "There is no golden road to excellence; excellence is the golden road. Until you start down this road, you'll never have a chance of getting there." (Pg. 196)

Adversity

• It's important to realize that the toughest days are your best days, because they have the potential to force the most adaptation - mentally, as well as physically. (Pg. 76)
• The problem with limiting yourself to training, practicing, and living within your comfort zone is that it prevents you from growing and reaching your full potential. We need to struggle because the struggle is what makes us better - the struggle is itself the journey. (Pg. 79)
• Part of leveraging adversity is expecting it. (Pg. 81)
• By not preparing for adversity, you're setting yourself up to fail when it arrives. (Pg. 84)
• Michael Phelps competes with a championship mindset and exemplifies what it means to visualize and expect adversity. During the 200-meter Butterfly at the Beijing Olympic Games, Phelps was contending for his tenth Olympic gold medal, which would have made him the most decorated Olympian of all time. He already held the world record for the event and, as he stepped onto the starting platform, he was favored to win by a comfortable margin. Then disaster struck - as soon as Phelps dove in, his goggles started filling with water. By the time he reached the turnaround, he couldn't see anything at all. Despite this, he never missed a beat; if you watch the video, you can't even tell there is a problem. He wins a gold medal and breaks his own world record while swimming completely blind. At the most elite level of competition, Michael Phelps overcame an obstacle that would have ruined the chances of almost everyone else. He did it by expecting adversity - and expecting to overcome it. (Pg. 84-85)
• To be ultimately prepared, you don't plan for the best-case scenario; you plan for every scenario. (Pg. 86)

Becoming the Best

• At the highest levels, everyone is the best. If you're a CrossFit Games athlete, it's a question you spend a lot of time considering. Every competitor at the CrossFit Games is physically and mentally formidable. Everyone has areas where they shine a little brighter or struggle a bit more; but on the whole, the differences in physical ability are negligible. So, what are the separators? How do you train to come out on top? (Pg. 28)
• It starts with the development of the person, of the character traits necessary to achieve at a high level. These character traits enable my athletes to follow a rigorous process designed to utilize every minute of every day toward improvement and progress. The process allows us to maximize every ounce of their abilities, which in turn shapes our strategy. (Pg. 28)
• It then moves to process which is about defining the controllables that can make you a better performer and maximizing your capabilities in every single one of those areas with a commitment bordering on obsession. (Pg. 28-29)
• Committing to a process requires a unique set of character traits - things like grit, resilience, accountability, confidence, optimism, perseverance, and passion. (Pg. 31)

Clutch

• Clutch, simply put, is the ability to do what you can do normally under immense pressure. (Pg. 190)
• If you want to be clutch, you need to strengthen your skills and prepare every day for those high-pressure moments. (Pg. 191)

Confidence

• People think confidence is the belief that you have the ability to win, or at least to compete with the best. But that's not what confidence is, or where it comes from. Confidence has nothing to do with outcome. In most sports you aren't going to "win" most of the time. (Pg. 90)
• The greatest golf and tennis players of all time have one to two dozen major wins, but they compete in ten times that many tournaments, so they are losing much more than they are winning. The best hitters in baseball are successful three to four times out of ten. Michael Jordan was entrusted with taking the final game-winning shot fifty-one times in his NBA career, but missed twenty-six times. (Pg. 90)
• Confidence doesn't come from knowing that you control the outcome of a given event or moment. It comes from knowing that you control your response to a given event. Confidence is about your competitive drive, your focus, positivity, perseverance, and grit, and whether you can maintain those characteristics when it matters most. Can you maintain the characteristics of a champion, regardless of what life throws at you? If you can - that's confidence. (Pg. 90-91)
• Urban Meyer's Success Equation (pg. 91)
• Event + Response = Outcome
• Successful people focus on the R part of the equation, while unsuccessful people tend to focus too much on the E part. 
• As a coach you are not going to restore confidence by pumping the athlete up with motivational one-liners; rather you can do so by re-framing the competition to where being successful would be manageable and within the athlete's control. (Pg. 93)
• True confidence is being secure in the knowledge that full committing to training and competing with excellence is enough, even if that excellence doesn't produce victories. (Pg. 97)
• Think like a bumblebee, train like a racehorse. (Pg. 97-101)
• Race horses are special. They're not like any other horse, they're elite athletes, and they know it. They train with heart monitors, they do interval workouts, they have coaches and massage therapists, they eat a special diet, and they have recovery protocols. It sounds like I'm describing a human athlete. And I very well could be because top race horses and top human athletes are similar in just about every way but one. That one difference is crucial, and it gives race horses a huge advantage over us. Race horses can't think for themselves, I get it; that doesn't sound like an advantage. But think about it, race horses are incapable of second guessing their coaches over analyzing their performance or logging junk miles, they're unable to sandbag a workout if they're not feeling up for training on a particular day. They don't look at other horses and compare themselves, or wonder if they're with the right coach and training program. On race day they don't walk up by the stalls of their competitors and think, holy crap "Look at the legs on him. How am I going to compete with that race horses just perform." They can't second guess anything. And they have no biological choice but to have a laser focus on the task at hand.They're able to do what we try to get our human athletes to do as naturally as breathing, when they win they don't change anything about their routine, and they aren't fundamentally changed. The next day, it's just another training day because winning or losing is just part of the process, not the endpoint. Race horses aren't biologically capable of understanding what their competitors are doing. They're completely focused on themselves. That's where I want my athletes. If an athlete's goal is to best their competitor, then, by definition, they're not reaching their full potential - they're simply clearing the bar of the next guy's potential. 
• Bumblebees are the other side of the confidence coin. Bumblebees are physically improbable creatures that somehow exist and fly around contrary to every physical law that states they shouldn't be able to. They're relatively huge, heavy, furry animals, with proportionally tiny wings. Before anyone took the time to actually figure out how bumblebees stay in the air. the popular folklore saying was (and actually, still is): "According to physics, bumblebees can't fly, but nobody ever explained physics to bumblebees, so they fly around anyway." Where this relates to the athlete mindset is that flying is what it should be doing; so, contrary to natural laws of the world, it keeps on doing exactly what it believes it is capable of doing. 
• Confidence is a character trait that develops from defining success in terms that can be controlled by the athlete. (Pg. 102)
• Tying success or failure to one single point in time, one event over which you really don't have much control of the circumstances, sets you up for unavoidable failure because there's no way anyone can win every single time. (Pg. 102)
• It's important to be able to turn the page after a bad competition. Staying in a negative mindset will undermine confidence. (Pg. 154)

Control

• As an elite athlete, there are only five things that you can truly control - your training, nutrition, sleep, recovery, and mindset. If it doesn't fall into one of those categories, I tell my athletes, forget about it. (Pg. 139)
• Control Vs. Concern Exercise (Pg. 140)
• Have athletes write down every possible thing they could think of that could go wrong prior to the competition. 
• Go through each one by one, categorize each item into things that can and cannot be controlled. The things that can be controlled are to be erased, and the things we can control. 
• Those that can be controlled get a plan.
• Playing your game while adjusting for someone else's is like trying to inhale and exhale at the same time. (Pg. 146)
• It's easy to compete with excellence when things are going your way; maintaining your composure when everything seems to be working against you is far more impressive. (Pg. 147)
• We need to learn how to take advantage of the next available moments, which are not affected whatsoever by what just happened. It's gone. Once it's happened, it no longer exists. (Pg. 157)
• Living in the past is a liability that will diminish future opportunities. (pg. 157)
• Reliving the past is a recipe for unnecessary depression, and fearing the future is a surefire way to anxiety. Learning to live in the present moment is vital, because it's the only thing you have any control over. The only thing you can do to rectify the past or influence the future is to take action now, in the present moment. (Pg. 157)

Deliberate Practice (Pg. 113)

• Can be characterized by the following four elements:
1. It's designed specifically to improve performance. 
2. It is repeated a lot. 
3. Feedback on results is continuously available.
4. It's highly demanding mentally, and not necessarily or particularly enjoyable, because it means you are focusing on improving areas in your performance that are not satisfactory. 

Excellence

• Excellence is maximizing everything you have in the categories that matter to your long-term goals. (Pg. 40)
• No matter what your craft is, there's a question you should continually ask yourself: Am I committing everything I have to make myself the tiniest percentage better than I am right now, no matter how hard I have to work, no matter what I have to give up, no matter how long it takes? (pg. 40)

Expectations

• Ben never expects me, or any other athlete, to do more than we are capable of, but he always expects us to give everything we have. (Pg. 15)

Grit

• What is grit, really? It's a word that's been used to describe everything under the sun, but it means something specific: when things get hard, you push harder; when you fail, you get back up stronger; when you don't see results, you don't get discouraged, but you just continue to pound away day after day, after day, with relentlessness, consistency, heart, and passion - that's grit. (Pg. 54)
• To win, you have to be talented, yes. But talent without grit is just potential. Talent plus grit is unstoppable. (Pg. 57)

Humility

• When you reach a certain level, it's far easier to hide in your strengths because of the ego-boost they provide - you feel food, you look good, and people are in awe. But it's a trap; the moment you believe you've arrived at the door of greatness, it will be slammed in your face. (Pg. 165-166)
• Most people define learning too narrowly as mere "problem-solving," so they focus on identifying and correcting errors in the external environment. Solving problems is important. But if learning it to persist, they must also look inward. They need to reflect critically on their own behavior, identify the ways they often inadvertently contribute to the organization's problems, and then change how they act. (Pg. 166)
• Double Loop Learning (Pg. 166-167)
• Single-loop learners search for external factors to explain why they're not succeeding; they put it down as having the wrong coach, the wrong program, the wrong equipment, the wrong people around the, or what have you Double-loop learners iterate, and then look inward for the solutions to problems that arise. They're the kind of people who can take a hard look in the mirror and tell their reflection, "I'm the reason I'm not succeeding," and then proactively change into a better version of themselves. They figure out their weaknesses, fix them, test, and then reevaluate; in the cycle, there is always a deep look inward built in. 

Mental Toughness

• We can condition our resolve for excellence or weakness, for resiliency or rigidity. At our best, mental toughness can fill the gaps that our talent and our practice have left open. (Pg. 23)
• When physical abilities are equal, mindset becomes the separator. (Pg. 158)

Positivity

• When you're in a negative mindset, you're slower and less precise. (Pg. 65)
• If you stay positive, you perform with greater speed and accuracy. (Pg. 65)
• Athletes need to be in a positive mindset in order to get the work out of them that will maximize their potential. (Pg. 65)
• An optimistic mindset is a distinguishable characteristic of elite performers because what the human mind focuses on and talks about is what we see more of Stanford Professor Arnold Zwicky calls this the "frequency illusion", which is essentially a phenomenon that causes you to see more of the things you're already focused on. This is caused, he says, by two psychological processes. (Pg. 66-67)
1. Selective attention - Consciously keeping an eye out from something your struck (metaphorically) by.
2. Confirmation bias - Reassures you that each sighting is further proof of your impression that the thing has gained overnight omnipresence. 
• Positivity doesn't guarantee anything, but it can lower perceived exertion, make things seem more enjoyable, improve your chances of competing at your potential, and give you a competitive advantage. (Pg. 70)

Process

• The process is about focusing on the steps to success rather than worrying about the result. (Pg. 121)
• Example of the process from a Crossfit perspective:
• We began her new program by repeatedly performing just the very beginning of the movement, the kip swing. No pulling, no getting up on the rings, no dip out - just swinging with her arms straight, over and over. After three months of this, I had her add the next piece of the movement: pulling up onto the rings. We did that for another month. We continued like this, in monthly increments, doing just one perfect muscle-up a day for thirty days. Then we increased it to two, then three. I made her take big breaks between sets, and never programmed muscle-ups into a workout. It was six months before I put them back into a workout and, when I did, she was only allowed to do one at a time - no cycling reps. Each one had to be perfect. If they weren't what we wanted them to look like, we stopped the workout and got them back to where we wanted them to do be. (Pg. 127-128)
• The process is acknowledging where you are, identifying where you want to be, and breaking it down into pieces. Excellence is a matter of steps. Excel at this one, then that one, and then the one after that. (Pg. 128)
• To be able to activate the process and live it, you have to have the right character traits. That's why when I coach my athletes, I start by developing the human being first - I have to build humans with a high level of resiliency, patience, dedication, humility, and hunger. Once those traits are developed, we can start to follow the process. When character and process are both in place, the results will take care of themselves. (Pg. 128)
• Ray Allen - Letter to my Younger Self (Pg. 132-133)
• You'll put up more than 26,000 shots in your career. Almost six out of 10 won't even go in. I told you this game was a sonofabitch. Don't worry, though. A successful man is built of 1,000 failures. Or in your case 14,000 misses. You'll win a championship in Boston. You'll win another in Miami. The personalities on those two teams will be different, but both teams will have the same thing in common: habits. Boring old habits. I know you want me to let you in on some big secret to success in the NBA. The secret is there is no secret. It's just boring old habits. In every locker room you'll ever be in, everybody will say all the right things. Everybody says they're willing to sacrifice whatever it takes to win a title. But this game isn't a movie. It's about being the main in the fourth quarter. It's not about talk. It's getting in your work every single day, when nobody is watching. Kevin Garnett, Paul Pierce, Lebron James, Dwayne Wade. The men who you are going to win championships with are all going to be very different people. What makes them champions is the boring old habits that nobody sees. They compete to see who can be the first to get to the gym and the last to leave. 
• 2013 College Football National Championship Game, Alabama 42 Vs. Notre Dame 14
• With just more than seven minutes remaining in the fourth quarter, with Alabama holding a commanding lead, quarterback AJ McCarron and center Barrett Jones got their pre-snap signals crossed. As a result, Alabama earned a delay-of-game-penalty. McCarron and Jones exchanged heated words, and then something strange happened: the center forcefully shoved the quarterback. To almost everyone watching, the scene was perplexing. Alabame was up twenty-eight points, facing a meaningless second-and-six with a national title all but assured; practically any other team would have been celebrating. But premature celebrating is simply not what Alabama players do. They are disciples of Coach Nick Saban's process, and the process is about doing your job to the best of your ability, right now, regardless of circumstance. McCarron and Jones were do detached from results and so committed to performing at their maximum potential that they got into a shoving match on national tv. (Pg. 176-177)
• If you can compete with excellence when you're way ahead, you can do it when you're way behind. Like everything else, excellence is a habit. (Pg. 177)
• Instead of focusing on the scale of a task, focus on making one play, then making another. (Pg. 178)
• Reinforce what competitive excellence looks like in practice - an unwavering commitment to the process, regardless of what's going on around you. (Pg. 178)
• Regardless of your chosen profession, being the best means taking advantage of every opportunity that each day brings. Success is not achieved by an occasional heroic response, but with focused and sustained action. (Pg. 179)

Work Ethic

• A lot of people are working hard; very, very few people are working really, really hard. (Pg. 43)
• It's not a question of how much work it will take, how much suffering will be involved, or how fast the results will come. It's about committing to the grind every day. (Pg. 55)
• Hard work is incredibly important - you can't get to or stay at the elite level without it. But once you're there, hard work is not enough. To continue to rise, you have to work smarter, more efficiently and more strategically. (Pg. 109-110)
• I can deal with mistakes. What I can't deal with is a lapse in effort. (Pg. 153)

"A fo ben, bid bont"