Cracking the Coaching Code: Using Personality Archetypes to Maximize Performance

[00:01] Announcer:

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, helping you build capacity for instructional leadership. Here's your host, Director of the Principal Center, Dr. Justin Bader. Welcome, everyone, to Principal Center Radio.

[00:13] SPEAKER_02:

I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to welcome to the program Dr. PJ Capozzi and Dr. Brian Wills. PJ is the Illinois Superintendent of the Year and a sought-after speaker and consultant and the author of numerous articles and at least nine books. Dr. Brian Wills is a chiropractor, entrepreneur, executive coach, and keynote speaker who helps people chase after their dreams, and they are the authors together of Cracking the Coaching Code.

[00:40] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[00:42] SPEAKER_02:

PJ and Brian, welcome to Principal Center Radio. Excited to be here. Yeah, thanks for having us. Well, I'm excited to talk about this book because it is specifically intended for athletic coaches, which is a group of very important adults who work in our schools who don't get a lot of attention. We have a lot of teachers who are coaches, but we also have a lot of coaches who maybe are parents or community members. who are not otherwise faculty members and as a result, don't get a lot of attention.

[01:07]

Why did you decide to write this book for coaches?

[01:10] SPEAKER_00:

A couple of reasons. First and foremost, both at an individual level, Brian and I have both been significantly impacted and largely in positive ways by our experiences with our athletic coaches. But then from the school lens as the superintendent and Brian, and I think the executive world, and then also as a school board member and president, we started to think about hey, we understand that we have coaches that have a disproportionate impact on our kids in terms of the impact that they have compared to time spent. And then when we looked at what we do structurally from a school lens in terms of providing support for coaches to get better at leadership, relationships, building culture, we kind of realized that that's truly void, right? Like that we might send them to a conference that they pick up some X's and O's, but systematically we were not doing very much. But when we looked in the mirror, we also started to look at kind of the market at large and said, wait, this isn't going on anywhere.

[02:05]

And so we thought that we had some value to add to that and started to put pen to paper, so to speak, and came up with a tool that we think is going to be really beneficial for coaches to use.

[02:15] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, dovetail what PJ said, you know, you can look on the internet and find almost an unlimited amount of X's and O's, you know, different weight programs, conditioning programs, philosophies and things like that. But you really don't find a lot of the two nitty gritty things that help a coach be successful, which like PJ was saying, the relationship building, the understanding your players, and more importantly, understanding yourself. You see a lot of coaches kind of sabotage their own success just by certain things that they do. And the Enneagram kind of gave us a framework to help people understand those self-sabotaging behaviors, how to avoid them.

[02:47] SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, that's an interesting framework for looking at coaching. So we're hearing a lot more about the Enneagram and the types. What are there, eight or nine types? We're hearing a lot about that maybe on social media. More and more articles are using that language. Help us understand what that is.

[03:01]

What is the Enneagram and how does it help us with coaching?

[03:04] SPEAKER_01:

So the Enneagram is just a personality assessment tool that is broken down into nine types. Everybody kind of fits into one of the nine types of personalities. And it allows... you to understand each type kind of filters the world through a certain lens and you behave in a certain way when you're pushed when you're happy or when you're stressed most people are running on autopilot they're just going throughout their day not even really thinking just reacting to their environment and the enneagram kind of helps you explain how you're perceiving your environment then more importantly how you're reacting to your environment and you know from a coaching perspective It just helps you to understand, for example, a coach may be an Enneagram 8 where they're very anger-driven and something bad happens during a game and that coach just gets fixated on that one specific play and they're just angry and want to get revenge on that thing.

[03:51]

And then 10 plays later, they realize, oh, shoot, there's a game I have to coach and they've made some fatal errors and given up points or lost the game because of that. And we see that all the time. And again, this Enneagram framework just gives them an idea of, number one, how to avoid that behavior. And then number two, how to get them to a more positive state while it's going on.

[04:11] SPEAKER_00:

The two things that come to mind always with me when I think about it is the old school Covey, like internal victory before external victory. So as people read this, hopefully that they look inward first instead of outward, which we say several times. But I know that a lot of people, when they first get comfortable with Enneagram, start to project that onto other people. But this is largely about self-mastery. The second thing that comes to mind is just a really simple sentence to me is that you are not your personality. And so for me, that gives me great understanding that I do not have to respond with my autopilot default response mechanism.

[04:44]

And so my autopilot response has been successful for me in many cases, but it certainly has not been successful for me in all cases. And I do not have to respond that way. Like as a human being, I have the unique ability to see the event, to then respond. to internalize that, to reflect, to understand what I might want to do, but understand that that might not be the best avenue or expression of my talents. As Brian said, sometimes my anger, my feelings, my emotions to produce the outcome that I want to. I will say that as I got deeper into Enneagram myself, it's been a game changer for me and my leadership.

[05:18]

to become a much more well-rounded, understanding person. It has allowed me to go internal before I went external, but going external has provided me a ton more empathy than I had working previously with other people.

[05:29] SPEAKER_02:

I would say the same thing. I'm not super familiar with all the types, but just an awareness of the fact that these different types exist and hearing some of the descriptions and often in kind of a humorous way has helped me realize that, first of all, other people do think differently than me. And when that is the case it's not because they're dumb or wrong it's just you know people vary and you know as much as i like to see the world my way other people see it differently and that's fine what are some of the disconnects that can occur when we don't realize that fundamental truth that we all you know see the world in somewhat different ways how does that show up in coaching when we don't realize that one of the things that happens in coaching is that it's a position of authority and power to begin with and so what i think happens a lot of times is that we try to impart

[06:14] SPEAKER_00:

the way that we view the world onto our athletes, which in some cases is exactly what they need, right? They might need more structure or discipline. So a type one that is doing everything to make every lesson plan perfect and demand perfection might be exactly what somebody needs. That same behavior may be crippling to another athlete. And this is, Something as administrators, and I say this, I talk about all the time. We talk about differentiation all the time in the classroom.

[06:37]

Like it's this easy thing. And like you talk to any teacher and like differentiation is exceptionally hard. But as leaders, we need to differentiate as well. Right. Like I know on my leadership cabinet now of 15 people, I can say the exact same thing to two different people and have dramatically different results. And then it's that becomes incumbent upon me.

[06:56]

to then change my behavior to create peak performance. What I think happens a lot of times at the coaching ranks is that I'm in charge. So I'm going to say the things the way that I want to say them, and they're going to react the way that they react because I'm in charge and they're not. And that's just a low form of leadership. And so the hope is that this book helps people to have that awareness to be like, look, I can say whatever I want to and I'm in charge and I might have that right. But if my job is to truly try to create more successful young men and young women and more successful teams and create peak performance, then I as the leader or I as the coach have to change my behavior to create different outcomes on behalf of those people they're serving.

[07:33] SPEAKER_01:

And this will dovetail exactly what PJ just said there. At the end of the day, it's all about communication. People speak and hear in their own language differently. And if, you know, you're a coach who's more of authoritarian, just screaming at everybody, you're just going to honor recuts with everybody. You're going to hit a home run with a few people, but you're going to alienate a vast majority of the team. And, you know, unfortunately I've seen that happen in my own athletic career.

[07:54]

You know, I was one that, you know, you didn't really have to yell at. You just told me to do whatever I needed to do and I would do it. And there's some kids you need to, you know, scream and yell and rant and rave and other kids, you kind of need to give them a pat on the back. And if you're not willing to, you know, first of all, acknowledge that. And then second of all, you know, do those behaviors. Again, your kids can't be as successful as they should be.

[08:11]

They're just not going to get it.

[08:13] SPEAKER_02:

Let's talk a little bit more about adult behavior, because I think certainly this is the thing that we notice the most when someone is kind of not in control of their own emotions. And sometimes if you know someone outside of coaching and then you see them in coaching, sometimes it's almost like you're looking at two different people. You know, like, who is this person out there yelling and screaming and throwing clipboards and all that stuff? Obviously, as educators and as people who are responsible overall for the athletic program, how do we think about this issue of inappropriate adult behavior? And how can some of the ideas in your book set people up for greater success and not exhibit some of those more unacceptable behaviors on the field or on the court? My sense is that everybody has seen this problem of most people are kind of in control of themselves, but I think we've probably also all seen...

[09:00]

somebody lose their cool, maybe a parent, maybe a coach. And we want to make sure that we're consistently modeling for our students' appropriate behavior, even though we all have different communication styles.

[09:10] SPEAKER_01:

One of the things I love about the Enneagram is that it's a lot of the other assessment tools that I've studied in the past, kind of put you in a box and that's kind of where you're at. But the Enneagram allows for a lot of movement. So if you're a certain type When you're healthy, when things are going great, you're not emotional, kind of in flow state, you're going to pick up the behaviors and habits that may be a different type. And then when you're stressed out, angry, emotional, those types of things, you're going to go down this dark road and kind of pick up the bad parts of a different Enneagram type. So the biggest thing is just becoming self-aware, feeling yourself going down that kind of dark path. And the easiest way I can explain it, and maybe it might be a little apropos for the educational field, was like teachers right now.

[09:52]

So if you look at the last couple of years, I mean, teachers, it's been a pretty rough few years for the whole education profession, right? And a lot of teachers are type two Enneagram. So they're kind of the helpers. They want to help kids. That's why they got into there. And when everything's going well and they're happy and not stressed, they act and behave a lot more like type fours, which are more creative, just kind of spontaneous.

[10:14]

Everything's going great. So you'll walk into their classroom and teacher's happy. Everybody's having a good time. They're learning, maybe doing some outside the box stuff. However, when teachers, when type twos are stressed out, emotional, angry, kind of like we've been the last three years with the pandemic and some of the political and social things that are going on, they pick up a lot more of the bad habits of an eight. And since I'm an eight, I can speak to that.

[10:36]

And they become much more authoritarian, angry, You know, we're going to do it my way to become more protective, obviously, which is not good for students. And then all of a sudden you add the parent component and the parents are upset. You know, they're under the same stress. They keep pushing harder against the teachers, you know, go more into this protection mode, basically fighting against the world mode. Well, as I can tell you, you know, fighting against the world every single day leads to burnout. So we have all these teachers that are leaving the profession, getting out of the profession just because they're just exhausted from fighting every single day.

[11:08]

The bad part is they don't even know that they're doing it. They're on autopilot and have no idea that's how their behavior is. So again, using the Enneagram, they can kind of feel themselves doing that and pull themselves back to at least to neutral to where they're not fighting against, you know, fighting every day against the world.

[11:24] SPEAKER_00:

And I would say for me, the biggest thing Enneagram has done has taught me a little bit about my core fears in terms of what is triggering for my behavior. So I know that my behavior becomes less than what I would want to model at times when I feel like I am not in control of the situation. So for me, I can go headstrong into what I know to be a really difficult town hall meeting and I'll be prepared and I'll be absolutely fine. I can control. But if somebody blindsides me with an attack, particularly for me, it's an attack that's usually around my integrity, then I am going to devolve. And so part of that was I did not understand what my triggers were.

[12:00]

I just felt like that person deserved whatever, you know, my outburst was because they were inappropriate. As I started to learn more about myself and be like, okay, I understand that when I feel out of control of the situation is when the worst part of me is going to come out. And so I think that our hope is that coaches can start to understand that as well. Right. So like for a type eight, when they feel like a game is getting out of control or their players are not doing what they're supposed to do, it's probably going to set them into a downward spiral. For type one, if they feel like the officials are not adjudicating the game appropriately, that might send them down a spiral.

[12:34]

For type two, that's a coach that has poured their heart and soul into a team and doesn't feel like that's being reciprocated with respect and love. That might send them down a downward spiral and so on and so forth. So our hope is to teach each person as they're getting deeper into their self-awareness and understanding of self that like, hey, these are the things that are probably triggering these events in you are the ones that, you know, when you go home at night and you're like, man, I really regret that. And so the hope is, again, that through the increased self-awareness, people just have less events that when they put their head in the pillow, they'd be like, Man, if I had a do-over, the hope is that more of that is happening in real time where it might be a five-second explosion instead of a five-minute explosion. And then even better, it might be a five-second internal thought process that leads to nothing external to impact either players, other coaches, community, parents that are observing the game.

[13:22] SPEAKER_02:

I want to go back to something you said a few minutes ago that I think is very important. And that is the idea that we're not really boxed in, you know, like we might identify very strongly with a certain Enneagram type, but there's some fluidity and some flexibility there. Talk to us a little bit more about how that works, because when I read the descriptions, obviously I am where I am on those descriptions. But it's not like I have to act that way all the time. It's not like if I see a situation that calls upon me to think in a different way, it's not like I can't. It's just, like you said, the default or when we're stressed, what we tend to go back to.

[13:56]

Say a little bit more about that and help us understand how the categories or types work.

[13:59] SPEAKER_01:

Basically, everybody's going to kind of gravitate towards one type. Majority of your behavior is like, oh yeah, that pretty much encapsulates kind of who I am. But the Enneagram allows for different flavors of personalities. Obviously, not everybody is a true eight or not everybody's a true one. So I'll just use myself as an example. So I am an eight, you know, pretty aggressive when I'm being in control, but I have a big nine wing.

[14:21]

So I have a lot of traits of a nine as well in me, which is a little bit more laid back, a little bit more of a peacemaker type personality there. That's why I love the Enneagram so much is because it allows their, for you to have other flavors. Now, if I'm really, really excited about something, I'll actually pick up some traits of a seven as well. So all of a sudden I'm a little bit more charismatic. a little bit more out there wanting to meet people to be more of a leader there. So it allows us to kind of move around a little bit, but you are going to have one type that you kind of associate with.

[14:48]

And as we were talking about before, you also, you know, when you're healthy, you're going to act a little bit more like, you know, as an eight, I'm going to be a little bit more like a two, or I'm going to be more helpful, be more magnanimous towards other people. If I'm stressed out, I'm kind of the worst case of a five, which I've become a little bit more controlling and kind of secretive, I guess, when I try to control every little thing around me.

[15:07] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, so I think there's two core concepts that I would encourage people, if you've never heard of Enneagram, in terms of this to consider. One is that I think the healthier we are, the more liberated we become in terms of how we can allow ourself to choose our responses to behaviors, and we can kind of chameleon our behaviors over to whatever desired outcome they want to be. So the healthier we are, the more that we become more of who we actually are instead of who our personality is, if that makes sense. What Enneagram also asserts is that of the nine types, as Brian said, we all have a primary type. But then under stress, we tend, not always, tend to act like a different type. And under periods of healthy emotional state, we act like a different type.

[15:50]

So it's interesting because I believe you identified as a five. So eights, when we are in a bad space, tend to act like fives. So for me... The way that I can tell that is the only people that I want to talk to is nobody.

[16:03]

I want to talk to myself. I want to be with my own thoughts, right? So when I can feel myself closing the door to my office all the time is when I know that I'm stressed. And it's a tell for me before I actually could ever articulate that I'm stressed. It's just that I'm starting to become a little bit reclusive. And I love my own thoughts more than I love interaction with other people.

[16:20]

So interestingly, when a five is really healthy, they start to act like an eight, which means that probably as a five is in a good spot, they become more controlling, more willing to take risks, more willing to take on challenges, more willing to stand up for what they believe in and more willing to assert themselves in the world in a more dominant space. And so there is no right or wrong type. There just isn't. There are types that are more rare and more frequent based on just studies, but that doesn't make any type more significant or more beneficial in any given space than anywhere else. As Brian said, there are professions that tend to attract a certain type more than any other type, but it's important for me to When I see the value and understanding where I'm at under stress versus health is when I can start to see where I'm heading when I'm under stress so that I can do self-intervention before I get to a spot where I know I'm reclusive and all I want to be is in my office with the door shut, reading in my own thoughts.

[17:15] SPEAKER_01:

And I think that I'll just dovetail what PJ said. So every time I do a speaking engagement on the Enneagram, I always started out by saying, listen, every type sucks. They're all bad. We all have our own warts. No one type better than the others. It's just all about becoming aware, like PJ said, becoming aware of kind of your tells or your triggers there and stop yourself from going down that kind of dark path.

[17:35] SPEAKER_00:

When I first started reading, so it took some convincing for me that I was a type eight because I really wanted to be a type three, which is the achiever. And so once I was finally convinced I was a type eight, one of the things I read is like the type eight is in some circles called the CEO type. I'm like, well, that sounds pretty good. Like I'm getting used to it. And then it said type eight under stress can become murderous. I was like, well, whoa, like, like this, you know, so like no matter what, What type you are, there's going to be really positives and really negatives.

[18:00]

And it's just examining the spectrum of the personality. And again, it doesn't mean that we have to exhibit any of those. As a human being, we have different ability to control that. It's just the lens we see the world. It's who we are in autopilot. And then figuring out, okay, autopilot isn't successful for us in the situation, right?

[18:17]

So to bring it back to the coaching scenario, if I'm a coach who's an eight and I'm a bit of a tyrant because I'm unhealthy. And every year I start off with, 47 players on my football team and end with 32 because I've run off a third of my team. Some point, my behavior, my personality isn't working, right? Like at some point, I need some type of personal intervention to realize that this is not working. The hard part is that most people that get into self-awareness, in my experience, are usually fairly successful people. And their default mechanisms have brought them to a modicum of success.

[18:49]

So it's saying, okay, I want to leave all the things that are my superpower, my default, my natural, but then I want to intervene on the things that might be self-sabotaging me from becoming an even better version of myself.

[19:00] SPEAKER_02:

It's interesting as I've become more aware of the types to be able to recognize them in myself, to recognize them in others. I saw a meme a couple of weeks ago that said, as a type five, please know that when I say that something is intellectually dishonest, I mean that as the worst possible insult and I am seething. I just laughed because that's me. Inaccurate or intellectually dishonest is the worst possible insult. Why don't we run through, Brian, if we could, just the different types real quickly and people will be able, of course, to look them up and to review them. And I know there are lots of tests out there that can help you figure out your Enneagram types.

[19:32]

What are they? Just briefly.

[19:33] SPEAKER_01:

Sure. So we start with the nine types, obviously. So type one is going to kind of be the rule follower. Type ones are all motivated by living kind of the right way. They're afraid of breaking the rules, basically. Type twos are the helpers.

[19:45]

Again, they want to get everybody to show up their back. A little more image driven, you know, want everybody to know that they're helping them out. Kind of figure that they're not going to be loved if they don't help other people. Threes are the achievers. These are the people that are achieving at all costs. They avoid failure above anything.

[19:59]

Fours are more of the artists. They're more of a creative kind of the introspective personality type. Type fives are the thinkers. They're the ones that are gonna be more of the intellectual type, not the life of the party, so to speak, but they're gonna be constantly thinking, breaking down complex things. Sixes are going to be more of your questioners. This is the biggest type actually of the Enneagram.

[20:19]

Far more people are sixes than anything else. Very fear-based. I have a lot of anxiety about the future and kind of what might go wrong. Sevens are the adventure, the fun people. Everybody wants to be around them. They kind of jump from one thing to the next, have a hard time focusing.

[20:33]

Eights, as we said before, kind of the CEO type. I want to control everything, kind of be the leaders. And then nines are the peacemakers, which is when everybody get along. So they avoid confrontation like it's the plague. In a nutshell, it's the nine types are as fast as I could possibly go.

[20:48] SPEAKER_02:

Now, in an athletic context, which types or type would be kind of preferred? Because I feel like different settings kind of optimize for different types. If we think about a directly competitive team sports context, who is most at home in that of those types? And who just kind of naturally falls into some of the competitive mindsets that we see in athletics?

[21:12] SPEAKER_01:

It's interesting you bring that up because it's kind of what we talk about in the book is that basically any type can be successful in any type of athletic situation. Just different types need different support. I'd say the only type that probably you aren't going to see on a football field or on a field competition, maybe fours. They're a little bit more of the creative, more of the artistic side. So maybe band, choir, those type of activities, you'll see them more in. But any of the types can be successful in anything.

[21:34]

So obviously... You know, eights, you know, again, tend to, you know, fall or naturally go into more of the leadership roles on a team. But a six can be just as much of a leader as well, as long as they're supported in the right way. So for examples, you know, sixes can be kind of the glue of the team, kind of keep everybody together because they want everybody to strengthen numbers, so to speak.

[21:54]

Everybody thinks that threes would be great as athletes as well, but some of the warts begin to show up with threes that they want to avoid failure at all costs. So as soon as the game starts slipping out of control, threes will kind of slink into the background, so they're not going to be associated with the loss or associated with the failure that's out there. So every type can be a very huge asset on a team there. It's just, again, what kind of support they're going to have, and that comes down to coaching. which is why we wrote the book to begin with.

[22:21] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, I think you're going to see it manifest in a different way. And we explore in the book a little bit about why somebody might want to be a captain, right? So a type two might want to be a captain because they really want to serve the team and they think it's the best chance the team could have. A three wants it because they want to put it on their resume and eight wants it because they want to be in control. Right. So it's all types might end up in that position of leadership from the athletic standpoint, just with different motivations in mind, which is kind of a core aspect of what we explore.

[22:48]

As far as the coaching, I can just say, you know, even looking and extrapolating this to principals and to like coaches. We have principals that are wildly successful as sixes, wildly successful as eights, as three, all the types. And then I've seen principals be wildly unsuccessful as all the types. So I think leadership is leadership, right? So I don't know that one type is going to lend itself more to any other type. The thing that Brian and I found in researching and prepping for the book is that seeing type fours at the highly competitive athletic level is going to be the rarity.

[23:18]

I think that's the one thing we saw. I think the one thing that we agreed on was maybe Dennis Rodman might be an example of a four that you see perform at athletic peak. Sometimes maybe a really eccentric relief pitcher in baseball you might see as something of that nature. Outside of that, there's a pretty, I think, wide distribution of people you're going to see independent of Enneagram type with high levels of success in all aspects of life, whether it be leadership, athleticism, art history, et cetera. I think there's a wide gamut that can be painted. That's a lot of what we try to hope to get through with the book is that it's not just you know, you're a quote unquote natural leader or this or that, that is going to make an excellent coach.

[23:58]

And it doesn't take a wide examination of looking at the most famous coaches to see dramatically different styles, right? You see Bill Belichick, you see Phil Jackson, you see dramatic, like almost diametrically opposed people on the spectrum of behavior and both considered the best coaches in their domain.

[24:13] SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, and to me, that's one of the greatest values here is the ability to understand what makes things work for people, even if their style is very different, even if they come across very different, and to not see the people who are like me as the good people and everybody else as the idiots, like how can they possibly get through the day? thinking the way they do. You know, we see that just with everybody around us that we do very so much in just the way we approach the world. So to bring it home, you know, back to coaches understanding them both themselves and their athletes. What are your hopes for how this book will help coaches understand their student athletes that they're working with? And do you anticipate that coaches will actually try to figure out or even share this with their athletes and learn their types or just kind of have a better understanding of this framework so that they can better understand their players?

[25:03] SPEAKER_00:

So I would say our primary goal would be to increase self-awareness of coaches and help them understand that, again, their default doesn't have to be what they exhibit to their players all the time. And in fact, I have a supposition that as we get deeper into the work, that a lot of coaches' defaults might not even be their default. It might be that they're playing coach or they're exhibiting the same way that when teachers get out of the classroom for the first time, they act like they're cooperating teacher a lot of times or their favorite teacher. I think a lot of people that aren't tyrants by nature might be acting like tyrants because they think that's what a coach has to be. So in some ways, like it's self-awareness for coaches, but also hopefully liberation for coaches so they can see that who they truly are. It has the potential for success and then adopting the tactics and the skills necessary to be successful in other regards.

[25:50]

And then the hope for us is sincerely that it gets down to the student level. I will just say, again, at the very personal level, I was introduced to Enneagram probably at the age of 28, and it's been foundational for a lot of my leadership success, and not because of being able to diagnose and type other people, but because I've gotten a much better understanding of myself and the ways that I was self-sabotaging, and hopefully that's the same benefit that we can provide to coaches and to athletes through this work.

[26:17] SPEAKER_01:

And I'll just, again, dovetail up what PJ said. I mean, for me, you know, I grew up playing sports. I played college football, so I played from sports from four years old on up to, you know, 22 or 23 years old. And looking back on my experiences, you know, and going through this work, I'm like, man, if I could just go back in time and tell this coach, you know, what was going on or kind of what his autopilot was, you know, how much better of a team we would have had or how much better even he would have got out of me. I think about that college, you know, one of my college coaches, I kind of butted heads a little bit because we were both not aware at all of each other. And, you know, it held me back athletically, obviously held him back success-wise as a coach.

[26:53]

So, You know, we want to get the most out of our athletes and allow them to have the best time possible. That's the whole key behind this. And to do that, coaches got to be aware of what their behavior is and, you know, how that affects their players and the performance of their players.

[27:06] SPEAKER_00:

And I think the bottom line that we both realize is that there's very few D1 athletes that are coming out of our high schools. There's one state champion per class. So for the vast majority of people, athletics at the high school level is about social development, intellectual development, and going on to figure out how to be a productive member of society. And so for us, this extends well beyond kind of wins and losses. If we can help create a tool for which people that have a disproportionate influence on our students can help them

[27:36] SPEAKER_02:

become more self-aware so they can lead a better more fulfilling productive life than we did exactly the job we set out to do well i really appreciate that point about who coaching is really for we're not really trying to produce professional athletes here we're trying to produce graduates who are prepared for life and i think athletics is a big part of that and the more we can approach it in a healthy and self-aware way the better So the book is Cracking the Coaching Code. Dr. PJ Capozzi and Dr. Brian Wills, thank you so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio.

[28:08] SPEAKER_00:

Thank you so much for having us.

[28:12] Announcer:

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