Sports Mastery

The word “leadership” gets thrown around a lot.

Recruiters, parents, and coaches rant about leadership and how the Student-Athlete needs to be a leader. What many do not understand, is that leadership is something that must be learned and developed. Yes, leadership is incredibly important in a Student-Athlete, but it is not something that happens overnight.

Dr. Benjamin Wax is a strategic leadership specialist with the John Maxwell Team and winner of several powerlifting and bodybuilding titles. Dr. Wax understands the proven principles that create a great leader who is exemplified through their words and actions. Dr. Wax’s academic background includes a Ph.D. from the University of Mississippi and Masters from Mississippi State University.

He has conducted extensive research studies, published numerous scholarly works and spoken at numerous regional and national events. Listen and learn why leadership is so closely linked with influence. You’ll also discover the immense impactof leadership, the levels of leadership, and how your Student-Athlete can develop their leadership skills.

Don’t know how to improve your Student-Athlete’s leadership skills or where to start? This episode will show you how!

Dr. Benjamin Wax is a performance and leadership coach who assist people in making profound shifts in their lives though 1 on 1 coaching, leadership groups, and speaking engagements.

As a member of the John Maxwell Team, his group has worked with major companies from Chic-fila, Microsoft, Southwest Airlines to training programs impacting our youth in the school system.

Dr. Wax academic background includes a Ph.D. from the University of Mississippi, Masters and Bachelor from Mississippi State University.

He is also certified as a Breakthrough Specialist and Strategic Intervention Coach through the Madanes-Robbins Center for Strategic Training by Tony Robbins (World’s Leading Authority on Coaching) and Dr. Cloe Madanes (World Renowned Psychotherapist).

Perhaps his greatest lessons, the value of hard work, ethics, honesty, communication, teamwork, and doing the right thing, was learned while working with his father (Rev. Benjamin Wax, Sr.) in the family businesses and ministry (5 churches).

Find out more about Dr. Wax here: http://www.johncmaxwellgroup.com/benjaminwax/About

ADETOLA OGUNLEWE is a sports performance coach and sports attorney who helps young athletes navigate the world of sports by understanding the mental and physical issues stalling their growth and productivity. Find him at www.athletemaestro.com or listen to his podcast, Athlete Maestro, on iTunes and other platforms.

In this wonderful conversation, we discussed:

• The sports business in Nigeria
• The Nigerian education system
• Sports academies
• Overcoming an ACL injury
• Getting a law degree

How To Overcome Adversity #2   Travis Daugherty explains in his book, THE LENS that the ability to overcome adversity is a hidden talent. He further explains that the ability to overcome adversity can be taught, developed, and cultivated in a student-athlete. Listen in as we supply the sports parent with answers to help their student-athlete overcome adversity. Below are 5 ways to help you get through adverse situations in sport or life.

1. Have the right mindset
Your thoughts are essential; they frame the triumphs or tragedies of your life. Getting past adversity requires a change in your belief about challenges. It is not what happens to you, but how you respond to it that is important here.

2. Stop making excuses
Excuses are the lies we tell ourselves when we’re too afraid of the future. Whatever you tell your mind will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you don’t achieve your dreams, it will be because you made the decision to be detained by excuses.   3. Have faith
It takes more energy to live a life full of fear than to live one full of faith. To fear is to convince yourself to live in the walls you build yourself. To have faith is to convince yourself to embrace change. 4. Don’t take “no” for an answer
Trials will occur in life, but endurance requires you to never stop trying. Trials are one of the greatest teaching tools of life.  Dare to do the impossible!

5. Let each success energize you
With every success, we are strengthened and empowered for greater victories. You cannot become enslaved by disappointments. You must realize that every disappointment is being engineered for your destiny.

The Takeaway Life can get us down, but we can pick ourselves back up. We must learn and not be limited by the experiences of our lives. We are strong, and we all have a dreamer inside of us. Anything is possible if we are willing to persevere.

Most young athletes want things fast and easy – D1 scholarship, turning pro, going to the olympics. Boredom is their great enemy and fear. Whatever success they may have is short lived, it slips through their hands as fast as it comes in. You, on the other hand, want to outlast your rivals. You are building the foundation for something that can continue to expand. To make this happen, you will have to find the right coach, mentor, and support group. You must learn early on to endure the hours of practice and drudgery, knowing that in the end all of that time will translate into a higher pleasure – mastery of a craft and of yourself. Your goal is to reach the ultimate skill level – an intuitive feel for what must come next.

If you are able to overcome your anxieties and forge a fearless attitude towards life, something strange and remarkable will occur — that margin of control over circumstance increases. At its utmost point, we can even create the circumstances themselves, which is the source of the tremendous power that fearless types have had throughout history. The people who "RESPECT THE PROCESS" in their lives all share certain qualities — supreme boldness, unconventionality, fluidity, and a sense of urgency — that give them this unique advantage over their rivals.”

The episode goes on to break down this law into its components, and details examples of each, as well as actionable guidelines for student-athletes, sports-parents, and coaches. 

It’s a conversation you should listen to and digest, and then refer back to constantly. This is one of my favorite episodes, it provides a set of principles by which you should live by. I definitely recommend.

Quotes

This must be the power and the direction of your mind whenever you encounter some problem — to bore deeper and deeper until you get at something basic and at the root.


The real poetry and beauty in life comes from an intense relationship with reality in all its aspects. Realism is in fact the ideal we must aspire to, the highest point of human rationality.


Keep in mind the following: what you really value in life is ownership, not money. If ever there is a choice — more money or more responsibility — you must always opt for the latter. A lower - paying position that offers more room to make decisions and carve out little empires is infinitely preferable to something that pays well but constricts your movements.


Events in life are not negative or positive. They are completely neutral...Things merely happen to you. It is your mind that chooses to interpret them as negative or positive.


Most people wait too long to go into action, generally out of fear. They want more money or better circumstances. You must go the opposite direction and move before you think you are ready.


Understand: it is not only what you do that must have flow, but also how you do things. It is your strategies, your methods of attacking problems, that must constantly be adapted to circumstances.


Forgetting is a skill that you must develop in order to have emotional flow. If you cannot help but feel anger or disgust in the moment, make it a point to not let it remain the following day.


After listening to this episode, you’ll understand that same lesson, how to eliminate this fear and how to help youR Student-Athlete grow in the process.

RJ Hodges is a best-selling author, speaker, coach and empowerment entrepreneur who’s list of titles include: Mission Unstoppable, You Can’t Practice At The Game, The Art of Mastering You Volume One and an audio book series called Winner Status.

RJ reminds us that fear, life-balance, self-confidence, organization, and planning, weave a delicate web among the lives of the successful Student-Athletes. To make it work you’ll need to learn how to take control of your life so that your life doesn’t control you. This calls for strategies, appreciation, and understanding.

Want to be able to help your Student-Athlete get rid of their anger and emotional mood swings? Have them listen to this episode with you. Their expanding mind can overcome fear, increase confidence and improve prioritization.

Lastly, I want every parent, coach, and Student-Athlete to read the following quote from RJ and really take it to heart.

“Start your day in peace and end your day in peace.” RJ Hodges

To help you stay focused and manage a complicated schedule, here are some tips for organizing your time as a student-athlete.

1. Keep Your Eyes on the Prize. Whether or not you want to go pro or to the Olympics, academics should be your No. 1 priority in college. 

2. Prioritize What's Important. 

3. Study Wisely. 

4.Don't Be Afraid to Ask for Help. 

Set Goals: Everything has to start with this process.. Set goals for what you want to achieve in your sport and in school. Many people skip this step, and just progress toward vague goals (“get better in my sport”) or accept the default goals in front of them (“graduate high school or college”). Anything exceptional that has ever been done didn’t just happen; it started out as a dream.

Plan: In order to accomplish your goals you have to zoom in a little closer and decide what specific steps you have to take. This could be deciding how many times you are going to lift weights a week, or how many professors you want to have a strong relationship with by the end of college. One step I began 3 years ago  to get the most out of planning is to take an hour every Sunday to plan out the next week. This allows me to prepare physically and mentally for my busy schedule.

Sleep: One of the most important things to develop is your sleeping habits. The National Sleep Foundation recommends that the average 18-20-year-old needs 8-10 hours sleep each night. Presumably, a college athlete would be toward the higher end of that. The effects of too little sleep are endless.  If you wait for sleep to happen instead of being proactive about when you go to bed, you probably aren’t getting enough.

Keeping Up the Resolve: It’s easy to do all of the above for one week, or even a few weeks. However, long classes and hard training can wear you down to the point where you don’t want to put the effort in anymore. It will happen, and you need to plan for it! The best way to handle these moments is to find a way to focus on your goals. Visualize yourself achieving your goals, or make a vision board.

Most of the times that you lose the willpower to stay disciplined is because you’ve lost sight of the connection between the hard work that needs doing and the payoff you will eventually have.

Trust the Process has become a catchphrase in sports. You hear it all the time. But WTF does it really mean?

It supposedly means sticking to a long-term plan even in the face of short-term adversity or bad outcomes.

We looked at the absurdity of using the phrase with young people in such a micro-wave culture. If it's such a  well-grounded methodology, why are so many young athletes and people in general failing and quitting when it comes to accomplishing their goals.

Stay tuned as we intend to provide some solutions.

In this episode, I had a magnificent conversation with Sugey Gomez, MA Sport Psychology. Sugey (Sue-hay) is currently working on her Doctorate in  Sport Psychology. She's also a practicing certified holistic health coach.

Sugey shares her thoughts on:

​Thoughts > Feelings > Behavior

1. The idea that one’s thoughts directly influence ones feelings, which then impact ones behavior/reactions.

In other words, misguided or inappropriate thinking usually leads to negative feelings and poor performance, just as good thinking enables feelings and good performance.

2. Mental skills being life skills too.

3. Importance of self-awareness.

Awareness, the first step to making change.

Definition: noticing or creating recognition about areas such as what is going on in one’s body and mind, as well as what is going on around you. For example, as a mental skills coach/practitioners (my job as I am training as a sport psychology student), is to help clients first become aware of what they are experiencing, and then make positive changes to the way they think and feel, (and yes, how they perform) but first the athlete must be able to take note of what is happening internally.

Example: Athlete is losing focus at key moments then some sort of refocusing technique might be helpful. If, however, they are not aware of losing focus in the moment, then the refocusing technique won’t actually be useful. Often times, work needs to begin around building the athlete’s own awareness of the way they think and feel in certain moments in their sport experience, and then you can move on to teaching of techniques.

A REFLECTION ON TRAINING CULTURE, LEADERSHIP, AND AFFIRMATIONS

It is a widely held belief in the sports world that the team culture can have a big impact on how a team functions and performs. How team members, think, feel, behave, and perform are all influenced by the environment in which they train, practice, and compete.

Developing a healthy team culture is as important in the sports world as it is in the corporate world. Understanding this,  what a team culture is and why it is of essential value.  

A culture is the expression of a team’s values, attitudes, and goals about sports, competition, and relationships. It determines whether, for example, the team’s focus is on fun, improvement, or winning or whether it promotes individual accomplishment or team success.

A team culture is so important because it directly influences many areas that affect team functioning and performance: The culture establishes norms of acceptable behavior on a team, either explicitly or implicitly conveying to members what is allowed and what is not. These norms can dictate to team members how to behave, communicate, cooperate, and deal with conflict. When clear norms are established, everyone on a team is more likely to abide by them.

Join us for a conversation with two Division 1 basketball athletes. This episode features Jazz Johnson and Tre'shawn Thurman. Both are outstanding student-athletes for University of Nevada-Reno. Jazz is a transfer from University of Portland. Tre'shawn transferred from Nebraska-Omaha.

Last Friday, No. 6 Nevada captured the Continental Tire Las Vegas Holiday Invitation after defeating UMass (4-3) 110-87 at the Orleans Arena in Las Vegas.

Tre'Shawn Thurman were was named to the all-tournament team. He scored a Nevada career-high 22 points and grabbed eight rebounds. Teammate Caleb Martin was named tournament MVP.

In this episode, both athletes articulated a tremendous amount of insight, knowledge, and wisdom gained from past experiences. They are the epitome of leadership and high character. Stay tuned as they share valuable information for the young student-athlete and sports parent.

1. Have the right mindset: 
Your thoughts are essential; they frame the triumphs or tragedies of your life. Getting past adversity requires a change in your belief about challenges. It is not what happens to you, but how you respond to it that is important here.

2. Stop making excuses
: Excuses are the lies we tell ourselves when we’re too afraid of the future. Whatever you tell your mind will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you don’t achieve your dreams, it will be because you made the decision to be detained by excuses.   The Takeaway Life can get us down, but we can pick ourselves back up. We must learn and not be limited by the experiences of our lives. We are strong, and we all have a dreamer inside of us. Anything is possible if we are willing to persevere.

One of the characteristics of being humble is having a low sense of entitlement. Humble people don't think they are owed things. This leads to a less prejudiced view of the world, encouraging them to be tolerant to others and less defensive about their own beliefs.