No Way Out

Flow: The Essence of Winning and Learning with Sue Enquist

• Mark McGrath and Brian "Ponch" Rivera • Season 2 • Episode 12

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Whether you're a coach, athlete, parent, or a fan of sports excellence, this episode promises to ignite your drive and equip you with the tools to chase your own version of greatness. 

Explore the cutting-edge intersection of sports science and leadership, where flow (peak performance) is within reach. From wearable tech analogous to an F1 dashboard to the cultural integration of healthy habits, Sue dives into athlete optimization. Key discussions on self-awareness and embracing uncertainty highlight how these elements craft formidable teams and unlock sustained excellence.

Sue’s extensive background enriches this conversation, drawing from her tenure as a consultant coach for the USA Volleyball Women’s National Team that won gold in the 2020 Olympics, and her innovative contributions like co-developing softball’s first training app and hitting analysis software. As a founder of ONESoftball.com and as the co-founder of the UCLA John Wooden Leadership Academy, her influence extends far beyond the field.

Chasing Excellence (Sue Enquist Website)
Wikipedia: Sue Enquist
Sue Enquist on LinkedIn
OneSoftball


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Recent podcasts where you’ll also find Mark and Ponch:

Acta Non Verba – with Marcus Aurelius Anderson
Eddy Network Podcast Ep 56 – with Ed Brenegar
The School of War Ep 84 – with Aaron MacLean
Spatial Web AI Podcast – with Denise Holt
OODAcast...

Brian Rivera:

I want to welcome everybody to the podcast today. You and I talk a lot about theory, john Boyd's OODA loop, how you can apply it to sports. Rarely do we get somebody who has deep expertise in actually applying John Boyd's OODA loop to sports. Sometimes they do it without even knowing it and that's absolutely fine. So our guest today has won multiple national championships, both as a player and as a coach. She is retired now, I understand, and we met through a Flow Research Collective high flow coaching activity that we did about three months ago two months ago where we connected on several topics and the top one being flow. So welcome to the show, sue Winquist. Thanks for being here today and I thank you for taking time out of your busy surfing schedule to be here.

Sue Winquinst:

Thanks so much. It's nice to be here as well and meet everybody, so I got to ask.

Brian Rivera:

We'll start with surfing right away. Why do you surf? Just out of curiosity.

Sue Winquinst:

I grew up surfing. I live by the beach, and so it was who we were. It wasn't anything that actually became an activity. It was just part of me and continue to be part of me, and then, as I got older, I was able to use that to my advantage, I feel, when it came to organized competitive sports.

Brian Rivera:

So in the flow coaching that we went through, we talked about high flow activities. Is there a high flow activity that you can find inside of surfing?

Sue Winquinst:

Oh, there's no doubt, those that are just learning how to surf certainly don't experience that usually right out of the gate. But once you become manageable in the water, you know what you're doing. It has incredible effects One in the escape from the digital tentacles. Number two, the integration of a diversity of population that you would never ever have an opportunity to engage with. And then the physical performance aspect of the readiness, the unknown. You don't have control over it. And then, once you do get on it, you don't have control. So this, adjust, adapt, this mental sharpness that you have to have, and then the constant failure, recovery that you experience. It gives you everything, just riding these waves that don't cost a dime, you know.

Brian Rivera:

So another question for you is how do you get your players to get focused on the work at hand, whether it be practice or the game? Is there any type of high flow activity that you can take them through pregame or preseason that gets them focused on the work?

Sue Winquinst:

Well, when I look back now, when we see how important flow is becoming and in traditional sports, mental training, flow activities they're still considered an accessory or an add on. It has not become a standard in sport. You see more of it in high performance. But I was fortunate to be around some incredible diamond sports mental performance individuals Ken Revisa. Some incredible diamond sports mental performance individuals Ken Reviza. So he introduced us to the ability to listen to your conscious mind, to organize your thoughts, to stop, be present in the moment, to understand breathing. But this was back in the early 2000s, right. So now what we need to do is we need to introduce at a very young age for our student athletes, this idea that mental performance shouldn't be an add on. It actually should be more like hygiene. When we get mental performance to become hygiene, we're really going to start to see this. It's really we're in the renaissance of flow and mental performance.

Brian Rivera:

Yeah, we're right in the middle of NHL postseason as NBA postseason. We just saw the March Madness, both men's and women's. We saw the uptick in the viewership on the women's side of the sport. Can we dive in a little bit about that? What's actually separating these teams right now at this level of performance both in college and in professional sports?

Sue Winquinst:

Well, both are very similar. When you're coaching in college, your first thing for the individuals that have that strong foundation around who they are and how they do things so I always attribute a lot of it has to do with their upbringing, whoever those influencers were. So for us, we really look at the integrity and what we want to call their awareness about their greatness. Then they come into college, the programs that have a solid understanding around leadership, both individual and group, because there's a contradiction there, right? So, individual, we want them to think they're the deal, but then we contradict it and say be humbled, give up yourself in the team dynamic. Pro is the same way. Pro is just another level of those highly competitive, highly talented and the teams that win over.

Sue Winquinst:

I'm really interested in teams that win over time. Thousands of champions, thousands of champions, but there are very few sustainable champions, people that repeat or in the thick of it, year after year. Those are the teams that you want to take a look at, their patterns and the frameworks that they have. Now what they're doing is they're trying to surround the athlete with the assets that create wholeness, but I still would love to pull flow, flow, science. I would love to pull that out of the asset management and put it in the X's and O's. I want flow science to be in with technical and tactical.

Brian Rivera:

Yeah, absolutely.

Sue Winquinst:

Technical. Sit alone. In sport, coaches know how to hold time for it. They talk about it over beers about it. It's technical tactical, technical tactical. I want to get our flow science over in technical tactical. Okay.

Brian Rivera:

When you reflect back on your championships, both as a player and as a coach and you have the advantage of retrospective coherence look back on it and say how did I do this? What strikes you now as what is essential to win over time? What are those things that you can share with other coaches and even business leaders, what it takes to win over time with differing team members.

Sue Winquinst:

Well, first of all, I'm very careful to talk about what I used to do, because for a large part of it I believe I could have been better at it. I didn't do it as well as I could have. I should have put the person first and I put the performance first. But I was also part of the program. We wore the men's track team practice t-shirts as game uniforms and then, in three short years, built the championship program. We never looked back and over five, five decades, six decades, we've won.

Sue Winquinst:

But winning also creates blinders and so for me, the timeless principles that I would stand by today and back in the 70s, 80s, 90s, new millennial, that I stand by is an uber fanaticism around awareness and improvement and both eyes on the performance gap, In other words, how I'm getting the results and how I'm building a relationship with those results. That's a big void in Today. Youth Sport is we're not building a relationship around results. So it's so much now about. We know we have to have that experience. We know we need them to be seen and heard. We're losing track of this fanaticism around results. We want them to love measuring that gap between where I am and where I need to be right now.

Sue Winquinst:

That is a fragility. There's a fragility there that if we appear that we are too fixated on results, we're not taking care of the whole person. In short, great leaders over time male, female, doesn't matter the gender don't get caught up on the diversity issues. All those here are things that we know are timeless. People that are leading other people around, uber clarity about where we are, how we need to get there and the relationship with the results along the way in a safe and emotionally collaborative way. That, to me, is something you can put your money on.

Mark McGrath:

So, sue, we believe, ponch, and I believe and I'm betting that you do that the order of people, ideas and things can never be violated, that the person and the human always has to come first, whether it's coaching, whether it's business, whether it's surfing, whether we have to focus on people, ideas and things. It seems to me that in sports today, we're so wrapped up in analytics and technology we forget the human-centered nature of sport and the human-centered nature of coaching. So am I hearing you correctly that effective coaching, in your case athletics, has always been by focusing on the person first and allowing the ideas and things to complement their efforts?

Sue Winquinst:

I do. But where I wished we had even more, where we would be putting in more time, is right now. We're spending a lot of time around what utopia looks like, right? What you just talked about is the standard that we're all shooting for. I want to be the person that says a memo to 90% of you. That's not going to happen. So raise your children to be aware this is not a people-centered coach that I have. He's a volunteer that works Monday through Friday and coaches baseball on Saturday morning. He's not people first, I get it. He's results-oriented. I know my checkpoints now that I'm with a results-oriented leader. No one is covering that dialogue and these children are coming in getting decimated emotionally, because they want to come in as their true self, because they've heard that over and over. Amen, I agree with you. That's the perfect world. We've got to get them where they are right now and build a competitive callus so when they get in there for 90 minutes on a Saturday, they can have fun, regardless of the results-oriented coach.

Brian Rivera:

Yeah, so we're immersed in AAU basketball at the moment here in our house, and I was going through some of your previous talks on was it Sharpie? What do you call it Sharpie?

Sue Winquinst:

Staying the brain. Staying the brain.

Brian Rivera:

Yeah, yeah that, and the failure recovery. So what we've seen with the coaches at the teenage level is the things they say and do are creating an impression on the girls forever. Right, it's going to be in their mind forever. How detrimental is that to sports today? I mean, are people giving up on sports kids giving up on sports because of bad coaching?

Sue Winquinst:

Absolutely, and we have stats especially with women. My world, those people that don't. My background, my expertise, is around women, basically high-performing women and youth, eight to 28 years old. I watched parenting come across my doorstep for 27 years at UCLA. This is what I know about great parenting.

Sue Winquinst:

That child, that young girl that comes in, that female that comes in with high self-efficacy I can look directly to her relationship with her father. Moms, they're off the hook. They've already created that bond. They have that. But I also have words for mom. Hey, mom, she doesn't need another friend. You don't need to be talking to her seven times a day. She needs to solve her own problems. Come home and talk about the process that she's working on each and every day.

Sue Winquinst:

Back to the dad. When the girl is playing sport up to our study show, up to 11 or 12 years old, it's just play P-L-A-Y. Once she gets into organized sport where she's traveling in a car or playing to compete, the dad gets interested. It turns into a sport. The dad now becomes the dialogue around who I am and how I do it. Dads that have an arm's length when they come into my office at UCLA. And that child, that young adult, is talking to me directly. I can ask the hard, I can bang her right in the forehead with a hard question and she does not become deer in headlights and she doesn't do a 45 degree turn to check to the answer.

Sue Winquinst:

Book called the parents. Those dads taught at a young age, process, process, process, and they celebrate the process, execution, and not the goals. They're not about. Here are all the mechanics, here are your analytics. It's all about teaching grit, teaching resilience, teaching this ability to fail and recover quickly and then recognize it after it becomes. I call it the drip, drip, drip method of fathering. Drip it in there and when you get in the car after the game she doesn't want to talk about it Put your hands at 10 and two, shut your pie hole and let that girl be a girl on her way home. But what do dads do? Our poor dads? They're just shoving that crap down her throat. By the time she gets to the house, she's already entertaining the fact. By the time I'm 13,. I'm going to quit this shit show.

Brian Rivera:

Yeah, okay, well, you're talking to me now. This is great. This is great. Coaching for parents in my position, dads in my position, and I think you and I talked about this in the past, where, when you look at the cognitive development of a teenager and you try to apply adult learning techniques to them, it's probably not a good idea, right? So here I am, taking what I know about effective debriefing and having my daughters reflect back on what happened and, based on what you just told me, that's probably not a good thing at this age. You know, they just want to kind of leave it alone at best. Knowledge is the way I understand it, so I might be applying the wrong process there. However, I do think that I want to highlight something else you brought up here, and that is the process, and I have to ask you about this Putting the work in in sports. Is there any difference from doing that and doing it in academics, or are they the same? Putting the work in they are they the same?

Sue Winquinst:

putting the work in. They are absolutely the same in terms of execution, but in terms of socially, how you're explaining it as a parent is completely different, because when I'm in fourth, fifth, sixth grade, I've never heard a kid say, hey, sign me up for soccer because I want to work on it. It just doesn't. But as parents, we get in there and next thing you know, we surround that kid with this, what I call this orbit of accessories. Now the kid has turned off the freedom brain, the curiosity brain. Now they're realizing I need to do this work because I got to make my parents happy, because I hear them talking in the car about scholarship. All of this is staying in their brain and you're going to say well, how the hell do you know that, sue? Because I'm interviewing them in high school anonymously. We've got 45,000 data points of what the daughter is thinking when mom and dad are chatting, and it will curl your nose hairs.

Brian Rivera:

This is great Mark.

Mark McGrath:

Yeah, so I'm the dad of a woman Division I athlete. She's a rising junior swimmer and from watching her swim from age four to now almost 21, it seemed to me what you're describing is a lot of. What I observed is like you stay back, let the coaches coach and let the kid fall in and let her, let her, uh, do the work and be there to support when, when they need it. And I would say that I've always seen that the best coaches were the ones that really focused on the person. They really focused on the, on the human aspect of it, that we're able to get the performance out, on the. On the contrary, the ones who burnt out, the ones who quit when they went to college and they burned out, were the ones that were driven so hard externally and synthetically from what you called. What did you say? You said like sort of the peripheral or sort of the ancillary things that surround that got in the way of the wavelength, maybe between the athlete and the team and the coach. Is that a good restatement?

Sue Winquinst:

Absolutely that orbit of accessories, that really drowns them out.

Mark McGrath:

That's what it was. Yeah, okay.

Sue Winquinst:

And you get caught up in it because you get the sense that I'm getting left behind when I believe parenting is an individual game. Don't get caught up in the team of parenting. Look at the Jones. They just bought the 700 bat. The kid doesn't even have a strong base. She could have a 1200 bat and it's not going to help her. So for me, what's so hard is there is no truth teller for sport parents around the long-term effect. They don't know how to discern truth from fallacy when it comes to raising sport children.

Mark McGrath:

Which is an always evolving. It's always an evolving thing, right? They need to revise and update their sort of understanding of things as things evolve, because things change. I imagine when you were playing in the 70s in college, it's very different than young women would play today. There's probably more opportunities. There's probably more funding. There's probably better amenities for women athletes, is that?

Sue Winquinst:

Yeah, you're absolutely right. Here's what's. Here's the point that parents need to understand. Sport is an unregulated society. So, as a parent, think about your lives. You just admitted you're both parents, monday through Friday. You are fanatical about car insurance, life insurance, health insurance, but then not necessarily you guys. Then the parent on Saturday morning drops their precious cargo, their daughter, to chuck in a truck. That doesn't know the first thing about anything that has to do with leadership, failure, recovery, player wholeness. It's not their fault. God bless them. They raised their hand. But because it's unregulated, parents turn off their discerning mind and say why wouldn't you ask the same questions of the youth coach that you asked the insurance policy guy? Why don't we? And until the parents have an uprising, it's just gonna be a money grab. Youth sport.

Brian Rivera:

And it is. It is right now. You brought a failure recovery and when you and I looked at the flow cycle, recovery is one of the stages of the flow cycle. There I believe it's struggle, release, flow and recovery. Can you walk us through what you mean by that and maybe apply it towards both what our kids are going through now as teenagers and as Division I athletes and then all the way through pros?

Sue Winquinst:

Yeah, let me first just back up. What's so exciting, where I get excited and where I've learned so much in the last five to seven years around flow science is giving language to way before and way after failure recovery. So for us, we've been working because I was raised that way. I'm a daughter of a military father. He stormed the beaches of Normandy, so I lived a world of you better own the process and no one sits in their junk. So for us, at UCLA, it was a station they come into UCLA.

Sue Winquinst:

Station Number seven is a failure recovery station. For the first time in your life, you're going to own my bat and then shut your pie hole. We've raised them to have such a voice around. Oh, I didn't get it done because my brother's, uncle's, sister's cousin didn't pick me up on time and teaches the brain, everything's okay around being average. Instead, if we celebrate that you go through the process, for us we always want to say in and out quickly, in and out of the failure quickly, this idea of anti-fragility we're going to get in, we're going to get out and be elevated because we're a little bit smarter. Number seven we actually make the odds of succeeding so, so low. They have to practice and so we had attention to detail.

Sue Winquinst:

There was a lot of rigor involved. Regarding softball, You're actually going to, however you want to do it, but if you can't figure out a model, here's one for you. And remember now, like golf, softball we have more time in between plays. Two pats of the chest Audible, my bad. Give the outs point to a teammate. I'm owning it, I'm going to own it. I'm going to say I own it and then I'm going to give the outs that says I've already intellectualized it, I know where we are. There's two outs, we've got a runner at third and I check in with a teammate. They want to know I'm okay, I'm good. Now boom, we get that done in about 2.5 seconds.

Sue Winquinst:

Now everybody's back and in alignment as a team, not around. Everybody's thinking the same thing. I'm not a big believer in that. And Ponch, we talked about that before. Team dynamics are different than individual. So this is an individual dynamic that we used so you can get in and out quickly, just like bats. We go through another set of prompts when we're going in between pitches. But they learn that language and they realize failure and success. They hold hands. You can't have one without the other. Grow up.

Brian Rivera:

This is interesting you bring up it's an individual construct. Potentially, I'm seeing there's a duality to it where if I own a failure, it's doing something to me cognitively and it's doing something where we can talk about either blending egos, building that trust, creating that psychological safety. Are you saying that it serves two purposes?

Sue Winquinst:

oh, it serves two purpose. It's, sir. Oh, look at you, look at punch I have balloons.

Brian Rivera:

I have no idea where they came from come on everybody who's listening to this. Uh, some balloons just went across my desk. I don't't know how that happened, yeah.

Sue Winquinst:

Ponch is partying over there everybody. Another side of Ponch here we go. Yes, I do agree there is a scaling effect that helps the group intel as a whole. I meant I want to be very careful that I'm not saying everybody needs to think alike, say alike, speak alike, because it's great. My interest now as a consultant is around team dynamics. I'm really interested in teaching individuals how to navigate the huge contradiction around individual greatness and team greatness, because they contradict each other and I love getting into the mess of that.

Brian Rivera:

Yeah, no, we could dive into that here in a minute as well. But back to the failure recovery is that I want to build on that some more. In the military we would talk about. When you do an effective debrief as a leader, you're showing fallibility, that you make mistakes as a human. You know that I did. I know I did something wrong. Everybody knows I did something wrong. I'm going to make sure everybody's aware of that and that creates the ability for us to reconstruct the past, understand what happened as a team so we can improve future team performance, and that's what we're trying to do there with effective retrospectives. That recovery method or recovery point in a flow cycle. Is that similar to what you did in the past? Or where were we different on this type of thinking you did in the past, or where were we different on?

Sue Winquinst:

this type of thinking yeah, that from both an individual and a team and a coaching. We do the AARs, I mean, every single day. We would do those and have them be able to move through them quickly. Where I think it's unique a lot of teams that don't do it is they've never thought about making failure recovery a skill, an X's and O's station, Because we're already assuming the athletes coming in whole.

Sue Winquinst:

Remember, my bias is around high performance, and where we're getting it wrong is we're assuming because you were so phenomenal, you were an honor student and you're the. You know, we're looking at the top 18 players in the country. We're assuming they're whole and it's just the opposite. Because they've been taught failure is bad. They've been taught that if it's bad, then the brain's got to negotiate the fear issues. So instead we're saying fail fast, fail hard, fail a lot, but by golly you better not sit in it or you'll be on the bench. So we had a really, really rigid responsibilities around how long you sit in your junk, because they learn very early. We're so deep as a team. If you can't figure it out between the white lines, we have somebody in the dugout that's chomping at the bit to show their failure recovery.

Brian Rivera:

Let's connect this to flow, because I think there's something here when we talk about being present. Does this type of failure recovery allow you to move on? Is that what it's doing?

Sue Winquinst:

Well, you've got to front load to make sure that they understand their wholeness. If I'm not whole as a person in terms of how I see myself, how I speak about myself both internally and externally, failure recovery is not going to work a bit. So we first put them through an individual audit, long-term athletic development plan where they go and they see where the separation from themselves to their identity as a player and they actually pinpoint there. It was ninth grade. That happened in 11th grade is where I actually left my whole self behind and all I did was become a swimmer or a soccer player or a basketball player. Once we can pinpoint that now, we can go ahead and reconstruct and get that back because we teach them. If they can get that back, this actually will be.

Sue Winquinst:

We call it hashtag love hard. You're going to love the good tension. You're going to love tension can be a good thing, right, and I know both of you believe in that. So for us we have to first do the individual audit to make sure they're whole, then get into massively successful failure recovery processes.

Brian Rivera:

Okay, I want to move over to the type of coaching and I've read this before that constraints led approach, where you actually create the conditions that they're going to see in a game. It's the way you want to coach or create the environment for them. Is that how you coached as well? It's not about the activity.

Sue Winquinst:

Yeah, we want to get context to our younger coaches out there. The first thing we have to do is we have to measure their overall movement, their functional movement, how they put their gears together. Then we evaluate their technical skills in how they put the gears together. Then we see if they have the timing and the decision-making on their tactical skills. Then we can go in to that next phase. So for me it's really kind of understanding all of those things first.

Brian Rivera:

So within the OODA loop and I'll let Mark talk a little bit more about this we talk about implicit guidance and control, the technical skills, that muscle memory, mind-body movement, the proprioception, that capability there. That is something that a good process, the way I understand it, can be applied to teaching kids at a younger age, if they shoot a basketball correctly or have a good approach to shooting a basketball, how they use both legs in soccer and there's other examples out there Even swim with your fingers open, which is a flow thing. By the way, it's just kind of cool. I don't know if you know that, mark, but when you spread your fingers open you create a hand glove there, which gives you a flow system. But I do want to know, as know, as kids progress into you know, from teenager to being looked at for a university maybe Div 1, div 2, div 3, how do you coach those kids at this level? What are we looking for?

Sue Winquinst:

Well, we've got great science on this around long-term athletic development. What we know now is the longer we can get them, keep them in unstructured play for them to be able to pick up the nuances of the game. Naturally, unstructured no instruction is really we're finding is a really huge asset. Now and then this is where we get lost. We have volunteer coaches, are responsible for biomechanical movement. So what's happening is the and I know this sounds like Sue's bashing youth coaches. To all the youth coaches, thank you for doing all the hard work, thank you for your service. But we also we also have to hold ourselves accountable. The system is broken. So when you look at us as a country, our results medals crushing it number two in the world. When it comes to our process, we're 57 in the world in terms of national governing bodies. So for us, how we go about doing it is first being able to understand.

Sue Winquinst:

The youth coach needs to understand. Are they in a huge growth phase? We have two huge growth phases. We have a six-year developmental gap. In age-based sports, we have a six-year developmental gap. So if you're a swimmer, that is eight and under swimming, that means developmentally there's a five-year-old there and an 11-year-old. We all can picture it.

Sue Winquinst:

Anybody watch the World Series. You got a pitcher on the mound that has a beard and you have a four foot seven hitter. So nothing illegal, it's just the development gap. That's number one. Number two is do I understand the basic fundamentals of a kinetic chain? The kinetic chain, people forget you have to add timing into that Game speed timing.

Sue Winquinst:

So you have youth coaches trying to fix a technical skill when in reality they are not picking up the pitch soon enough and they're rushing. This is, if you said, sue, if you could throw a mic to the whole world, what would it be? Please understand. Just Google functional movement tactics, speed and timing. So you understand. Are they in a technical hole deficit? A technical deficit they can't get their elbow in line with their hip, or are they late getting there? So it looks wrong. This is the number one problem we have in, in my opinion, from a science background, is we are not factoring in game speed timing element. They actually have a beautiful technical swing. It's their timing, and the only way you can do that is you got to put them into game situations. But most coaches don't want to do that because you don't get a lot done during that time, because the game will only go so fast, I'm going to go ahead and let them hit off the machine. I'm going to get 300 swings, perfect. Now they can't manage the tactical part.

Mark McGrath:

Do you think that in what you're describing though, I mean, do you think that there's been in this modern epoch of athletics, especially for kids, that there's too much over specialization and what I mean by that? By contrast, when we were all kids, you know, I had a fall sport, a winter sport, a summer sport, spring sport and a summer sport, and that developed range and repertoire. And then I found out when I went to high school, I was a great lacrosse player and I just played lacrosse. I stopped playing baseball, basketball and football and other things. I mean, do you see that or do you see more of an over-specialization?

Sue Winquinst:

Yes, definitely so. It's a bell-shaped curve right. So on the right side of the bell-shaped curve, the best of the best, there are some that survive out of that and they are very successful. What we're finding overall in high performance sports that they didn't early specialize, that they had a variety in their experience and still made it to the top. Now we understand the specialization has to occur at some point. People always ask me at what age should she start being on a travel team? I'm like well, you're going to have to show me her long-term athletic development graph and I'll tell you exactly when she should do it. But everybody is a snowflake, everybody's different, and parents need to be responsible about where their child is in their long-term athletic development as a body and their body of experience in sport.

Brian Rivera:

You know I've read the book. I think it's by David Epstein. Am I reading that right? White Journalists Triumph in a Specialized World. I don't know if it's actually by Epstein or not. Yeah, david Epstein. It may or may not be from him at all, but anyway, the concept is exactly the same thing. It's take a journalist approach at a younger age and you hear about different athletes who are great at what they do today. They didn't start off that way. They played soccer, they played basketball, they played baseball, they swam, and then now today they're great tennis stars. So that's what the research is saying is it supports everything you just pointed out there, at least the way we understand it is. There's no need to specialize at my daughter's age anyway, 13, 14.

Mark McGrath:

You talked about in that book, about, like you know, tiger woods was designated from birth to be a golfer and that's all he did, whereas roger federer, who had a very famous mother, um, who was a very famous tennis coach. He allowed him to play soccer, basketball and skateboard and do all sorts of other things, and then he came back to tennis at the time that all of his peers that had been specializing were burning out.

Sue Winquinst:

Yeah, and as somebody that I believe the teaching aspect in understanding how the athlete develops overall. So when you have these hugely successful documentaries, as a teacher and a leader I cringe because I'm like, oh, a whole nother generation of parents that think their kid has to be kicking a soccer ball competitively at age five, because we now have five and under national championships. We now have six and under World Series, national championships Six and under.

Brian Rivera:

Yeah, it's phenomenal what's going on in sports today. I came across a quote recently from Sally Jenkins' book the Right Call. It's a great book. Don't mistake activity for achievement, practice the right way, and that's from John Wooden, and I think that's somebody that you may know. We have a 10,000-hour rule that may have been debunked as well. They're going back to Tiger Woods for 10,000 hours and I tell my girls this all the time. Hey, just because you're doing something for a large amount of time doesn't mean you're doing it right. So can you talk a little bit about doing the right thing right?

Sue Winquinst:

Yeah, first, once again, you're going to see my biases at the parents right, because they create the conditions right. So this is a youth sport. Today, with our parents, we've decided to have behavior on a week-to-week basis that is, dropping too much money, too much time, too much cognitive load, too much physical load on something that is all about a lottery ticket. And we're going to win that lottery ticket called an athletic scholarship. People are going to say, well, I'm not that into the scholarship, I just want my athlete to play. That means that they're still in the naive experience. As a parent, we don't really care about Susie doing any type of scholarship. We don't really care. Good, stay in that, because that's going to last about two years and then you're going to meet one family that's on a travel ball team and you're going to get sucked into that vortex because the majority of our families try to gravitate to that travel ball experience. So for me, it's about work smart as a parent first and then create those opportunities where you're going to actually start to ask the athlete do you want to do a little bit more? And it is a slippery slope. I want to give credit to the parents. This is the art part of parenting. There are times where your athlete doesn't want to do the extra work, but then, when she's 18, she's going to regret it doesn't want to do the extra work, but then, when she's 18, she's going to regret it. Right, but let me tell you.

Sue Winquinst:

Let me tell you something I'm going to say. It's eight to nine to one that the parents I deal with regret. They push too hard. Okay, there's going to be that one parent that goes, oh, should have pushed her harder. Nope, 80, 90% of the parents have regrets that sit in. I got caught up in the noise, don't forget. Now. Less than 1% get a scholarship in the sport of their choice, to the school of their liking Less than 1%. But no one is selling that because the NCAA doesn't want you to know the math. They don't want because it's a business, right. So we want to sell the dream all the way up through high school. But here's the reality. Parents would never. We're going to spend $15,000 this year on lottery tickets because we think we're going to win the billion dollars. Parents are like I'm never going to do that. I go. You do it every month.

Brian Rivera:

It's called youth soccer. Can you shape sports as a way to help kids do a couple of things? One, stay away from technology, try to avoid that, avoid social media, and then, two, use it as a way to help them understand the importance of academics? I mean, how do you feel about that approach?

Sue Winquinst:

And if so, I just I still, having said that, I mean you can sense my passion is I'm on the front lines. Yeah, right, right, I mean, if you can, just as a parent, read the statistics, you read the stats and life insurance and car insurance why are we dropping on school? My goodness, mom and dad are down there with the principal going crazy because the math standard is not being hit, but the brain is off on new sport. So, yes, sport is a hugely important. It is, I always say it is the greatest leader for a young human outside the parents. If the parents are doing their job, parents are doing their job. They should be number one. But here's the unfortunate Studies now show this generation right now. What are they called? Gen A? Now, gen A is the first generation that their number one influencer is the internet. It's no longer the parent.

Brian Rivera:

All right, let's talk about high-performing teams in college sports, what you've seen in the past and what you've seen today you and I kind of talked about this the other day where things like alcohol, the consumption of alcohol at the professional level before a game, the wearables that type of you know, how's technology, how's better understanding of the body, the mind or the brain gut connection, how's that starting to play into sports? And again, I think this connects into a lot of concepts you and I learned about to float.

Sue Winquinst:

Yeah, and now my work is predominantly with our national teams and our professional teams. I love this level because they really are tapped into the nuance around analytics. Are they perfect at it? No, but they understand. We've got to figure out the fit and what we've learned in the last 10 years. This is at the NGB level, the National Governing Body level, for those of you who don't know NGB. The NGB of each sport is responsible for the rules of the sport, picking the Olympic teams, our national teams. So they represent our, our, the world, our country to the world.

Sue Winquinst:

What I love is they're starting to see the importance of customization. So 10 years ago, when we started getting wearable technology, everybody just got slapped the same thing, got slapped, the same answers. Now we're able to read this like an F1 dashboard and they're really starting to create the conditions. When you think, you know, mark, I think about you when I talk about this. Because swimming, you know they've got it dialed. Now I know they're training controversies regarding swimming, you know, like gymnastics, but if all sports could get into swimming and gymnastics and track and field and learn from them from a individual sport basis, collectively, all sports would get better.

Sue Winquinst:

So I love the idea that we're using technology around sleep, around recovery, the fact that alcohol now you know this generation coming up, that Poncha and I were talking about this the fastest growing uh beverage in restaurants and bars is non-alcoholic beer. So we know it's coming. They understand the huge effects of it, whereas 10 years ago, my gosh, those poor young athletes just couldn't wait. You know, 20 years ago we party from 10 to 5 in college. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Then we know now we're going to go ahead and binge it 10 to 12. Now you're finding they're not big binged drinkers. It's coming. So I get excited about how we're connecting gut health, everything that goes into our stomach, including alcohol, and how it's translating. And the science is now sharing with us our ability to have quicker reaction time, better sleep. All those get into flow, in and out of flow more efficiently. So I get excited about the future on this national governing bodies level.

Brian Rivera:

When I was in the world of fighter aviation we were max performing aircraft, right, I even flew air shows. Alcohol was it's part of the culture. I'm not sure if it is today. And then you know, going back to that, the wearables where we saw in the military EOD teams were wearing devices and they'd go out on a Friday night and it would tell them how they would perform three or four days out and it kind of shifted the culture there away from drinking and so it wasn't. I don't think what it was like 20 years ago. It's not like, I'm sorry, today, it's not like it was 20 years ago where everybody was drinking all the time again, from my perspective and I see the same thing in sports so here we are watching NHL, we're watching NBA. These teams are max performing every other day. Basically, how do they get through those couple of days in the recovery mode and going back to nutrition and coaching? What's happening in that space?

Sue Winquinst:

Well, first of all, in the team space, team by team, right, every national governing body has. You know, for example, let's talk, I'm working, I'm embedded with USA Volleyball, okay, so they have six disciplines, right, you've got beach, you have indoor and you have para, right. So, men and women, six disciplines. But in those six disciplines there's over 20 teams because it's by age group, right? So how do we scale all those teams? Very, very difficult. That's why NGBs are struggling, because they don't have the funding to take care of everybody. So what I'm about to tell you I'm not assuming everybody does this, because I'm in, I've seen our national teams in multiple sports, but this is here's what the best are doing in my opinion. Here's what the best are doing in my opinion the coaching staff is in alignment with strength, sports, med and mental performance and mental health. So we're now splitting those right.

Sue Winquinst:

So up until gosh, five, seven years ago, it was mental health and mental performance sat inside of it. So think clinical psychologists who have a great expertise around mental health. With all due respect to that industry, mental performance is completely different. And so now, at the high performance level, our big programs that have a lot of money, on the national level and colleges. They've split those. So now we're normalizing people that have to manage mental health. Think day-to-day performance, anxiety, ideation, depression. We're now building conditions for those parents out there that have that kid. We're now building conditions for them. And then, team-wide, we're turning mental performance into hygiene. Everybody is going to go through a process. They're all going to be customized because they all get in and out of flow. We're finding differently.

Mark McGrath:

I wanted to shift gears to leadership and I wanted to stay in the realm of women's sports intercollegiate sports, if we can. So you are the second Division I women's athletic coach that we've had on the show. The first one was Digit Murphy. That was the head coach of Brown Women's Ice Hockey for many, many years. It was right around then NBA and hockey playoff time too, and one of the things I learned from Digit and one of the things I observed when I was in corporate America that when I talked about things like flow and OODA and complexity, I always felt that women were more interested in the in the business world than men were and in in being friends with digit and knowing what she had been studying about women in in the in the professional world.

Mark McGrath:

There were some very alarming statistics, you know there were. There were more more men named Dave leading S andP 500 companies than there were women. But when you stripped out all the C-suites and you looked at the women in the C-suites, the overwhelming majority of them were former women collegiate athletes, intercollegiate athletes. And that the edge that a woman intercollegiate athlete has a young woman in college you know that's that's playing intercollegiate sports. The edge that she has over her peers is is significant and I wanted to get your take on that because again there's there's sort of two angles. There's the women are attracted to these things flow, decision making and chaos, nonlinear environments. These things flow, decision-making in chaos, nonlinear environments. And women intercollegiate athletes have an even further edge. That's trackable with data in the business world. What are your thoughts on that?

Sue Winquinst:

I think that we first have to go back to the science. We know the brains are different. That's number one. So this conversation goes sideways because it could sound like we're genderizing, and we have to genderize this because we have to first start. The brain is different, the pathways are different, we know right.

Sue Winquinst:

So oftentimes the simplified saying is you know men have, you know, a freeway, and women have a bird's nest of roads that are capable of intertwining and they're really comfortable with chaos, which is true I see it as more about because I see it when I deal with men is it's easier to get in and get messy with the chaos with women. But we have our own impediments and that is we're like gunpowder. So if we're locked and loaded and we understand, we have an awareness about what we're picking up, we call it frequency. If we're aware of all that frequency, gunpowder, we could shoot lasers. If we're not aware of that and we don't know how to workflow science, it will blow up in your face With guys. People will say, oh well, guys, you know they're not as complicated. Actually, I'm finding and I know this is going to wake up a lot of people and they're going to get all ruffled. So I hear you. Please don't blow up my inbox, but this is what I want to share with you.

Sue Winquinst:

In the last 20 years, I'm finding men to be more androgynous towards the female side than they were 40 years ago, and science backs that. We now know that the overall testosterone levels of men has decreased. Overall, as a gender it has decreased, and they're attributing that to environment, what we're eating, all that kind of stuff. So if we first start there that both genders have a positive and a negative, and the teams men and women that I work with that are more tuned for me it's just being tuned in to what toolkit I need in the moment, those are the teams that do extremely well, whether it be male or female. The most important work we're not doing with our females is we're not doing an audit of when they lost their identity. We're not doing that audit and we don't do an audit on that and have an honest conversation first with ourselves.

Sue Winquinst:

Build safety. I'm big on anonymous stuff until we build the emotional safety. I deal with coaches all the time. They say I go tell me this is my first question How's your culture? I've never heard a coach say, oh, it's crappy. I've never heard a coach say that because we're so early in my career, I'd say our culture is perfect. Now that I look back, it was a shit show.

Brian Rivera:

Yeah.

Sue Winquinst:

Now that I look back and I know what perfect actually looks like, or close to perfect. If we can first do anonymous stuff so we find out exactly where we are, what is our state of mind right now as a group, then I become your co-conspirator in getting better, and not your, your leader. So to me, if coaches and leaders can first go there and I say what holds your team back, you know what the first thing they say right out of that? I don't know. I've never asked them.

Brian Rivera:

Yeah, yeah.

Sue Winquinst:

So let's get, let's become more transformational as a leader. For me, people always say well, how do you define transformational versus transactional? Super simple I first listen, I take the information and lift up the group intelligence right, and then we literally go through that cycle every single week. We're listening and we're learning and then the ultimate if we're doing it right, we end up lifting the entire group's experience. And if you have talent, you get to win. It all starts with talent, but if you have the talent and you're transformational with your individuals first, I'm going to build up your wholeness. Because I then have to be a contradiction and tell you you have to be aware of when to go in your ego and when to go out. You got to go in and out of your ego hundreds of times during a game.

Brian Rivera:

This is amazing. We can go in many directions here on sense-making, red teaming, the stuff that we use in organizations, how we understand culture. I want to go back to the ego point. I think during our course we talked about mission-focused and ego-focused and you just brought up you've got to go in and out. So there are times in a performance where you're going to be ego focused and more so than mission focused, or internally focused, more so than mission focused. Can you talk a little more about that? When it comes to high performing individuals and teams?

Sue Winquinst:

Yeah, and it's going to sound broad brush because I don't want to get into the sports I deal with. I don't want to talk about soccer and softball and volleyball, because you might be a swimmer, but at the end of the day this is what we know. When the player, first of all, they've got their anchors of their individual efficacy locked and loaded and if they don't, they have the toolkit for that. And then they go through and they audit their game when they're in ego and out of ego. Now they have a map, a roadmap of their sport when they're in and out, in and out, in and out, in and out, and now it's almost more like it's an orchestra. That now happens because everybody understands they're in and out of their ego. Then we have group conversation about that, because we've got to make sure that we have the team actually in alignment, like they're in and out of their ego. Then we have group conversation about that, because we've got to make sure that we have the team actually in alignment, like they're actually saying the same thing when they're out of their ego. We've got to make sure we don't have too many people saying I'm in my ego at that point and 80% of the team is like no, no, no, no, dude, no, no. This is when we put our ego on the shelf. You've got to put. You got to pluck out people that don't quite have. Uh, this is when I'm out of my ego. So let me be real, specific.

Sue Winquinst:

Diamond sports, okay, diamond sports. I'm the number four hitter. I hit home runs, I hit RBIs, run batted in. That's my role. Now we're down by one with a runner at second. We know that there are people on the team that are meant to do the bunt. A little tap of the ball onto the infield. If I don't get out of my ego and look and know coach is going to call for a bunt, we're screwed because they're going to go in there and swing big. The player, the opponent, knows how to set that up. That's kind of situational awareness. This is when I'm out of my ego. I'm going to do what's being asked of me, not what I want to do. Hundreds of times during the game we have to do that, and some sports extremely fast. Other sports, you know, in our game we have 32 minutes in between at bat.

Brian Rivera:

Yeah.

Sue Winquinst:

So you got to learn when to get out of your ego, or if you stay in your ego in those you know 31 minutes you'll never be a great diamond sports person.

Brian Rivera:

Never, you'll never make it. You'll never make it. So being selfless is critical in everything.

Sue Winquinst:

I'm not a big thing around selfless. Okay, I'm self-aware, right or just?

Mark McGrath:

high self-aware.

Sue Winquinst:

Self-aware because selfless means no self. So I don't like. I'm not a big. And I'm not a big one on confidence either. I don't like the word confidence because, socially, people, if you talk to people that are 18 and younger, they're going to say, yeah, you've got you project the wind, you're confident. I actually, if you define it, if you look in the dictionary, it means certainty, but it's gotten a bad rap. So I stay away from it and I just say I need mental regulation. I don't even talk about toughness, that's a results oriented word. All I need you to be is ready for the moment. In softball there's 95 moments, 95 pitches. I need you to be ready for the moment. That makes me feel like I don't have to be that big, I don't have to meet a moment, I don't have to strike out 18 people, I just have to meet a moment. And so for me it's all about awareness, it's all about readiness and failure recovery.

Brian Rivera:

So the word process is coming up a lot in the late, especially around the word teaming. Teaming is the process of teamwork, so how do you work together as a high-performing organization? That's one thing we coach right now is how you do that in an organization. We borrow from team science and aviation crew resource management. Can you talk a little bit about team science in sports and how you bring individuals together to be a team and what that actually looks like today?

Sue Winquinst:

What do you mean by team science? You mean the evidence that's behind what we're doing.

Brian Rivera:

Yeah, yeah, the evidence that supports the positive, the good practices behind teamwork.

Sue Winquinst:

There's only a handful, to be honest with you, because the rest is phony science. Yep, this is what I know to be true regarding great teams. It's not about you keeping an eye on what it's supposed to look like in the team. It's building a team that says this is what really good looks like in a shit show. But what we're doing, we're having these culture. Oh, we're going to go away for three days. We're going to carry tires, we're going to have candles and there's this and it's great because we know the dopamine right. It's like, oh, that's amazing, that's an event. What we need to do is have leaders. If you are the regional manager, you're the VP, you better create environments two, three times a day. That says I'm rewarding your process in our shit show.

Sue Winquinst:

So this idea, the people that are mastering uncertainty are crushing it. I've dealt with a group. They're rising stars in the company this was early in the week Cannot believe how the leaders are front-loading everything. They are teaching them and celebrating them, Not, oh my gosh, you took this team and you made everybody one and we hit our third quarter numbers. It actually sounds like this oh my gosh, we were at the bottom, we're still at the bottom, but we retained our top talent for the last two years. It's a complete different mindset around building the bricks on process of enjoying and valuing uncertainty. That's the reality. If you're talking to a 22 year old, teach me how to get excited about uncertainty, Cause right now it makes me not want to get out of bed and I'm going to quit my job. Every what is it? 15 months now I'm going to quit the job because I've been taught what great teams look like and I haven't recognized it, so I'm leaving.

Mark McGrath:

I mean you can use a surfing example, because the ocean is about as uncertain as it gets and you never get, never get in your repertoire and your knowledge and your understanding and your ability to reorient and make faster decisions and shape. You take what the ocean gives you and you approach it that way. Not, hey, the ocean's going to do exactly this, because it never does.

Sue Winquinst:

Yeah, and there's this front-loading. Front-loading is a big thing for me in teaching teams and teaching individuals is when I walked down on that sand. I am humbled because there's no off switch with the ocean Right.

Mark McGrath:

There's no guarantees either.

Sue Winquinst:

No guarantee, Just like when you're in a clown car of a company. Thank you, All you 22 to 42 year olds that can document you're in a clown car. Thank you, that got us nowhere. Who is the person that's going to go AAB with their group? Well, Sue, I'm just a first line sales guy. Yeah, Pack somebody. Dude, Go above and beyond. You might have to do an extra phone call. You want to, Sue? I want to step out and I want to. I want my bosses to recognize it. You want to? I want to step out and I want to. I want my bosses to recognize it. You want to be recognized? Go above and beyond. Don't point the finger, Captain. Obvious, we have enough of them in this world.

Brian Rivera:

Yeah, when we were training I think we're in a coaching session you brought up a phrase you use. I'm going to get it wrong, but it goes something like this it looks like this. It doesn't look like that.

Sue Winquinst:

Can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah, we do this as young as we can. We want people to understand right now, society is doing a great job of dream making, dream building. This is what they can acknowledge. Yep, to be a great leader, I need to be positive. I was positive you need. Then what we do is we say, what doesn't it look like? Because you know what I have found and I'm not cynical, I am so excited about this generation. I really am. We never talk about what it doesn't look like. Average doesn't know their average Right, because average says I was positive one time, but now you say, hey, you know what it doesn't look like when you're down by one. You get quiet in the dugout.

Brian Rivera:

There you go.

Sue Winquinst:

When your team loses, you're complaining about the teammate and the coaches, the weather, the equipment, your friends. That's what it doesn't look like. Now, average says crap, that's me, so to me it looks like it doesn't look like. It's an important framework, starting at a young age.

Brian Rivera:

Yeah, so we talk about behavioral markers inside of team science where, basically, it goes like this Teamwork is observable, therefore it can be measured, and we can have exactly what you talked about and say use a marker which allows people to understand where they are.

Brian Rivera:

So, with my girls, when I see their head down and you can see the body language, right. So I've imagined body language is it doesn't look like that, right, that's, or it looks like you know, that's a good indicator. There is what's going on in the team, so we can use these inside of organizations to tell them what good looks like and what bad looks like. And I've had the same experience with a Fortune 20 company where they had marked themselves as a high-performing team and we sat down with them and went through the markers and they found out they weren't even a team, right, they had all these things that said this is what we look like right now and they were able to move forward with that. So I think what you shared with me today and what you shared with us in the past is spot on and it's pretty simple, isn't it? It's just amplify the good and dampen the bad.

Sue Winquinst:

Well, papa Coach Whitten used to always say boy, the most difficult thing is when you know everything is to try to simplify it for everyone oh, that's a great one, that's right, so the hardest thing to do is to simplify it, to be able to hold everybody accountable.

Sue Winquinst:

You know, I have so much. I have so much respect for our usa volleyball team because we've built in teammateship analytics and people say, oh, we do analytics for us because we're small enough. Right, we only have 23, 24 players. They build in the micro behaviors yeah, pre in and post everything that they do. And then they define that on the court, right service line, shuttle sub line, in the box, which is the bench micro behaviors. And then we celebrate what you are and what you're not. We celebrate what you you're not and you're going to acknowledge what you're working on.

Sue Winquinst:

And I know people are like wait a minute, they're the best in the world. They shouldn't have to deal with that. We're number two in the world, but we don't have the top three players in the world. We have to out-team the world. And so this idea of team unity is and everybody uses that word team unity. I don't know a team in the world that's doing what they're doing. I have so much admiration for them.

Sue Winquinst:

And then to be able to have a razor thin margin for error because everyone's expecting. You know, we're in our launch to Paris. Everyone is expecting oh, they're going to win a gold medal. They don't realize the margins are so thin. But we actually let them rate each other because we want them to get comfortable with learning and not taking it emotionally as a negative. So we front load and we said look, if you still are afraid of this assessment, it means you're in your ego. If you're not afraid of it, you're in mastery. So mastery, we always sit in mastery. We never arrive.

Sue Winquinst:

Players people always say well, what does that profile of that iconic player look like? The iconic player, not the one that's won a million championships, I'm talking about the iconic one that has the talent, has the numbers, has the results, has the teammateship. That player they are so fanatical and curious about getting better. They don't care who's telling them. It could be the eighth grader that said I watched you practice, jordan Larson, and it didn't look like you were hustling. And she's going to say where did you not see me hustle, cause I'm trying to work on my micro behavior around hustle? They never attach their ego to the result or the perception. They just say what do I need to do to get better?

Mark McGrath:

To me, that's inspiration from the broad panacea of all sport that listeners would be able to relate to. In other words, you know famous athletes like who would you say were the best, that kind of characterized or capitalized that like your top three or four or five yeah, so from a, from a celebrity sport?

Sue Winquinst:

I people ask me that often, mark, I never state that because all I see is in front of the curtain, right? So people are going to say this guy, this guy, this guy, and I'm going to say I want to see behind the curtain, I want to see how, how he grew, or was he just the go-to? Everybody shut up and put up. But I can tell you on the women's side. I can tell you on the women's side, like right now I, jordan larson to me, is one of our greatest iconic athletes that's in mastery, constantly trying to get better. She would get on the podcast and say I'm still not there yet and yet she's literally weeks away from possibly becoming a four-time Olympian, right? So I can go on women's side a little bit more, but I would have to be behind the curtain. So I know them at their worst. How are they? So it's easy, it's easy to look at.

Sue Winquinst:

Oh, so-and-so is all it, but I don't really know because I'm not behind that curtain.

Mark McGrath:

Yeah, and I guess also too, probably relies on a lot of anecdotal evidence and things like, say, kobe Bryant I mean he's anecdotally from what others say that he was extremely intense, as you say, behind the curtain. That's kind of like what I was thinking about, like that sort of a thing, not whoever cleans up the most championships, because, to your point, yeah, you don't really know what's going on and when you like, let's talk about in front of the curtain, right when?

Sue Winquinst:

when you say Kobe Bryant, what's my first quick response? That as your model for rigor, rigor is a discipline term and attention to detail. This generation needs to learn that word. They don't, this generation doesn't know that word because they're swipe and go because of social media. You probably know this, your parents, right? You actually can't say something one time, it has to be reiterated multiple times, more than ever before. And that's because they're in the swipe and go right, they're swipe and go on their social media. Everything is quick scans.

Sue Winquinst:

But when you talk about Kobe, I think rigor, he is a, he is a role model for rigor. He has this relentlessness around the attention to detail and his discipline is next level. I don't know the man, I just know what I saw publicly, to watch what he did in behind this, behind the competition window, to see what he did behind the competition window, to see what he did Monday through Friday. I have seen that firsthand. To me, that's where I don't say iconic athlete in terms of technical tactical failure, recovery and teammateship, because I don't know the teammateship, I don't know how he manages failure because, only the people on the team know that.

Mark McGrath:

Interesting. Yeah, I mean, that's really fascinating Because also, do you think that you can see when these athletes, when they say things publicly, like maybe in a press conference or whatever, can you determine? Like, say Kobe Bryant, for example, when he was still with us, he would say he would be disappointed being up two to nothing in a playoff series. We're not over yet. Like it's not over yet and there's things that we need to be working on and we got a long way to go versus, you know, you hear other uh, outward projections that kind of reflect, I think, the inward projection yeah, I think in general people don't understand.

Sue Winquinst:

Like sometimes there's a part of society that says, god, kobe, take a rest. But they just don't understand what he's looking at. He's looking at the standard of excellence, not the standard of the opponent that I'm one inch better than. And athletes that have an eye on excellence are the most powerful to recruit and you can go through an interview, are the most powerful to recruit and you can go through an interview. It's so easy to pick it out.

Mark McGrath:

It's so easy to pick it out if an athlete love asking the questions so I can pick out if they have rigor in their life. So here's a question, then. So you're familiar with the recruiting process and I've gone through it as a parent with a child and then about to do it with two others, do you? What are like your red flags as a coach? When you're looking at a kid, you can see the numbers, you can see the data, you can see the scores or the times or whatever, and they're great, they're awesome and they're minimum to be here at whatever school. What are the real three red flags that you look for that say there's no way this person's ever going to be in my organization?

Sue Winquinst:

Well, it first starts from a college standpoint, and remember my biases. I'm at UCLA, so I have to. First thing I have to look at is their academics. So that's beautiful because it's objective, so I literally know whether they can even be in the game. The second thing is what I? I spend a lot of time with the family. So to parents, I'm retired now, so I'm going to open the curtain. All right.

Sue Winquinst:

When we're doing things and I'm talking to your athlete, I'm actually interviewing the parents. I'm watching where they sit, I'm watching what they're doing while the athlete is speaking. I'm listening to the tone I see in conversations. I may be asking the athlete a question about failure, but I'm actually waiting to see if I can get some tips and tools that have influenced that athlete from the parents. The parents have no idea they're being interviewed. They really don't. Overall, they do not understand.

Sue Winquinst:

I like to give a lot of rigor to families to see if they have an attention to detail. So I would recruit athletes. Now, remember, if you're the best athlete, trust me. If you're smart and you can hit, you're playing for UCLA. I'm going to just be honest, because if you can hit at that level and be academically at that level. Barely did I have families that weren't locked and loaded. Locked and loaded, so it really, to me, all those other things that I don't know about came first. I see them because they're hitting the ball over the fence or they've got great defense From a parenting perspective. Here are the questions you want to role play. Yeah, I'll roll great punch. How? Let's give me the profile of your athlete and then mark you, give me the profile of your athlete I'll give you both 13 and 14 year old girls playing uh aau.

Brian Rivera:

Basketball technical skills are, uh, about average mindset or headspace about average awareness of the game about average drive above average and the game about average Drive above average. And then the younger player, and she may listen to this. By the way, she's naturally talented and doesn't put a lot of effort in. So that's a big overview of dad looking at the daughters right now.

Sue Winquinst:

Perfect, I wasn't interested in any of that, but I'm curious what the first thing he talks about. So what did he talk about? Performance, so give me the profile. Here's my first question to you, dad. Does she do her own laundry? Yes, Does she cook her own meals 50-50 now. Does she do her dishes?

Brian Rivera:

No.

Sue Winquinst:

Is she a good sibling?

Brian Rivera:

Yes, I had to delay on that one. I'll pick one.

Sue Winquinst:

That's where I like to go.

Brian Rivera:

Okay, nice.

Sue Winquinst:

You see how quick he is, he has answers, he's paying attention. I feel really good about that, but he tipped his hat. He tipped his hat to me as a dad, so I already know his daughters have been impacted by winning, just by the sheer fact that he broke down their physical. Yeah Right. So, mark, we don't need to run you through the rigmarole, but you get it right, oh yeah.

Sue Winquinst:

And you want to be able to, as a dad, say, oh, you want to profile my daughter. This is what I'm going to tell you. I want to tell you a story about biology, and then you're going to tell me about the process of how she made biology certain during the uncertainty of it.

Sue Winquinst:

Or I want you to tell me about her kindness, because we went down to the mall and there was a bus of our our young children that have challenges, whether they're physical challenges, they're a para. Let me tell you what she did when one kid's wheelchair was broken. Those are the things I'm looking for, not do I recruit her, it's just I need to know where to start.

Brian Rivera:

Wow, this is great.

Sue Winquinst:

I'm not judging you. I just need to know where to start.

Mark McGrath:

So I want to flip the script with you, as a parent that did take a D1 prospect who's now a D1 athlete around the colleges. The overwhelming minority of options, and the one that she ended up choosing, saw her as a human and saw her as a young woman with certain potentials. And the opposite was and they were more. The opposite was I saw your daughter as a warm body that's going to score points and that's all I care about. I really don't care about her development as a woman.

Mark McGrath:

I really don't care about her development as a woman, I really don't care about her development as a leader, and they were very easy options to disqualify um and the program that she's at now. It was which we still believe was the best for her, and she believes that, and her coach believes that, because I think it focused on her development as a, as a human and, yeah, is she a number unless she put up points and finished in the top 10 in the conference? Yep, but that, I think, is a product of how she is as a person and how she's approached. So that way, I would reverse the script. Are there programs that are? Because this is my experience. It seemed to me it was very easy to disqualify things and encourage her to disqualify things that didn't see her for who she is. They saw her as something that helped them not her.

Sue Winquinst:

Great, great comment, and this is what I want everyone to discern from what I'm saying. I also am controversial in the sense that I don't even have a problem with a coach. I don't even judge a coach that says, hey, let me tell you something. She's a number and I couldn't care less about her as a human. That was your job, mom and dad. You had her for 18 years. She now can vote and, I think, go to war. It's not my job to make her feel good about herself. If you think I can do that 20 hours a week because we have limits, okay. So I want everyone to know I have no problem with that person.

Sue Winquinst:

That's recruiting warm bodies. But here's the downside they don't tell you. So I have colleagues that are like that. I have so much respect for them because in the recruiting process they tell the parents do not look to me to build your child's confidence. That's your job. Yeah, I mean, that's powerful stuff, right? That's well, parents are going to go. Well, wait a minute, the brain is still growing until they're 28 people. Let's own our responsibility. The number one influencer in a child's life is who they spend the night with, every night of their life. So I'm not saying it has to be the blood parent, it's whoever the adult is with them through those 18 years. This is fantastic and that's that Now.

Sue Winquinst:

it's super hard for the parents because you're in the in the sports space and you both, especially punch cause he's got 14 year olds. You're going to look back at this podcast. You guys have no idea what sport is going to look like in 10 years. It's going to look like your corporate world. They're going to have it Right now. They're protected. They're protected right now. The NCAA is protecting them. You guys, it will not hold up in Congress anymore. They're going to be employees.

Brian Rivera:

Well, let's look at this. I know we're running short on time, so I want to lead into three questions here, first being NIL and Portal and kind of where we are right now. What's that doing in the game in NCAA? And I also want to talk about alignment and maybe look back at what life was like at UCLA when you're surrounded by absolute greatness your teams and I believe you had some connection to, uh, you said papa wooden, uh, so maybe, maybe, look at that, yeah, yeah, that'd be great. So, nil, uh, portal, uh, what's going on in sports right now? Your thoughts?

Sue Winquinst:

yeah, let's just, let's take the tippy top so people know and they can start to see this right. So you have this control with the nc2a. You had the control with the administration and now we finally have. Who now? Our student athlete now says you're not giving me the same rights. People on the outside are going to go. They're so spoiled. Let me put it this way I want parents to remember this If I'm the top basketball player on campus, I cannot get an extra job. So those students out there, they've got three, four, five jobs. The smart engineers at UCLA they're getting paid $20,000, $30,000 to go to student college camps across the country because they're so smart Athlete nothing, I'm on scholarship.

Sue Winquinst:

I cannot do anything extra. Those laws are now being broken down. I am super excited and super scared at the same time, because what I fell in love with I know is no longer going to be here in 10 years. I know it's going to be gone and I'm preparing myself to look at sport more like corporate America. So what will happen? And I said to the athletes be careful what you wish for, because now you're going to have to pay taxes, Now you're going to have to be compliant with HR, right Because you're now going to be a corporate employee and then on the fixed picture. This Coaching is an unregulated industry.

Sue Winquinst:

Coaching you need no certification to become a coach. Guys, I went to UCLA, I became an assistant, a co-head coach, a head coach, a development director in administration, and now I'm a professor at UCLA. No certification for coaching None Zero, administration. And now I'm a professor at ucla no certification for coaching none, zero. Now we're asking that guy and girl to now run a fortune 100 company called their athletic team. So there's nil, there's it today and there it is in 10 years.

Sue Winquinst:

Transfer portal. Parents, stop getting emotional. They have rights. Get away from this or we're loyal. Once a bruin, always a bruin. I said to my head coach let go of that, start playing this game around. You've got to be able to fit your program. If someone is not happy, you don't have the time anymore to get them to get it right. I want us to stop shaming families that their athletes are picking up and leaving. We can't change that character issue. We can't change that. The system tests them right.

Sue Winquinst:

But what I would do in the recruiting? Some people say what would you do today? I would just ask you dads, hey, if your kid doesn't play and she's unhappy, would you entertain the portal? Just let me know, because I want to have your backup ready. I'm never going to get rid of her, but I'm going to be prepared. I'm going to have an open, honest conversation in the recruiting 90% of the colleges I consult with. I say in your anonymous survey, do you have? The question is are you looking at transfer portal? If you're unhappy or not playing? 90% of them don't have that in there. I said how who's going to transfer? Then? Well, just at the end of the season they say they're in the portal. You don't do anything else like that. But once again, you turn your brain off with the transfer portal. It's a strategy. Stop getting your heart involved. It's a strategy today.

Brian Rivera:

Wow, you know I'm a Coloradoado buff, so we have coach prime, and coach prime, I think, can only exist in the way he exists today because of nil and the portal.

Sue Winquinst:

Now that's a. Now you've gone to the tail of the bell-shaped curve here yeah is what he's doing.

Sue Winquinst:

is it sustainable? Only time will tell, but he's grabbed some nuggets that I think are a lot of. When you have a situation like coach prime, everyone needs to say what part could work. For me, you want to know what is powerful with him His brutal honesty. I'm not saying what he thinks is right, but I love there is no filter, but does he need to be more of a professional? All those things, all those things that people yes, yes, yes, yes. But no one can discount how he's transforming the landscape of football. No one can discount that, and I'm a big. I admire people, whether they do it intentionally or not. Change is never clean in the front end. You never have people go, hey guys, let's create some change and the guys go, okay, perfect, shake hands and we have change. No, it's always messy. There's lots of tension on the front end regarding change, and so I think people like Kim are creating change. Whether you think it's a good way or a bad way is not for us to judge.

Brian Rivera:

And your thoughts on alignment. I think you and I had a quick discussion on that and maybe you brought it up today. Alignment on teams Is there a better way to think about that?

Sue Winquinst:

I. Just everybody defines alignment differently. So for me, this idea that everybody needs to think, speak and act the same way, that the principles we all need to be going into is an awareness around in my technical, tactical failure, recovery and teammateship. Where am I? In my ego and out of my ego. To me, those, if you know, those principles were. We're in alignment. It doesn't mean we are agreeing. I want to work with teams that understand how to be good fighters with each other. And this idea, this is a fallacy and people are like well, what makes you an authority? Well, we won 11 times. I'm a world champion. I've coached with our national team. I am familiar with what it looks like All the parents, everybody that reads about the press conference.

Sue Winquinst:

We went to the next level. We were so in alignment. Everybody was no, we're not. It's a mess. It's intense Injuries, fighting egos, role reversals.

Sue Winquinst:

Coaches today have to manage so much. Stop thinking we all have to be in alignment. But what we do have to do, we have to be aware we have to fail and recover. We have to fight and recover and we have to actually understand what I call the belief. Well, when your well gets shallow, everyone's going to surround you with honey, make sure we know how to address you to get your language back to deepen that well again, so you can absorb the wins and losses. Because I believe the game you play is perfect. The game you play is perfect. We're the imperfect ones. So that's why I love team sports. Our team sports can hover around you when your belief well gets empty. That is when we have that emotional safety. You believe the words that are being told. That means we have the trust. That's when we have that emotional safety. You believe the words that are being told. That means we have the trust. That's the beautiful, delicious mess that I love to be a part of.

Brian Rivera:

Final topic for me is the topic of flow, and that is you know. You and I went through training on this. I have a book called the Flow System. We co-authored that, co-created that. What are your thoughts on flow? Where are things going with it? What happens next?

Sue Winquinst:

I've never said this to you, punch, but I can remember when you first on the Zoom I didn't know who you were and the words that were coming out of your mouth. I was like, oh my God, I'm going to put Punch in the duplication machine and then bring him into sport and we can scale this stuff right. Because flow if families, youth, sport could just understand front-loading, how you get into that flow, just don't complicate it. My mind and my body are together and I lose track of time and I kind of be doing it. Know how to get into it, know when you're stuck, when you get out, how you take care of yourself and then just do that cycle your entire life.

Sue Winquinst:

It needs to be, as we end this podcast, as we started it. Flow science needs to be in the X's and O's, technical and tactical. It needs to be hygiene. It needs flow, also known as breathing. We would never decide whether we're going to breathe today. We should never decide if we're not paying attention to flow six, eight, 10 times a day to reset ourselves and do our state management.

Brian Rivera:

I think we got to end it there. That was just amazing, Sue. I appreciate your time.

Sue Winquinst:

Thanks for having me guys. Hey, good luck in that parenting thing.

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