The mantra became, what am I teaching my children now? Like that, I can remember lying on the floor in my living room and I'm done, I'm sobbing, I'm feeling imposter syndrome, I'm completely falling apart. And I'm like, what have I done to my family? And my wife's like, no, no, no, we have a chance. You have a chance to teach your kids how to come back from this. You have a chance to teach your kids how to embrace the suck. You have a chance to teach your children how sometimes it's just gonna hurt but like you said it's not gonna kill you. Okay so you've got to get through it. Words matter. The choices that we make with the words we choose to speak or to write send powerful signals to the people we're trying to lead or inspire. And they can make all the difference between a powerful connection and a missed opportunity. For San Diego, California transplant Reed Malby, decades of experience as an athlete, a coach, and a speaker have taught him the importance of the perfect word applied at the perfect time for the proper audience. But it wasn't until a trusted advisor and those closest to him finally inspired him to stop talking about the idea and to put it to work. His newest book just released in April 2023, The Spartan Mindset, Mastering the Language of Excellence, shares powerful and personal insights that are supported by science. Here, Reed shares his own story of battling through dark times and finding victory through persistence, will, and the love and support of his family in Episode 37, The Spartan Mindset. This week's guest is a renowned speaker. He and I met years ago at an event with John O'Sullivan's Changing the Game Project and Reid Maltby has gone on to do some great things and he's continuing to grow and expand in the world of coaching and beyond. So Reid, it's great to have you this week. Oh, I'm excited to be here and I love the theme. Awesome. Well, certainly you've developed a platform. I think initially we would say maybe started in soccer and you've expanded beyond that. Now a published author with The Spartan Mindset, which if you haven't read it yet, I think is available to the general public now. Is that correct? April 18th. Awesome. Okay, so we're launching. So I got a sneak peek. So we'll get into that a little bit. And I've absolutely loved the read so far. It's been really great. And I've even used the example of if in class already. So we'll get to that. But we always start on this show, bit of a softball question. Who did Reed want to be when he was a little kid? Who did you want to be growing up? I don't, I definitely didn't want to be this guy. I really thought, I think I thought I was going to be a professional athlete. So to be more academic and more engaged with the mind and the body was not something I thought as a kid, because I played every sport possible. And if you wanted to find me, I was on some kind of sports field or some kind of pool or something, on a court. And so that was really what I wanted to become. I was just really into athletics. And then at age 16, my high school coach, my mentor, talked me into coaching. And that sort of changed the trajectory because I saw how important it was to be on the other side of the line and also to be working with the brain as much as the body in our lives. Excellent. So that's a great segue into the next question I always ask. You start at the beginning. your coming up, whether that was as an athlete, as a student, or anywhere in between? Yes, so I was a nerd. Not only was I always playing sports, but I was one of those people pleasers that I hated to disappoint other people and I set very high standards for myself. So I was that kid that was trying to get all A's in class and very studious, but at the same time real free spirit when the school bell rang and the day let out, I was at the sports field. And I think that really helped shape me today because I continued that process of trying to be as excellent in the classroom as I was on the field and trying to keep that balance there. And I never got to the point where I thought, oh, I need to focus more on sport or I need to give up sport and focus on academics. And because of that, I always went into everything I did with that balance. And like I said, I thought I was going to be an athlete or something more physical in life than I am now. You know, I'm sitting at a desk most of the time, but having that balance and knowing that I was a nerd and embracing my, and I had, luckily I had great mentors and family members and friends, and especially my parents who let me continue to embrace that nerd side. And because of that, I think that's really what shaped why I'm so fascinated by the academic side of youth sports in general, but in sports and performance. So your background was primarily in soccer. You've coached, you've played. Tell me about your experiences as an athlete all the way through high school, college, and beyond. I was probably your typical 80s kid. Gen Xer, played everything, sampled as much as I could. Dad coached me for a very long time. And then finally one day, because he wasn't a soccer player or a soccer, he was a coach, but he'd never even heard of soccer until I wanted to play it. And then he said, okay, I'll figure it out and help you. So I was that typical 80s kid who was just dad ball. I was coached by my dad. I played in the neighborhood. I played all the sports I could. I focused on, I didn't really focus on soccer until, I was probably at my freshman year of high school, I got cut from the basketball team, which was a huge surprise to me. It was, I talk about in the chapter in the book, I didn't see it coming. I thought that I was a better basketball player than a soccer player. And what's funny is, I thought I quit every other sport. So, well, I'm just gonna focus on soccer. So, I played rugby in high school, but it was a hobby more than anything. And in college, I got down to college and the swim team was brand new. And the coach from the swim team saw me take a, we had to take a swim test at our school. And he said, do you want to swim? And I kicked it around for a little bit. No, I really want to focus on just soccer. But my experience as a coach was shaped by the coaches I had. I had my dad, he was a phenomenal coach and mentor. He brought in a young coach named Donnie who worked with me for some of my more formative years as a player. And both of them were very heady coaches. They were always worried about how I was always in my head and I was a little bit too, a little too cerebral as an athlete at times. And so they were always trying to get me out of my head and let me just let the instincts take over, let the skills that we worked on take over, stop overthinking things. And then I had a phenomenal mentor in high school. And then I had, along the way, I had different coaches. So my college coach was very different from my high school coach and very different from my father in that environment. So it changed the way I looked at coaching myself and it also changed the way I looked at the sport. So when I retired from soccer, I had some really good examples of what I wanted out of a coaching career and what things that I thought I could clip and change from other coaches that maybe I didn't appreciate as an athlete. And of course, that's my personal experience, but that's really how I came to the coaching game. What's wild is, it was a few years ago, it was probably about 10 years ago at this point, I started to establish myself, I was coaching soccer full time, and I was working in clubs, and I was starting to do some of the speaking you were talking about, and my dad has lunch with me one day, I think it was actually after an engagement or something, and he says, are you happy? I said, I'm really happy, I love what I'm doing. He says, thank goodness, because soccer was your worst sport, man. He said, we didn't have the heart to tell you. And we didn't want to, it had to be your journey. But when you quit everything else, we went, why? He's not that great at soccer compared to the other sports. That's funny. I think it's interesting, especially you mentioned Gen X and certainly good coaching is not new, but I think we could agree that the cerebral side and coaches that encouraged the mental side of the game were fewer and farther between back then maybe than they are now. And there was very much a my way or a highway kind of approach. But I've certainly I've seen you speak and I've certainly seen athletes that you've worked with and you've taken what was modeled for you and morphed it and made it into your own. How do you think that experience of being a multi-sport athlete, even though in that era, that was kind of the early leading edge of early sports specialization, and it's now something that you and I both work against, is young athletes specializing too soon. But how do you think that experience shaped you as a coach and as a speaker, being the beneficiary of coaching like that. I think that combined with coaching at such a young age had probably the biggest impact on me. Having played as many sports as possible and sampling them. Your friends would stop over at the house and say, hey, I've got this cricket set, let's try it. So we were just sampling all the time. We were the kids, don't come home until the streetlights come on. And I lived in a neighborhood where there were about 10 of us that were around the same age. So we always had enough, actually more than 10 when buddies came over, we always had enough to make two football teams or two basketball teams or we were always, always doing something. And that really did gave, as I played soccer and got deeper into the cerebral side of the game, I understood that there was an athletic intelligence, for lack of a better term, that naturally had developed in me having played so many sports. I understood body movements and proprioception and functional movement patterns and I understood where balls would bounce and based on the different people like Dennis Rodman said he would rebound for all of his teammates at the bowls and that's all he did. He wouldn't shoot, they'd be shooting after practice and he'd just rebound because then he got to understand how each player's ball bounced differently and so he was able to rebound each player and you get that from sports, too. You understand different surfaces and different movement patterns and the way the ball move and the way people move. And Wayne Gretzky said that that's why he was such a great goal scorer. He played lacrosse and he played hockey. So you put the ball in one plane, and then you round it out and put it into a completely different plane. And he said, I just always knew where the puck would be based on having played multiple sports. So it had a huge impact. And then add to that the changing of my degrees. So I had one degree in sports psychology because I was such a heady guy and really wanted to focus on the head. And then flip that over and I go and I get a degree in early childhood education. So again, two completely different fields and yet they really did shape how I approached the cerebral process of coaching because different age athletes need different learning environments and they need different communication patterns and they need skills set up differently. And so you start to understand how the brain functions at different ages in life and how learning functions at different ages in life. So those two pieces, it's why I coach the way I coach is having sampled so many sports and sampled different academic arenas. Right. Well, I think it's interesting as your college career winds down and your coaching career ramps up, for a lot of us, it's hard to replace that core of our identity and sport being central to a lot of, certainly the folks in my network, we're all kind of junkies and we're looking for a way to replace what playing once provided. And coaching for a lot of us is that. Sports medicine was that for me. So you kind of gravitated naturally and leveraged those attributes you grew as a student into coaching. But when we met, you were in the midst of a big transition, and you were moving across the country, if I recall, and stepping out in a big leap of faith. Like the safe, easy answer was, I'm just going to coach at a high school or in a club and stick around. But you didn't do that. So talk me through the thought process behind that and where you went from and to? In hindsight, at times, I believe, probably when things came undone, I may have regretted that stepping out, because I was running my own club back in, not my own, I was brought into a club where they said, you can run it your way, you've carte blanche, run it how you want to, we love your philosophy and we want our club to reflect that style. And so here I was, we had a club, we had dialed it in, it was starting to really take on momentum. It was like a juggernaut and growing and everybody was values-based and we had all these habits of excellence in place and it was just a lot of joy and passion happening at the fields. You know, when you get those phone calls from people that say, oh, I wanna join your club because I don't know what it is about you, but we just love watching your parents and your kids interact and we wanna be a part of that. We were getting those kind of calls. And yeah, I had the opportunity to move across the country to San Diego from Cincinnati and take a different career route to work with soccer shots out here and to step away from the competitive soccer sphere and start working in that development phase with the ages two to nine and then begin my speaking career. And when my wife and I had a lot of talks, it was more around, what are you gonna regret 10 years from now? Are you going to regret making the move or are you going to regret not making the move? And at the time it was we definitely would regret not making the move. And she said, you got one life. We always talked about being at the ocean. She said, let's jump in the car. I'm a big Dave Matthews fan. Let's jump in the car and drive until we hit the ocean, babe. And so we did it. And like I said, in hindsight, some things came undone at times. And there were times where I questioned that decision but I go back to I was asked this recently we're talking about scale I go back to why I did what I did I didn't do it to work at soccer shots or to work it I mean I did but there was a bigger why behind that I did it because I could continue to work with a club of 500 to a thousand athletes and I continue to coach a team or two and have 10 or 15 kids in front of me. And that'd be fine. But if I really wanted to have an impact on the world, you know, if I really wanted to go for that dream of creating excellence beyond the game or developing leaders who transform lives, I had to go wider and scale more. So the whole reason for moving here was multiple people said if you're in Southern California, you'll have better access to make a bigger difference. You're closer to bigger cities, you're closer to the hub of entertainment, media, and all that, you'll have that opportunity to really grow. And so, and I trusted one of the people I asked was actually a broadcaster, and he said, you need to be in SoCal. And then Carmine Gallo from Talk Like Ted said, you need to be here. That was why I did it. In hindsight, yeah, rough ride. I had the easy, comfortable life. But I can now say that I can work with X organizations or X coaches per year. And so instead of 1,000 kids a year, I can work with 1,000 coaches a year and those 1,000 coaches might work with 1,000 kids a year and I can scale that impact. So that when I leave, I feel like there's a legacy of something positive there echoing. Yeah, I think it's a John Maxwell quote where he talks about how, before we take roles of leadership, it's about adding to our influence. And when we step into roles like that, it's about multiplying. And I think that's a great illustration of it. When my wife and I moved across the country, we moved from Illinois to Arizona, so we didn't quite move as far east to as far west as you and yours. But we got to Tucson, and I found out once I got there that you only get paid once a month as a graduate assistant. And you have to be there a month before you're on the paper. So it was two months and we had zero income. And I can remember thinking, you know, I did the brave thing. We loaded the U-Haul, we moved across the country. We were obedient to what we thought was the plan for us. And now I'm going to starve out here. Like I can't even afford to turn around and go back. And, uh, we happened back in the day. You could, uh, sign up. We had a Cardinals baseball game right before we moved. And that was back in the day when like NBNA would set up these tents and you sign up for a credit card and they give you a free t-shirt. And that was the whole reason I got it. I'd never used this card. I found it in my desk and it's like, all right, we got, I don't know, $500 credit limit to live on for the next two months. But I've learned that lots of times fear like that limbic system, that emotional center, that fight or flight response has taught us the survival instinct of run away from the fear as fast as you can. But it's not fatal. Like doing hard things isn't running into a jungle with hungry lions. It is facing our fears and digging in. So I'm curious, when you were in that situation, when you were confronted with the doubt about, did I make the right decision? And as a husband, you know, have I dragged my wife into this circumstance? What did you tell yourself to keep going during that season? So that would have been 2019. And there were a lot of hard conversations that my wife and I had, that I had with my mentor, Jane Nelson at the time. And the mantra had to be, I kept reminding myself of why I did what I did. I wanted to leave a legacy and I didn't want my kids to suffer. And I felt like there were times potentially that I was robbing them of opportunities because we fell into the same boat. Call my mom in my 40s, Mom, can I borrow a little money because we're tight again this week? And then of course, then the pandemic hits and so then the bottom completely falls out because my clients, they have to shut down their operations. And so, you know, I had some big clients that I was working with and they were gone. The mantra became, what am I teaching my children now? Like that I can remember lying on the floor in my living room and I'm, I'm done, I'm sobbing, I'm feeling imposter syndrome, I'm completely falling apart. And I'm like, what have I done to my family? My wife's like, no, no, no, we have a chance. You have a chance to teach your kids how to come back from this. You have a chance to teach your kids how to embrace as we joke, you know, the Jocko Willink, David Goggins mentality of embrace the suck. You have a chance to teach your children how sometimes it's just going to hurt. But like you said, it's not going to kill you. OK, so you've got to get through it. And so those were the conversations and that was the voice in my head that when when everything else when the amygdala was fully engaged and telling me run, run, run, I had to pull back to the frontal lobe and say, No, my children are watching me more now than ever, like, they're waiting to see what I do next. And I'm going to teach them a path depending on what I choose to do. And so that became like a very personal legacy. Yeah, that's so powerful. I think once we can take ownership of that and recognize that it's almost like we feel shame for having the emotion and that's it doesn't serve us when I feel embarrassed or ashamed or otherwise beating myself up. Nothing about that is serving the purpose of solving the problem. And so I found myself, it's almost like athletics taught me sometimes, like, okay, if you made a bad play, you're going to show your teammates that you care by beating yourself up. Like, I can actually remember running back down the floor after missing a shot and punching myself in the head, as dumb as that sounds. But somehow in my mind, I was communicating to my teammates that I didn't perform and this matters and I'm sorry and that's so Counter to what I know about mentality now if I really want to be better for the next play I'm locked in defensively now. I'm back in transition I'm ready and and I'm gonna show them that this matters because I'm gonna lock my guy down this time but as a 15-16 year old kid I didn't know that. And so, unfortunately, unexamined behaviors like that have a way of just kind of making their way into our behaviors as adults. And so we have to unlearn those things. I love the fact that really, I think you had already done your TED Talk before we met, and that certainly there was kind of this energy around youth sports that John had started, and certainly you were involved in that and some others. Talk to me about how this idea started germinating for a platform. This was even before you moved to San Diego with Soccer Shots. Came from my wife, they always do. All the good things, all the good ideas seem to come from my wife. So the TEDx was the start of it all. And at that point I had moved over to this new club where they said, you have carte blanche. You can, we can, and we did, we started from, they had a really good foundation, but we sort of started from scratch, new values, new habits of excellence. We, well, they'd never done habits of excellence. So I introduced them to the habits, a concept of habits of excellence. And, and so I'm coming home every day and I'm, I'm telling my story to my wife about the successes that we're having and the things that I'm still seeing happening in other areas that I, you know, from the science do not agree with happening. And she said, you got to tell your story. She said, this is, you're coming home and you're telling me and I love it, but I'm one person. She goes, you've got to tell your story. You've, you've got to share. And she says, and you have strong beliefs and passion behind it. And you've got research to back you. Let's do this. So she talked to me in doing the TEDx. And after I did the TEDx, I can remember her asking, what do you want from this? And I said, if just one of those coaches, just one of those coaches from my talk changes or tells me or I see they've changed. Then it was a success. And she says, yeah, but we got to keep going. Like this is that's a great idea, but you can't stop with the talk. So that's when after the TEDx, I really started. I started getting opportunities to be on podcasts and on radio shows and and they use those platforms to sort of continue to share the message outward. And my hope was is that it wasn't just soccer. It wasn't just in Cincinnati, Ohio, and it wasn't just it. It would continue to grow. It wasn't just here and even in the states. I wanted more people to hear this message and hear that there is a scientifically proven way we can do things and still get great results. But we can eliminate some of the Bud Kilmer type of you know the from varsity blues type of coaching and everybody's like well I'm an old school coach and my wife pointed out that's great. You know we were talking about and I said, but you know, she's like, you know, she pointed out the old school coach mentality. I said, yeah, but John Wood is an old school coach. And John's key word was love. I mean, he refused to have a book published that had his name on it if they took love out of the title because the publisher had threatened to take love out of the title because they didn't think athletics should have love. And he said, then take my name off the book. I mean, that's so he's OG. So that was, you know, and so we sort of grew, grew, grew the platform for that concept. Like, can we go back to that kind of OG? And can I talk to as many people as possible as cross as many sports to start to keep this conversation moving? Yeah, that's a great point. I think so many people think of old school coaching, they think of Vince Lombardi or Bobby Knight or fill in the blank, the taskmaster disciplinarian, my way or the highway. And there is no better example of, and he was a physical educator first. John Wooden taught PE, and he kind of reluctantly gained the limelight because of his success at UCLA. But his Kaizen philosophy, his idea of small improvements repeated over time, that's way more important than a big improvement that dies. And I love the connection there, because it tells me that good coaching is timeless. It is not something new that behavioral scientists or sports scientists have just unearthed. It's long existed. But now we have more data to support the reality of what John was teaching us than ever before. And couple that with the injury data, the overuse data associated with this failed model of early sports specialization. It may be controversial, but I go so far as to say that if you're specializing your child, if it's not abusive, it's bordering on it in light of the evidence that we have. And that multilateral, just teaching movement skills is key. But I understand the suck. Like, my kids were raised in Texas. If you didn't get them funneled in the right track early on, they had no chance of making their high school team. They weren't going to make an elite travel team. And that's going to close their opportunity. As a parent, you feel like, if I don't make this right decision when they're four or five years old, I'm going to funnel them into the wrong path. So what do you say to a parent that has those concerns about, should I specialize my kid? Or what's the alternative? I love that you've got a model from your past that showed that you can build, not just sports skills, but values and culture and excellence. And those are attributes that serve us well beyond our competitive days. Yeah, you just touched on it. So there are two things I usually, a couple of things I usually bring up. One is I knew a kid at 12 years old who was 5'8 and dominant on the basketball court, but was one of the smaller kids on his basketball team, so he actually was more of a forward than he was a center, and sometimes would actually play guard. He had a teammate who was a much better guard than him, so he wasn't a point guard. And this kid at 5'8, everybody's like, oh, you got to keep him in basketball. You got to specialize. He's going to go pro. I mean, look at him. He's 5'8 as a 12 year old. And usually I'm in, if I'm in the room in front of people, I'm standing, they can see that and I say, and you're looking at that kid today who is still 5'8. So I'm so glad that we did not early specialize because we would have missed that one. We would have blown it. I just don't think, no matter how talented, I don't think there was ever a shot for me to play much further beyond maybe sophomore, junior year of high school at my height. I just don't think so. So that's one I always point out. That's that story of sliding doors of wow, you just missed chances because you specialized way too soon. And you banked on beating biology. And we can't do that. Everybody develops differently at different ages. And my father-in-law said he grew to 6'2". He grew from like 5'9 to 6'2 when he was in college. I stopped growing at 13. So you can see two different people, different. So you can't bank on specialization being the right path when you just don't know biologically what's going to happen with your child and more importantly, the kids around them. Your kid may be the best right now at eight years old, but you shake that globe for a few years, we can't guarantee that the kid's going to come out on top when you keep shaking the globe like we do. So that's, you know, that's got to be the first thing. And then you said something else that that made me think that that's another path to talk about. The other thing is the life skills. If I play one sport and I play for one type of coach and I play in one type of environment my entire life, then I've got a very narrow view of the world. I've got a very narrow subset to draw from. But if I play as many or participate in as many activities and I go even to activities, I'll talk about get them in theater, get them in, get them in music, get them in. If I go to as many activities as possible, what I'm doing is I'm using as many parts of my brain as possible. So I'm igniting a ton of neural pathways and the hope is is that my brain doesn't prune back as many because I'm using so many. But if I'm very narrowly focused on one thing, my brain's gonna start pruning back other skill pathways, other neural pathways. One. Two, I don't get the experience of playing for and with different kinds of people in different kinds of situations and finding myself moving in different types of places. And I don't get that opportunity to draw the values from those people. I played as many sports as I could. So I was introduced to as many other athletes and parents and coaches as possible. And I'm able at that point to draw off of them the value systems and the, you know, I got mentorship from them and I learned powerful life skills from these people and I just feel like Telling parents. It's not just about specializing in sport But when you specialize in sport you specialize in their ability to grow as a human being you narrow that Bandwidth for them and my thought always was Well, I got ten kids in front of me one one out of the ten kids Maybe or let's say a thousand kids I coach a thousand kids in my lifetime one out of those thousands Maybe has a chance to go college, go pro. What am I doing for the other 999 kids to give them something that they can take and go be excellent in life? And so when people today complain, oh, our workforce is this and everything, I'm like, yeah, we blew it. We had 35 million kids playing youth sports, and now they're all going in the workspace and you're complaining. Well, if you feel like you're complaining, then you should have done something when we had a chance to influence and coach them, which I don't always agree with it anyway. We've got a pretty strong workforce out there. But we had a chance to change the trajectory of the future by focusing on the fact that we could pour into these 99 percenters and give them something beyond the game. Same thing for a parent. You have a chance to pour into your child by exposing them to as many things as possible so that if the ball stops rolling or if, God forbid, an injury ruins their career, they are an excellent human being at whatever else they choose to do. And if you specialize in one sport, not only are you risking injury through the body, you're risking brain injury. You're risking stunting their development as a human being so that they're only excellent in a very narrow bandwidth. Why not give them the world and let them choose their path? Yeah. And what other system is built and iterated to the 1% if you really, if we're honest about it, to the detriment of the 99. Why wouldn't we build a system that's better equipped to cater to the masses and then give the 1% a little extra once they've identified. I've long said that in order for me to believe in sports specialization, I have an equipment need. I need a crystal ball. If I had a crystal ball, then sports specialization is absolutely a great way to go, because I can see that this person develops. They've got opportunity. But I don't have that. And so variety is absolutely key. And learning multilateral movement skills and coping skills, like you said, behavioral things. I mean, as a college professor, I really struggle with teaching my students resilience skills that I didn't struggle with 10 years ago. Anxiety and depression are at all-time levels. I know that, but they need coping skills, not quitting skills. Sport can be a vehicle to do that without question, but instead we perverted it so that, oh, if I'm not playing, then I'm going to go to this other team. Or, oh, if I get sideways with the coach, then I'm going to quit. There's value in persistence, persistence. Not when there's abuse. Clearly there are exceptions to that. But sometimes there's lessons to be learned from just sticking out things that, again, running toward that fear instead of from it. It's interesting you bring that up because my one son, so first off, I never forced my kids to play anything and it drove people nuts because they're like, you're a former collegiate soccer player now you run a soccer club. Why aren't your kids playing soccer? Because that's not their that was my path. That's not their path. And so I was never maybe I should have gotten them in early, but I just let my kids decide what they wanted to do. And and if they didn't like something, finish it out, finish out your obligation and your commitment to your teammates and your coach. But at the end of the season, we'll choose something else. And my kids did that. And all of a sudden, I got one kid, I played football, but I never introduced my kids to football. I quit my football career after eighth grade. And also I got one kid He's kicking for the football team as a senior He's like I just wanted to do it dad and he went out and second-string kicker because he played soccer And he's and then he researches volleyball. He's like I want to play volleyball and then my younger follows in his footsteps I want to play volleyball then my younger says I want to lift weights and like they're just going into these areas I never expected so my one son is playing a sport right now and He's grown up in my coaching environment He's grown up seeing all of this that I do, and he's grown up with around other people who I bring around us who are experts in this field of coaching and stuff. And so he knows how I feel. And he gets a coach who is not like my style and, you know, punishment, kids being punished mid game and on the court while it's happening. And I'm like, are we are we actually is he doing? Are we doing this? And you know, and yelling at them, and you know, and my opinion is the screaming, and what are you doing, why are you thinking that way? What mistake? Every time a kid does something, they turn and look at the coach, which tells me that they're not even using their frontal lobe, they're in the amygdala, they're just playing from the amygdala, they're not even processing, so they're, why are you making such stupid mistakes? Well, cause they're not actually using their brains now, they're in fight or flight mode, you know, that type of stuff. And I was asked, given what you do, what's your opinion? I said, well, you know, not my style, but here's the thing. I was asked by another parent. And I said, here's the thing. My kids played for me. My kids have also played for other coaches like me. My kid is now playing for coaches very different from me. And this is a good thing. There's no abuse happening. There's nothing that I would, I mean, if I would, I wouldn't want to be that parent, but I would pull my kid immediately if I thought there was abuse and you know from my TEDx I'm all about that there is such thing as chronic verbal abuse none of that is happening it's just a different style and I told that parent and my son because he confronted me about it you have a chance to play for somebody that doesn't quite you don't quite agree with that doesn't quite fit your style and that you probably don't respond very well to from a coaching perspective what a life lesson you now have. Because you will have a boss like that someday, you will have a partner like that someday, you will have a teammate like that someday, you will come across a situation where you will have to over a course of time, not just like in a day, but over a period of time have to manage the relationship with a person who's like this. And you're learning at a young age that this is life. You're not always gonna have John Wooden as your coach. So you're going to get the Bobby Knights every once in a while. And here's the thing, my hope is, and this goes to parents with the specializations, is if we've armed our children with those coping mechanisms and those behaviors and created emotionally fit kids, that when they do have that kind of coach, it doesn't do any long-term damage because they're able to work through it. And that's that was my response to my son. Good for you, you're gonna learn a extremely, extremely powerful skill that you can apply in life. How to collaborate with people who you just do not see eye to eye with. Yeah, it reminds me of a quote, and I may be butchering it here, but in our forecast, we're supposed to have 40 mile an hour winds tomorrow in Lubbock, which is fairly typical for this time of year. But if the roots are weak, the storm blows the tree over. And so I don't want to set my kids up for failure by exposing them to that kind of coaching when they haven't been prepared for it. But I'm also not opposed to letting them endure a season of hard coaching. There's so much that I can learn about myself if my leader isn't necessarily catering to my every whim. Because like you said, those are life skills. I don't get to pick my boss in the workforce unless I'm an entrepreneur, in which case everyone's my boss. So you make the move. COVID happens. Obviously, some things probably didn't go according to plan, centered around that. But today, you find yourself on the threshold of launching a fantastic book. What happened between that low point of 2019 and now that allowed you to find the energy, the wherewithal to become now a published author? So, 2019 happened. As I went into 2020, I would think I was already against the ropes. And then 2020, the world shuts down. And my wife and I had to have that hard conversation of, it's time to give up the dream because we're in survival mode. And there are times in your lives you have to be in survival mode, and that's okay. Again, survival mode is something that we should all learn how to do. And so I took a role here in San Diego and I really, I took the role because I was traveling a lot, I was away from home, I was missing out on things, so I wanted to be home and be with my kids. I wanted to be local and be in my community. This is my new community, I wanted to embrace it. I also wanted to take a step back and for my own mental health, there are times when you realize, I was on a podcast earlier today and we were talking about resilience and adapting to this and a person said, and sometimes it's saying, that's not the path I'm going to take. Everyone, yes. I had to realize that the path I was on was not healthy for me emotionally, and which was becoming physical. And like, that's just not worth it. So I took a step back and I started working for this nonprofit in town and I applied different skills and I went into a different realm. And one group of kids I had never worked with were homeless youth. And now I find myself COO of a nonprofit that works with homeless youth. So I'm finding a whole new world of children, of youth that I've never been around and I've never seen their journey and been a part of their journey. And I worked for an amazing founder who he'd been doing it for 17 years out of the goodness of his heart. And he ended up being, really I loved his leadership style with me because we'd end almost every call with, what can I do for you, Reed? Where am I, you know, what are you missing that I can give to you? What can I do for you to help you do your job better? Like I really liked those conversations. And again, very different, very different leadership style than other people I had. So I had to adapt to some of the other leadership styles he had. And so in that timeframe, we are suddenly in survival and suddenly life starts getting good again. My wife gets some promotions and some really good opportunities and my kids find a real stable place where they're no longer, because I could see that they were emotionally and mentally struggling. And now they're back in stable places. And my daughter moves back near us and she's getting married. And like all these things start happening. I'm like, this is great. This is really good. And so I meet with my mentor and she's really Jane Nelson really had done a lot for me over the years. I met her in 2016 and she said, hey, let's do these tool cards together. So we worked on them for several years and and then we launched them. And so I'm meeting with her regularly and she knew how bad my 2019 was. I told her everything. And she was one of the people that was like, you gotta pick yourself up, buddy. You gotta remember the legacy. I've been there, I did this for 43 years. I know how you feel right now, and look at me now, Reed. And like, you know, we're sitting in her condo on the water one day, and she goes, this is where I am, but trust me, I was eating ramen one day, buddy, just like you are. And so I meet with her, and she says, hey, I really miss you speaking. I really miss when you were doing that stuff. She says you were so full of life. You're so passionate. She's like, and really, to be honest with you, I just loved you. I never give myself credit. I've always felt the imposter syndrome in my my inner voices, the meanest person you will ever meet. Like I am just I eviscerate myself on a daily basis mentally. I just do. And it's always been I told you earlier I had to have coaches that knew that I was like that. And she knew that apparently. And she's like, you never give yourself credit, but you're such a great speaker. And you have such a great view on the world. And she's like, people benefit from having you. She's like, we need you back. I'm like, I'm long gone, Jane. I'm long gone. She goes, no, you need to step out of the shadows. You always felt you needed other people around you to be successful. You always felt like you couldn't do it on your own, so you always needed to be attached to other people to do it. And now you're finding out you can do this on your own. You never needed anybody else. Step out of the shadows and show the world your light, Reed. And she said, you've got to do this now, Reed. She's 83 or something. She's, I'm 83. She goes, I don't want to have any regrets. She goes, you need to do it. So I did. I said, OK, well, I've got this book I wrote in 2017. I'll dust it off and we'll make another run at it. I reached out to the only agent who gave me the time of day back in 2017, the only agent of hundreds and hundreds and hundreds who even responded to me. And I reach out and we connect, the next thing you know, boom, here it is. And it's like all because I had somebody who I trusted, who influenced me, who had this unconditional love for me as a human being, but who had that conversation, because she was harsh at times with that conversation, who said, stop hiding, stop hiding in someone else's shadow, stop thinking you need other people and just do this now. And that's really what caused it. That's awesome. I was talking today to someone about our mentoring program. And I really think it's critical that people understand that a good mentor is so critical to our growth. But so often, I feel like people only view mentoring as I need to find this experienced older person that can help me walk. But mentoring is three directions. It's reaching up towards someone that's been where I aspire to go. It's reaching out to somebody that's going through the same stuff I'm going to. And then it's also reaching down people that are aspiring to be where I am. And I get value and it's different value from all three of those relationships. For the reaching up, they hold me accountable. They inspire me when I need it. It's the hug around the neck or the kick in the pants, depending on what I need on a given day. For the shoulder-to-shoulder person, it's just good to know someone else is carrying this around too, knowing that they are aspiring to do great things and it doesn't always go well. But then I find that reaching down, like helping, for me, junior faculty members, or for younger aspiring whatever, podcasters or authors, it really helps me kind of firm up my own beliefs about this whole process. So I love that you have someone speaking that life into you because I couldn't agree more. Your message is one that the world needs and it extends far beyond coaching. I think that's where the book has – I've been blown away. I really, really enjoyed reading the book. So talk to us a little bit about maybe the impetus for the Spartan mindset. And if you would, in the time we have, share the opening story in Reed's words because it's so awesome, it's so powerful. I use this story of if on a weekly basis now. I love to hear that. So first off, you're spot on about the younger people mentoring us. It was Jack Welsh at GE, that was one of his things is he had a reverse mentorship because he realized he had an aging C-suite and this young mid-manager level and the C-suite knew nothing about technology so they did reverse mentorship to teach the C-suite how to be more relevant. So I do, my son actually, my 17 year old son is one of my mentors because he's got such a great outlook on the world and such a great mindset and he knows where I struggle with my insecurities so he sometimes calls me on the carpet and says, dad you're being insecure, dad get out of your own head or you know, and it's really cool. And then I feel cool because I'm mentoring him at the same time. Okay. So the book, I wrote it in 2017 and it was that son, I believe that sat down with me and I was working, I had a, I had a workshop called warriors, not winners that I'd started in like 2016 and had been honing over the years. And it was one of the most requested workshops that I did. And it was based around five psychological principles and how we're creating these win-at-all-costs mentality and we should be creating a compete-at-all-times mentality in our kids. And so I talk about intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation and locus of control and all these other things. And I'm sitting there, I had spawned it into this short presentation that I do called the Warrior Brain. And the idea was taking liberty with neuroscience that if you said certain words it would light up certain parts of a person's brain and those words were value words in their lives. And so for instance, love lights up the amygdala and reduces our fear response and allows us, you know, things like that. And not really how it happens, but that was my liberty that I took because it's a really cool slide to see the different parts of the brain light up when I use certain value words. And my son's looking at me, because that is really cool. He goes, You should you should write a book because you're I'm a word nerd. And he's like, You really are into words and you will stop mid sentence and change a word to make it right. It's like you should write a book for people. So I did. And the deal was I would write it in a month. So I took 30 years of coaching experience and all the master's degrees and all that research and everything and I just went poured through it all, compiled it into chapter headings with bullet points and each chapter is a word that I go into. And I wanted to be scientific because that's, I'm always a justifier. I want to justify what I'm saying. So if I'm going to tell you something, I'm going to give you data to back it. You understand this in the role you play. You always have to have some data in the back. And the data may change, but you have to have that data. And so the book gets a little heady and scientific, but I wrote it in a month. I get done writing it September 2nd, 2017, and I post on Facebook. Just wrote 40,000 words in a month. I'm taking a break because what happened was I promised my son I'd write a thousand words a day as a challenge to exercise that muscle. Just like working out, I'm gonna write a thousand words a day. Well, it ended up I'd get to a thousand words and if the chapter wasn't done a day, I got to finish the chapter. So it became a chapter a day basically. And, uh, and that took days off, obviously. So anyway, I, only reason I say the exact date is because the day I sent the manuscript for final print was September 2nd, 2022. So it was exactly five years to the day that it came out of my, out of my brain and then went to print. All right. Let me tell the story of it. We came to the name of Spartan mindset because I was like, Oh, I want it to be like every word matters or I want it to be in. But there's there's always some books out there that are like, you know, this every every et cetera matters or words matter or something. I was like, no, I want to be different. And I kicked it with my agent, with the with the publisher, with my wife, with my family, everybody else. I kept kicking around these titles. And I'm like, what about speaking excellence? What about if we just call it if neither if thought thought thought neither. And it's like, yeah. And my agent's like, you've got to tell them what the book's about. I'm not going to pick it up. And he's like, you talk about the Spartans. So in my journey to book in, to give examples, because every chapter starts with a story as an example. In my journey to find examples of words I was using, I found these two stories of the Spartans that made the perfect opening chapter and closing chapter. It was like perfectly come full circle kind of situation. And I'm like, oh, this is brilliant. And so he says, let's go with Spartan. Everybody understands that they resonate with it, especially since the 300 came out way back when people get that concept. And mindset's a big, that's a big, because I was going, oh, okay, we'll do Spartan brain. He's like, no, mindset is a great, mindset at the time it wasn't there yet, but everybody's talking, oh, it's gonna be, the mindset blew up again. And this past year it suddenly became relevant again. So it was like the perfect word. So we went with Spartan mindset. It's not about the Spartans, but it's the idea that these two stories bookend this book so well. And if you're gonna be honest, if anybody used words to the greatest advantage, it was that civilization. That's where the term Laconic comes from, comes from as Laconia, and they were Laconians. That's the idea that terse, succinct, say a lot with very little, right? So these were the perfect word warriors to model. Other things we can disregard, but their use of language was phenomenal. Here's the opening story and this when I found the story it was like the book completely solidified for me. Philip II of Macedonia is at this point this is after 300 so after the hot gates the Spartan nation is not what they used to be they're on the decline they were decimated by that war obviously and the civilization itself is sort of decaying a little bit they're not the Spartans of old, they're sort of downhill. And Philip II knows this, but as he's marching through Greece, taking up the city-states and conquering them and making them part of his subjects, he comes upon Sparta, and he's at the edges of their territory. And out of either respect or fear, or a little bit of both or whatever, he sends in, instead of marching in, he sends an emissary ahead of time. And the emissary goes in with a note. And depending on what text you read, this is a paraphrase of basically, if I come into your land, I will destroy your cities. I will enslave all your people and I'll kill all your women or something. You know, it's like it was it was nasty and days go by. No, no response. And you're thinking this is it for Sparta, right? Like this guy's going to come in. He's he's Xerxes proved they can lose. This guy's going to come marching through and he's just going to wipe them out. We're done. Sparta is it's over as a nation How are they gonna respond in a way that actually saves face? but they're gonna have to just submit to him because that's what he was saying submit and So they get a note back and two texts say it differently But I like the one that says this They get the note back and it's the exact note he wrote and all they did was circle the word if So this son of a gun to kill everybody, threatens to destroy their beautiful cities and enslave them all, the people that remain. And their response is, if. Like you can't think of a more Rambo response than if. And he chose not to attack. Because I say in the book, if your language isn't certain, the outcome isn't either. He wasn't certain. He used the word if and the Spartans caught onto that and said, oh, you're not quite sure. You don't think you can actually do this. You're concerned you can't pull it off. And if that's the case, we're calling your bluff and we are Sparta, so bring it. And he passed. Yeah, that's so good. That is the most alpha response that I can think of. But you absolutely shine a spotlight on the fact that they called him on his bluff and he unintentionally communicated his uncertainty he did that one word was the difference so it's a love the nation like one word saved a nation I mean John F Kennedy's speech was like 6,000 words long and that put man on the moon, humans on the moon. One word saved a nation. Yeah, that's so cool. Talk to me what your days look like today. Busy. I'm now executive director of the Intercollegiate Sailing Association. So we are the governing body for all college sailing in North America. We've got a couple of Canadian teams, which is awesome. And so my days are spent in meetings. I might be on the water with teams on the weekend at regattas managing working with our board, so we're trying to streamline our board operations and get all the committees firing it on all cylinders and I hold. I become. I've become kind of the governance person where I make sure that committees are governing the way they're supposed to be and that the rules are being followed and that we're adhering to procedural rules and then I'm working with sponsors trying to draw in more sponsorship and more and trying to grow the sport to get more teams and I'll interface with the with not really with the NCAA but I'll interface with some of the academic institutions for teams that want to go varsity that aren't varsity and so my days are spent a lot of that the cerebral stuff and then my nights or you know into later in the days for me I'm on podcasts I will have done 35 podcasts between January 1 and May 10, I think. And really it's to spread the message about the Spartan mindset and to reconnect with, because we've known each other a while, to reconnect with people that I hadn't talked to in a while. If I'm not doing that, I'm doing one-on-one calls with people who are interested in having me come out and speak, or I'll do webinars. It's I eased back in. I've done a little bit of traveling and speaking. The beauty is the ICSA loves having me do this because they wanted an expert at the helm, somebody that they could say this this person is out there doing stuff. So I am traveling and speaking again, doing workshops. I'll work with organizations from governing bodies all the way down to high school teams if that's who needs the work. And then I'm doing webinars. I was just on a webinar with Sport New Zealand last week, and as you know, you've seen my stuff and we've talked about it. The New Zealand All Blacks are, to me, that's like being able to meet them would be a bucket list dream. And so here I am on this call with Sport New Zealand, and I'm freaking out. And of course, at the end of the call, I was like, I would love to come visit someday and meet the All Blacks and the Silver Ferns. I mean, I want to meet New Zealand athletes For a culture junkie it doesn't get better than I'm feeling all blacks for sure right Well read what has failure taught you that success probably wouldn't have Failure taught me that I'm resilient. I can adapt I can innovate that I That I can take a hit and stand back up. Failure has taught me what paths don't work in my life and what directions not to go. It's also taught me a lot about what works best for me. When I failed, I'm able to step back and think about what are those things in my control that I could have done differently and what were those things out of my control. And so now I know how to put myself in environments where those extraneous variables I can't control are not a factor and I also go into those environments knowing the things that I can change about myself or the situation that I have control over that allows me to succeed where I didn't in the past. And failures taught a lot about me. You know what failure taught me? The biggest message failure taught me was, and this is not just me, this is all of us, this is something we all need to remember. How many people love us? How many people care about us? How many people are actually rooting to see us succeed? That's what failure taught me because I failed miserably and I walked away completely away and I was willing to give that dream up until you know my wife and other people and especially Jane Nelson were like, you know, Jane especially, get out of the shadows, Reed. Get it out of the, get the message out. When I came back, there were so many people are like, welcome back. This is so cool. Oh my gosh, it's good to see you again. I found out how many people love us through failure. Because it took me failing and bouncing back to realize that there were people out there who were actually cheering for me and us, the rest of us, to get up. When things come undone, there are people who are cheering for you to get up. Absolutely, that's so powerful. I'm reminded of the Stoic philosophy that says the obstacle is the way. Somehow we build this false notion that if I'm going to be successful, then I never fail. And that's so, it just doesn't happen. And not only does it not happen, there are lessons I miss when I just succeed. If I just skate by, like if I had to get a 70 and I got a 70, I probably didn't learn the lesson. Whereas if I would have gotten a 69, oh, I learned how to, like, there's so much more that I learned from the things that I didn't do the way I expected to do than the things oftentimes that I did. And so just understanding, and that's the whole impetus for this show was helping to normalize the fact that that person you see as an overnight success, not true. Absolutely, it's our limited understanding of what it took, how many failures, how many obstacles it took for them to get to that success. Definitely, and I don't remember the quote, but there's a quote about lions, the lion with the most scars is the one who's the leader because he's failed at something, and it's true, we're all gonna, we're gonna go through life with scars. Those scars are signs that we push the envelope of life and signs that we were willing to come back from it. Yeah, well you're in San Diego so that's Navy SEAL Central so what is it bleed in training the more I sweat in training the less I bleed and bad something like that. So what for Reid is left undone? Getting the message out more broadly. It's it's undone and I'm so glad that I was called on the carpet for wanting to just hide and not return. Because Jane again said, like you said, this isn't sports read. She said, I don't want you to return to youth sports. I want you to return to the world because there are people that want to hear this message and there are people I think, she suggested, my message made a difference in your life. Your message will make a difference in somebody's, just one person's, that's all that matters. And so for me that's the undone piece. The piece that's not finished is getting it out to a broader audience, getting into the entrepreneurs, getting into certain sections of the business world who don't typically get that kind of messaging or getting out to certain kids. Like I said, working with homeless youth made me realize I hadn't seen all the kids that were out there. I hadn't gotten that message to every kid that was out there. So that for me is what's undone, is getting to that broader audience and letting them take from it what they need. And if, hey, if they get nothing out of the message, that's fine. But one person in an area of life that I've never been able to touch because I've stayed just focused in youth sports, sees this message, reads the book and gets something from it just like the TEDx, that's a win. If just one person benefits from it, that's a win. Absolutely. And that's a great segue into my last question here. Whether it's speaking or the book, how can listeners connect with the work that you're doing? CoachRead.com is my main website and you can connect there. There's actually a link there to go to the book page. I have a page just for the book. That's the easiest way. I'm trying to streamline it and set it up so people can find me there. If you go to CoachRead.com, I've got some examples of my speaking and I'll have digital courses coming out that are the first one will be the language of excellence actually and and and we'll go from there but yeah and again I'm not just about I'm not just about delivering workshops and speaking engagements if there's if somebody messages me I always respond yeah so I've had a lot of just one-off a parent hey help me with my kid what can I do so that's another way to contact me. Well, I'll also say that this show has been, you touched on it, it's a great excuse for me to reconnect with people from my past. It's also been a bit of a convicting reminder to me that social media doesn't always tell the whole story. We don't necessarily understand the depths to which people in our world are suffering. People that are becoming undone could really benefit from reaching out. I'm thrilled to see the work that you're doing. I'm glad that you have gotten back in the game and I wish I had been there for you. We're kindred spirits. We think along the same lines and I love the work that you're doing. And if there's ever anything I can do to return the favor, brother, just say the word. I'm happy to help. I appreciate it. I will say this. I suffered in silence and that was my fault. I didn't tell people I was suffering. So to everybody in your audience, don't suffer in silence. I appreciate that, Toby. Well, Reid, it's great having you. By all means, folks, check out the book. It was transformative for me. For more info on today's guest Reed Maltby. I'll be adding more and more to the site in the coming months, so be sure to check it out every so often. I know there are great stories out there to be told, and I'm always on the lookout, so if you or someone you know has a story that we can all be inspired by, tell me about it. Surf on over to undonepodcast.com, click that contact tab in the upper right hand menu and drop me a note Coming up dr Ram hadass will share his story of traveling to the US from Israel working with the iconic, Indiana Hoosiers basketball team And it's worked today as a decorated researcher Then educator researcher and former collegiate athlete Quincy Conley will drop by to share his tale of working his way up through corporate America and eventually jumping over into higher ed. I've also got a special treat legendary University of Washington strength coach and founder of the popular iron game chuck talk podcast Ron McKefree is coming soon so stay tuned. This and more coming up on Becoming Undone is a Nitro-Hype creative production written and produced by me, Toby Brooks. If you or someone you know has a story of resilience and victory to share for Becoming Undone, contact me at undonepodcast.com. Follow the show on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn at becomingundonepod. And follow me at Toby J Brooks Listen subscribe and leave us a review at Apple podcasts Spotify stitcher or wherever you get your podcasts till next time everybody keep getting better Thanks for watching! you