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Coaching Mind's Podcast: Perform at your best!
Coaching Mind's Podcast: Perform at your best!
#137 - Simple, Not Easy: Building High Performance with Marc Nudelberg
In this episode of the Coaching Minds Podcast, Ben Carnes sits down with Marc Nudelberg—former college football coach and founder of On The Ball—to explore the principles behind consistent, high-level performance. Drawing from his experiences at programs like Florida State and Cincinnati, Marc explains why simplicity beats complexity, how culture can make or break a team, and why most businesses are failing when it comes to real leadership development.
The conversation dives into athlete identity, the dangers of tying your worth to your title, and the difference between feedback in football vs. feedback in business. Marc also shares tactical ways entrepreneurs and coaches can build sustainable habits using the “1% better every day” philosophy—without burning out or chasing perfection.
TimeTopic
1:10 | Marc's coaching and entrepreneurial journey
3:00 | Why he left college football despite success
5:10 | Special teams = leadership bootcamp
7:00 | The hidden culture behind Florida State’s national title
10:00 | Identity shifts and the cost of chasing success
15:00 | Why most athletes (and coaches) struggle with identity
18:00 | What business gets wrong about leadership + training
21:00 | The importance of visibility and feedback loops
25:00 | How solo entrepreneurs can use AI (like ChatGPT!) as a coach
28:00 | What “1% better every day” really means in practice
30:00 | Avoiding burnout and perfectionism through minimum standards
33:30 | Applying time + mindset management for MTP coaches
37:00 | The 3 priorities every coach-entrepreneur must schedule
40:00 | How to hold others accountable without sacrificing care
42:00 | Marc’s advice to his younger self: Be obsessively curious
Are you an ATHLETE looking to take your training to the next level? Check out our website to learn more about 1-on-1 training opportunities:
mentaltrainingplan.com/athletes
Are you a COACH looking for an affordable year-round mental performance training program? Check out the MTP Academy available through our website:
mentaltrainingplan.com/teams
Hey, welcome to Coaching Minds Podcast, the official podcast of Mental Training Plan. Today's guest is someone who knows exactly what it takes to win, whether that's on the field or in the boardroom. Mark Nudelberg is a dynamic leader whose journey bridges two intensely competitive worlds elite college football and business leadership. For over a decade Mark was in the grind of Division I coaching at Florida State, florida, cincinnati, nevada, lafayette. Worked on both sides of the ball, was special teams coordinator, recruiting coordinator, built game plans, developed athletes, helped shape nationally recognized programs. But Mark's story didn't stop there. He took those same leadership principles, those high-performance habits, the team-building strategies and translated them into business success. Today, mark helps others compete at the highest level in their own arena, and at the core of his philosophy is the idea of getting 1% better every day. Mark, so excited to have you here. Thanks for joining us today.
Speaker 2:Ben, thank you for having me and thank you for that wonderful introduction. It's great to be here and I'm excited to share my story with everybody.
Speaker 1:Love it. So, to start off, would love to just hear who you are, how you got to where you're at. Just maybe take us through some of the highlights of your own story.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I'd say you know I'm Mark Nudelberg. I'm a proud dad. Family is the thing that is most important to me, and I think it really started back when I was a little kid, growing up in an entrepreneurial family. My dad's been an entrepreneur my entire life, and so if you know anything about entrepreneurship, it is entirely about performance, and particularly your performance on a daily basis in order to be successful. So I grew up in that kind of environment.
Speaker 2:I became obsessed with what made people great. I used to read books about Michael Jordan when I was a kid because he was the best out there, but it didn't matter if it was the Cowboys in the 90s that were having great success, or the Chicago Bulls, or my home teams like the Miami Heat, the Dolphins and the Panthers. I was always drawn to things that were having success or people that were being successful. But figuring out why and I was fortunate to get the opportunity to become an equipment manager at Florida State when I went to school there. That offered me my foot into the college football industry, and while I was a student there, I worked my way out of the equipment room to becoming a student assistant, volunteer coach, to then getting hired full time when Jimbo Fisher became the head coach, which then led to a 10 year career postgrad, where I was a special teams coordinator and worked on both the offensive and the defensive side of the ball.
Speaker 2:Through that time no-transcript it didn't matter how many kids I recruited out of the state of Florida. If the head coach had a friend he wanted to hire or the AD didn't like the head coach, or whatever the reason was, we ended out looking for a job. So that's when I ended up getting out and starting my entrepreneurial journey, building this company on the ball with my family, which now we service organizations all over the country, and we focus in two areas modernizing the sales process, which is 1000% performance based, and helping leaders understand how to actually become great coaches, which is something that I was fortunate to do at a high level throughout my career in football.
Speaker 1:I love that. I'd love to go back and just kind of start off in your coaching days. And you know, being on both sides of the ball offense, defense and then, even more specifically, being a special teams coordinator I think is a unique role. I was an offensive coordinator at the high school level for quite a few years and my head coach at the time actually convinced me hey, you need to if you're serious about wanting to be a head coach. Like you can't just coach quarterbacks your whole life. Like why don't you go be, why don't you be our special teams coordinator? And now it's like well, I'm responsible, instead of being responsible for five guys and calling plays. Like now I got to figure out what are we going to do with 150 dudes on this football field and where are we going to put them on? How are we going to? How are we going to practice what? What were some of maybe the, the leadership lessons that you took away specifically from those, the special team side of things, where you were responsible for such a large group of people?
Speaker 2:That really the ultimate key to success was simple and effective. Right, I knew that everybody that I was going to coach, aside from the punter, the kicker and the snapper, everybody else was recruited to play a different position, so this would always be the secondary thing for them. So I couldn't have elaborate schemes and really complicated processes to go through. I had to keep things super simple so that they could know it and have a lot of confidence in it, and so that then it could be effective. If it was simple and unaffected, well, what's the point in doing it?
Speaker 2:So everything that I tried to do as a special teams coordinator, I tried to keep the philosophy of our goal was to be simple and effective, and that transition into business for me and everything that I really do in my life is in order for it to be successful, there has to be consistency to it. Right, and the more complicated things are, the harder it is to be consistent to it. So I am always on the hunt to try to cut the fat and try to get rid of the excess and to try to keep things as simple as possible so that I have the opportunity to be as consistent as possible, which will lead me to way more success than anybody who has something that's really elaborate and really difficult but can only do it a couple times a week.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and you know that makes me wonder also about some of the bigger picture things like culture. But let's talk maybe just for a little bit about, you know, within some of those powerhouse programs, what were maybe some moments where you saw culture make or break a team. Just the expectations of, hey, this is how we do things here, either in a really positive way or a negative way that you were able to learn from.
Speaker 2:Well, so I think probably one of the highlights of my career was building the national championship Florida State team. Right, I wasn't there for the year they won it. I had actually taken a job at the University of Cincinnati but I had been there for the seven years prior and we had gone from being blown out by Wake Forest on our home field with Bobby Bowden, to now being a nationally dominant team. Twelve and two Orange Bowl winner. The next year they win the national championship. And what's interesting is at that time when I left, I always told everybody in that 2013 season the Florida State Seminoles actually won that national championship despite Jimbo Fisher and people thought I was crazy at the time because he was the dominant name and he had built the program, but I was like there's a lot of lack of accountability there with him and there's a lot of big Bart no bite. And I'm telling you that the reason that team was successful was because of the culture of the kids, the quality of the kids that we had recruited for those four years prior and the assistant coaches and what they had done in developing those kids, because when they won it, everybody was gone.
Speaker 2:More than half of that staff had gone to take jobs in other places and part of that was because it was all great opportunities for them to go do something Guys like Mark Stoops who went on to the University of Kentucky but the other part of that was it was really hard to be there and work for Jimbo because of that.
Speaker 2:You know, toxic environment that we were being that was a little bit bipolar and there wasn't a whole lot of accountability to it. So I will tell you what was really interesting was watching a team galvanize for themselves right and galvanize and say we can do this no matter what, because of who, the brotherhood they had and the bonds they had and the quality of relationships that they had developed. So to see that happen and be successful was really unbelievable. And then I think of the flip side of that coin was maybe when I was at the university of Nevada and we were crippled with injuries, we actually lost a player in the off season and we were an untalented football team by most stretches of measurement. And I would say that watching those kids go six and seven that year which most people would call like a failure of a football season watching them battle and scratch and claw for every little thing that we could get, and getting six wins out of that year was something that we were very proud of.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So now, at some point, you start to feel this pull. You start to feel this pull, maybe outside of football. Hey, maybe there's something else I want to do. Maybe it's better opportunity. What was that pull towards more of the business, more of the leadership side outside of football?
Speaker 2:So I will tell you, I think the key to success for anybody is understanding what it will cost to be there, right to get there. And I think, having been in the career for 10 years and being all over the country and working at different levels of major division one college football, I knew what the cost of becoming a head coach and continuing that career was going to be. It was going to be family, it was going to be my life, it was going to be all of my time. I was going to have to devote everything to that and the 10 years prior I had no problem making that sacrifice and that commitment. At the end of 2018, I was like am I really willing to make that commitment still?
Speaker 2:And as soon as I knew I was questioning whether or not I was willing to make that sacrifice, I knew I was going to do the organization of this justice, the kids, the injustice, all of these. It was gonna be a ripple effect because I wasn't willing to give up what I needed to give up in order to meet the standard that I thought was necessary and was and was I owed the team and the kids. So that was really the start of it. Then there were some opportunities that popped up and I realized that I had been offered this moment of in-between where, like, I could get out, I could go do something for a year and if it wasn't the right thing and I realized all I wanted to do was be a ball coach, I could always come back and have the same job opportunities and rely on the same network, and I could just go back.
Speaker 2:And so that was really the moment for me where I was like, if I'm not 100% certain, I'm willing to sacrifice what's necessary to be successful, then let me try to find something else that I am willing to make the sacrifice for. And that's how the journey began. That was the first step out, and then it was a long journey of you know. Now it's been six years since I exited the game and, you know, on the ball has been going strong for five of those years and we're continuing to grow and change. And what's interesting is that I found a way to to fulfill my dream of being a head football coach, of being a head coach without being a head football coach. Right, and that's really the way I look at myself in terms of our organization, our community and all of the people that we're responsible for working with is I get to be the head coach for all of them and create the environments and deliver the resources and create, you know, everything they need to get that growth and that development.
Speaker 1:Yeah, was there any piece of maybe your identity that you felt shifted, changed, when you left coaching? Were there any aspects of that transition that were difficult for you?
Speaker 2:I think it's similar to most athletes who, when they retire after a professional career, or even college athletes, when they transition into the business world for the first time, you've devoted everything to this thing and that thing no longer exists for you and what you realize is that you've tied your identity to that thing, which I will tell you is the most unhealthy thing we can do as professionals, as people and I always sound like Dr Seuss when I say this you are you, no matter the industry, the job, the thing you choose to do as a profession.
Speaker 2:You are you no matter what, and you need to define that for yourself and help yourself identify what that really means in the term of your life and then find the place or the profession or the passion that feeds that the best for you, because you cannot create your identity around what you do, because you are so much more than that and when it's gone. It was one of the hardest things for me to really then go, the transition to go through, because I really had to redefine myself as a person, because I was no longer Mark Nudelberg the ball coach. I had to be Mark Nudelberg, the man who then had a profession doing something else.
Speaker 1:Yeah, do you think that that's a possible thing to teach an athlete or a coach, any individual, while they're in the middle of doing that? I would say probably. Where we saw it most was when an athlete would get injured and, you know, kind of spiraling into some negativity. It's like my worth, my value, my purpose, my identity has all been in this sport, has all been in this. You know me as football player, me as basketball player, and now that's gone, is it? Do you think it's possible, you know, for the it's possible for the players out there, the coaches out there, to really understand that and really start to separate that identity before feeling that loss?
Speaker 2:I do, I do.
Speaker 2:I think if we can start to shift the conversation around having to sacrifice everything to be successful in something and that's not saying it's not going to create you don't have to. You don't have to sacrifice more to be the best or to reach a certain level, like, if you look at the greats of the greats, they were obsessed with what they do. There's nothing wrong with being obsessed with what you do, right, but understanding that that doesn't define who you are and helping yourself create your identity as just because you're high performance focused and just because you care about committing to process and daily behaviors and routine and all of the things that make people successful, that doesn't mean that your identity is wrapped in the thing you do. You can carry that philosophy into everything into being a dad, into being a husband. You could chase everything with that kind of relentless pursuit, but you have to chase everything that way, right?
Speaker 2:And if that, what I think we need to help kids particularly kids understand is that you don't have to play football year round to be the best football player. You can actually still play baseball, you can still play basketball and it's actually probably going to serve you better as an individual to be less specialized and more well-rounded and experience, and it's going to help you detract yourself from that identity of I'm a football player or I'm a football coach by exposing yourself to more opportunities and more experiences to give you some perspective for yourself that says, yes, I love to do that, but it's not who I am.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So, as you've made this shift and you know, and you've just left the coaching world and you're getting into this business leadership development area, where did you see the biggest gaps in how businesses were approaching the development of leadership, the development of high performing metrics, of all of the things that are maybe done at an elite level in athletics to reach that peak performance? Where did you feel like the business world was lacking that the most?
Speaker 2:Where did you feel like business the business world was lacking that the most? Well, it was actually in my first job. So when I got high, when I when the first sales job that I got, I got trained for two weeks, right, and then my training was over, right, like sure, they brought in some speakers or we had some like group meetings to talk about how to do things and share some like, but they're like in ball. You practice every day, you watch tape every day, right, like every day you are studying, you're preparing, right, preparation and preparation meant studying, meant planning, meant practicing. Well, all of a sudden I get hired into an organization that's a very successful organization and there's very little studying, there's very little planning, there's very little practicing happening. And I'm like, wait a minute, I know that these are the must-have components to being successful and it's not showing up anywhere.
Speaker 2:And then you talk about like focused on behaviors and not outcomes. I didn't. I knew that that on Saturdays, saturdays would take care of themselves If we practice the way we needed to practice. All week long, you talk about being focused were having and the results of the behaviors, instead of focusing on how to perfect the behaviors on a daily basis that lead to those things. So I recognized inside of my own business that I was in, that I was like whoa. The expectation for what it means to be trained and to be a professional and to commit to your craft on a daily basis were wildly different in athletics than business, and so that helped me start to create an idea around a business that could exist, that could help organizations adopt these principles, not just as organizational excellence, not just as leadership development, but actually changing sales culture to be results oriented or results focused, to being behavior focused and results oriented.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so in the world of athletics, I hear that, and it takes me back to planning my individual time. So there were, certainly there were things that my guys were going to do every individual time. So there were things that my guys were gonna do every single week, and there were things that they were gonna do every day, and those were set in stone. While we were watching film, though, we would break every single play if it wasn't efficient. The question was well, why was it not efficient? Did we not make the right read? Did we just make a bad pass? Did the coach call the wrong play from the sideline? Did the quarterback not check out of something that wasn't a good fit for the front we had or the coverage we had? We wanted to know why was it not efficient? And then, how are we going to fix that? How are we going to get better? Tell me now, from the business perspective, how does that carry over and what does that look like? And maybe I was missing that a little bit in my example. No, your money, your money.
Speaker 2:So you're you're talking about the feedback loop which, in in sports, is instantaneous and multiple. In a day, right Like hey, I do something on the practice field, I immediately get feedback on it from the coach after it happened. Then we go back into the film room and we watch it on tape and we see it again. So I get another, you know another piece of feedback on what the inputs were, what happened and why it happened, which, in business, most people's feedback loops are a week long. Action happens and nobody gets any kind of feedback on that action for a whole nother week. And you're expecting to develop people. So the thing that's missing, which we have in athletics, is visibility to the work. I'm watching it actually happen. We're videotaping it. I can watch it again and review it again.
Speaker 2:So I think it's really critical for business leaders to create that visibility to work so that they can shorten the feedback loop and give more feedback to their people to help them develop.
Speaker 2:So, for instance, right, I'm not asking people to micromanage, but I one of one of three things has to happen.
Speaker 2:You either have to deliver me a report saying these are the good things that happened, these are the bad things that happened.
Speaker 2:These were the priorities that worked on so that I have visibility to see that and give you feedback on it. Right, or you've got to record it or have it captured in some way, whether it's an audio recording, a transcript or something that you can deliver to me for me to be able to review with you, or it's got to happen automated, right, where things are automatically being populated for myself so that I can see that and give you feedback on it. Cause if there's no visibility to work, then there's no, there's nothing to really give feedback on and there's no way to really develop people if they're not getting that feedback. So I think that's the biggest thing that I think I took for granted in sports was just that you just had this happening all the time, and then it was natural and expected where now, when I deal with organizations, it's like, okay, well, show me how we're getting the visibility to give these people feedback, and that's a kick in the hose, usually for everybody.
Speaker 1:Right then, and there yeah, and so to to follow up on that, I want to just give you a real world example up on that. I want to just give you a real world example. So this morning I had a sales call at 9 AM with a school on the East coast who wants me to come over and do a workshop with the coaches and then we're going to kick off the MTP Academy where they're doing some year round training. Set you know, told her about the program, we talked through what the pricing was going to look like. We set up like some next steps.
Speaker 1:So let's say, I'm Ben Carnes, I'm running my own small business here. I don't have someone, I don't have that assistant coach or that coordinator or that head coach behind me giving me feedback, telling me, hey, this was really good, or hey, dummy, you forgot this, or maybe it's. I am, I am working and I do have that boss, but, like you said in your your first job experience, there's no, there's no, like you look around and there's no one there. There's no accountability, there's no training. So if you're kind of on your own, what does that look like? How does somebody like me get feedback from that sales call that I had at 9am this?
Speaker 2:morning. So chat GPT is a great place to do it right, like I'll tell you, like I could sell our business right now, like that's why we exist right, because there's far too many people that want to be high performers that don't exist in environments that are conducive for that and we can give you that right. We have a weekly morning huddle that we do live for our community. We have monthly coaching and accountability happens for everybody. We have a training platform that we have visibility to that we can see whether or not you're logging in and learning and doing the things you need to do to perfect what we feel like are the pillars of performance in business. We have that. So like one you can go find a community and find a place or find a coach or find somebody that can give you that.
Speaker 2:But let's say you don't have a budget for it. Let's say you're not. You know you're not. You're not in a place where you can afford to do that, because it's going to cost you money and the good ones are always more expensive. So let's say you're not in a place to do that.
Speaker 2:You could literally say to ChatGPT I want you to operate as a CEO of a small to medium-sized business that's focused in this area, and I'm going to deliver you what I'm working on and how I'm doing it.
Speaker 2:And I want you to give me feedback on blind spots, on things I might be missing or how I can execute better. And it'll give you that feedback right, because it's pulling from all of these different sources all over the internet to develop that mind. Now you have to give it the context right. You can't just deliver it your call and be like hey, how did I do here? You have to tell it the context right. You can't just deliver it your call and be like, hey, how did I do here? You have to tell it how you want it to operate. But if you can be really specific with that identity for chat, it's going to give you some really really good perspective and help you. So there's a couple of ways to do it. You can go find the communities like ours that exist that want to deliver that for you, or you can just hop right into chat and do it for yourself.
Speaker 1:So, if I'm hearing it right, it's almost like I could record that call and then I could give that to chat GPT and say, hey, I want you to sort of act as my coach here and give me some feedback. Or I could even have my own scrimmage and just have a conversation with JetGPT as if it's another athletic director on the West Coast that I'm doing a sales call with.
Speaker 2:You nailed it right, it can do all of those things for you, and I think that's what people don't really understand about. The value of what's been put in front of us and how rapidly it's growing and changing is like people are just using it to like write stuff for them which like cool, that's awesome, but like that's the infancy of what it's really capable of. When you take it and say I want it to help me develop and grow and you start getting into that kind of dialogue with it and being very specific about how you want it to operate, it's got unbelievable capabilities for people.
Speaker 1:Kind of going back into you guys' motto of the 1% better every day, which, from an athletic standpoint, I obviously completely, I'm wholehearted, all in, bought in on that. It's a simple idea, but it's not easy. That it's a simple idea, but it's not easy. So what does that actually look like from an implementation?
Speaker 2:standpoint in your world. The fact that you said simple but not easy is one of my favorite phrases of all time. Right? Because nothing that requires consistency is easy. That requires consistency is easy. Consistency in itself is hard. So, simple but not easy.
Speaker 2:In that exact philosophy, it comes down to controlling the controllables, which, as human beings, comes down to two things what we choose to focus on and what we choose to do.
Speaker 2:So, if I can build simple habits for myself that allow me to focus on the right things and do the right things on a daily basis, and then I can have discipline to doing that which creates consistency for myself, that is the simple formula for getting 1% better every day.
Speaker 2:And now, candidly, I believe that the philosophy of getting 1% better every day and now, candidly, I believe that the philosophy of getting 1% better every day is not actually in getting better, but accepting the challenge of getting better. Right, because the things that are going to get in your way are your feelings. And as soon as you're able to ignore the way you feel and say I know that I want to try to get better today and you show up and give the effort to do that, you still might not meet the standard right. You still might fall short of that standard, but because you showed up, that's going to compound day after day and those days that you came up short, underneath the standard. The next day is going to be the day that you catapult 10x beyond that and create an entirely new standard for yourself that allows you to focus on the things that you know you should focus on, and not the noise, not the negativity, not the feelings, but actually the things, the goals and the visions you have for yourself. If you can focus on those things and discipline yourself to doing what you need to do, success is nearly guaranteed.
Speaker 1:So how do you now Stay consistent in chasing that progress without getting stuck in perfectionism or, you know, falling into the other side of maybe burnout? You know, you're just, you're all in on this. You kind of you lose any any sort of, you know, balance in your life or any sort of rest and recovery. To go back to our athletic example, I mean, what does that look like once you're in the chase?
Speaker 2:Consistency over intensity, right? So I'm not interested in grinding for 10 or 12 hours a day, right? I can tell you the days of me showing up at the office at 7 am and leaving at nine or 10 o'clock at night, or worse, midnight Sometimes, when we were at Florida State. Those days are long, long gone. It was inefficient and ineffective, right? So for me, the way you create the ability to sustain and maintain is by understanding what's the minimum required. Sustain and maintain is by understanding what's the minimum required. What is my absolute, non-negotiable right? Like, I got to at least get up and work out for 20 minutes. I might not get an hour workout, but I got to get 20 minutes and, no matter what, I'm going to get 20 minutes every day and I'm going to read every day. I might not read a whole chapter every day, but I'm going to read a page every day, right? And if I can get more, great, I'm going to get more. But I have my minimum, non-negotiable standards that I'm able to accomplish every single day and that creates consistency and creates sustainability for me, so that I'm not like, ooh, I'm going to read 10 chapters today If I have the time to do it and I feel like I'm capable of doing that. Awesome, go ahead and go for it, but I don't. I've got two young boys, I've got a family, I've got a business. I got so many things going on in my life that I don't have time to be in the gym for three hours. I would love to. It's not a reality for me, Right? So, figuring out what the quantity is and it really just boils down to time management, which you know like you talked about planning your individual period Most people use their calendars for other people.
Speaker 2:Everything on their calendar is meetings with other people and they don't have anything scheduled for themselves, whereas ball coaches, we scheduled every minute of the practice, everything we were going to be doing. Whether it was an individual period, a group period, a team period, a special teams period, didn't matter. We knew everything we were going to do. So, carrying that philosophy over for myself and just being like okay, nobody's going to define the schedule for me. The head coach is no longer here telling me this is when we're going to be in the office and this is when we're going to leave, and this is how long practice is going to be. I have to define that for myself. Then it becomes about defining priorities, reverse engineering the behaviors that are aligned with those priorities, getting them on your calendar for the right amount of time and then being consistent and showing up and executing on those things every day.
Speaker 1:I love that. So one of the I would say the newest thing that we have right now is our MTP certification right, where coaches can go through the training. They get trained and, using the frameworks that that we use, working with the individual athletes one on one. So putting them through the assessment. Let's figure out, you know, where are they at score wise in the prime five, what are the main objectives that, the things that we're going to be intentional about working on moving forward. And then you know what are the sessions going to look like, or what's that kind of practice plan look like for our one-on-ones right. And then you know the coaches who go through the certification program. Now they're getting ready to essentially start their own business, to start working with athletes. How would those coaches starting out trying to build this coaching business wherever they're at, apply this 1% mindset of getting 1% better every single day? What's like a real world example of if your company was working with a client like that. Where do you start? What are they building? What's that look like?
Speaker 2:So I think it really comes down to defining the priorities right. So like, and I think, for people particularly, you got to look and I don't know what your I think you called them prime five, right. I don't know what those five pillars are, but for me there's two main pillars it's your mindset and it's your time management. How are you cultivating a growth mindset, extreme ownership and self-awareness? Those are three non-negotiable things that happen internally in our brain, that are skills that we got to be able to cultivate for ourselves, and there are routines and behaviors that will feed that right. The other part of that is what does my daily schedule look like? Do I have a morning routine? Am I hitting the big three in the morning in terms of physical movement, in terms of reading and writing? Right, those are the things that are going to affect my body and my mind. How am I structuring my day so that I understand I have time for me, I have time for my family, I have time for my business.
Speaker 2:So I would say, focusing in those two areas and giving yourself a grade and saying I do this really well, or I think there's some significant gaps here, because when I look at my calendar, I actually have huge areas of white space and everything on there is for other people. I think that's the areas to focus on, because then, when you go to the business side, to me there's nothing more important than revenue, right? How do you drive revenue then? Because, particularly as a solopreneur, or particularly as somebody who is going to be responsible for running a business of small people, you're never out of the revenue seat until you've scaled yourself way out of the business. So and I would even say that most CEOs of successful organizations are still creating revenue somehow, some way. So what are your non-negotiable behaviors for the priorities? For me, I've got three priorities in our business revenue, our team and our clients, and I know the behaviors that are associated with those three things. If they're not on my calendar, they're not getting done.
Speaker 1:So kind of shifting gears a little bit. You know, maybe now, instead of the solopreneur, maybe you know larger business, medium sized business, certainly the coaches that we have listening, what are, what are some things that you feel like every leader should be doing, but most?
Speaker 2:aren't. I think every leader should have a development plan for their team, for each individual, a specific, tailored, and so I like to grade people on a matrix of core values and performance. Right, so you might be unbelievable culturally for our organization, but lack the skill sets to exceed in your performance. That doesn't mean you're bad for the team or you have to be fired. But as a coach, I know I need to be focused on developing those skill sets with you, and not necessarily the intangibles of what it means to be focused on developing those skill sets with you and not necessarily the intangibles of what it means to be a good teammate, as opposed to the worst kind of teammate we can have, which is an ultra high performer but super low core value score. I got to do everything in my power as a leader to be working with that person to develop the intangibles that make them a good teammate.
Speaker 2:I don't need to be coaching them on skill sets. You don't coach Randy Moss to run a post route. You let him run the post route, but you teach him what he needs to do in order to be able to communicate with Tom Brady at a high level so that they can mesh together. There's far too many leaders out there that are just looking at the scorecards and coaching the performance side of it and they don't actually know where the gaps of their people are, because they haven't really evaluated them in that kind of way for them to figure out what's the real gap that's keeping them from becoming the high performer that they need to be.
Speaker 1:And then I guess my next question would be how do you, as the leader in your organization, how do you balance the intensity with still caring about that person when you're leading others? Like, how do you find that balance between I want to drive and push, because I know from a coaching standpoint it was like if I build up that relationship to the point where this guy knows like I love this kid and I want what's best for this kid and he's going to run through a brick wall for me, I can light him up, I can get in his face a little bit and he's going to take that very differently than you know. Some new kid, some freshmen, somebody that just transferred in what's that look like in your mind? In the balancing the people aspect, of it.
Speaker 2:I'm always investing in the relationship first, right? So like I know how many kids you have and I know your wife and I know your spouse and I know what you guys like to do and I'm asking about what you did on the weekend, and so I'm never sacrificing the person for the performance, right? And then I'm a huge Godfather fan. It's one of my favorite movies of all time and one of my favorite lines out of it is it's business, it's not personal. And so me, holding you accountable to your performance is business, it's not personal.
Speaker 2:I don't make it personal, I don't attack, I don't demean, and I actually got rid of a lot of those traits that are so associated with football coaching, which is that getting in somebody's face and getting nasty with them. There's not a whole lot of room for that in business, particularly because it's an entirely different environment. So for me, I try to be as clear and direct as I can be, I try to be as unemotional as I can be and I try to ensure that they understand the accountability is actually in their best interest and not for me. These are goals that you agree to. These are goals that are going to help you grow in your career. This is my investment in you, and part of that investment is me holding you accountable and ensuring that you're willing to meet the standard and having those difficult conversations with you, which are not personal. I still love you as a human being, but that has nothing to do with the fact that, in order for you to be on this team, you have a standard to meet.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that reminds me of our previous head coach, jake Gilbert. He would always say be specific with your criticism. You just yell at a kid. What the heck are you doing? You're an idiot. He's now thinking oh, coach, doesn't like me. Oh, I'm not good, oh, I screwed up. No, all these negative thoughts versus hey, you need to fill that gap. When you make that read, it's like oh yeah, I should do that. We practiced that. We had drills for that. I know what to do now and how to change my behavior.
Speaker 2:And I will tell you in business, right, I get a lot farther by asking people questions than by telling them what to do, right? So instead of me saying, hey, you need to fill that gap, or like, hey, how come you didn't get back to that person's email yesterday? Right, I can just ask, like, what happened with that scenario with that customer, right? Like, hey, I saw XYZ customer had had emailed us yesterday. What happened there, right? Oh, I didn't get back to them. Ok, how come? Help me understand what happened there, right? And like, helping them uncover their own mistakes and helping them problem solve their own mistakes leads to far better development, far more ownership, far more accountability than me coming in Monday and being like you need to respond to that email. That doesn't help anybody solve a problem. All it does is keep me in the weeds of what's happening and doesn't allow development for anybody else to really grow. Sure, yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 1:So, as we start to wrap up, one of the things that I love to ask guests is just looking back on your journey, knowing what you know now, what advice would you give a younger self, maybe the version of you that just started out coaching?
Speaker 2:of a younger self, maybe the version of you that just started out coaching. So it's actually something that I think I did well early on, but that I would want to reinforce to myself, or that I would want to encourage more of, which is be as curious as you could possibly be. Ask questions about everything, figure out how everything works. Like whatever you think you're learning, you need to learn 10 times as fast and 10 times more, so at the end of the day, you feel like you learned a lot. Learn more, ask another question, grab another book, do something, get into another conversation, because the thing that serves me really well in going from being an equipment manager to being a special teams coordinator was I was always wondering why we were doing what we were doing.
Speaker 2:I was always asking questions, I always wanted to understand the philosophy behind it. I always wanted to understand where it generated from and why we were doing it, and because I understood that, I then had context around everything that happened and I became more and more valuable to the organization because I knew more, and because I knew more, I could do more, and so I think that's really important for young professionals is it's not about how much you're getting paid, mind you. I got paid $7.25 an hour for 40 hours a week to be a quality control coach at Florida State. I worked far more than 40 hours a week and I was getting paid minimum wage. Right, it's $13,000 a year to be a ball coach and I was like you're going to pay me to do this. I was thrilled to just get money right. So I think far too many young people early in their career are chasing status and money and titles rather than chasing experience and knowledge, which that that pendulum will flip so fast if you invest in that rather than the other things.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Well, Mark, I really appreciate you hopping on here and joining us today. If people want to connect with you or learn more about the work that you're doing now, what's the best way for them to do that?
Speaker 2:You can go to our website. Wwwontheballco is a great place to learn about us. You can connect with me on LinkedIn that is my number one social media platform, but I'm also on Instagram. You can find me at at coach noodle Um, and I'm always open to a conversation and helping somebody if I can.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Well, Mark, thanks again for your time today. It's been really great having you on the show. Thank you, Ben.