The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk - 503: Sherri Coale - Choosing The Hard Path, The Art of Asking, Learning From Shakespeare, & Winning On & Off The Court (Lessons From a Hall of Fame Coach)

Duration: 1h 9m
Broadcast on: 11 Dec 2022
Audio Format: other

Text Hawk to 66866 to become part of "Mindful Monday." Receive a carefully curated email each Monday morning to help you start your week off right.

Full show notes at www.LearningLeader.com

Twitter/IG: @RyanHawk12 https://twitter.com/RyanHawk12

The Hard Makes It Good - A league of their own — Tom Hanks — when Geena Davis (Dottie Henson quit saying it just got too hard). " "Of course it's hard. If it wasn't everybody would do it. It's the hard that makes it great."
Writing - A writing life may seem to lie somewhere on the other side of the moon from a life in athletics, but the two are scary similar in the things that they require. They're both ridiculously hard, even if they sometimes look easy. And the reward for either isn't what you get at the end, it's what you go through to get there. The process in both is the prize.
Great teachers — "Great teachers crack open a door and cue the siren's song that lures you in. Once inside, they give you hard. And then they let you decide what to do about it. I live indebted to them for the view."
The art of asking — Dr. Darryl Tippens — a Shakspere class... "I admired all he knew, but I admired what he did with it even more."
- "His questioning and blatant unwillingness to give us the answers made us work for our conclusions. The process and the product stayed with us. We learned that what we strain for, sticks."
The job — "if a leader's primary job is to be a dealer of hope, Whitney Hand was a leader of rare air."
It's not about the trophy - After winning the state championship, on the bus ride home with the team, Sherri noticed that she had left the trophy behind accidentally. And she said,"it so had never been about what you get in the end."
Confidence is self-governed. Nobody can give it to you and nobody can take it away. I've found that regularly doing hard things helps me earn more confidence.
The makeup of a great point guard:
- An outward perspective. They care more about setting their teammates up than themselves.
- A capacity for understanding what each person needs.
- Athletic eyes - They have a broad spectrum. They see things before they happen.
- Sturdy, innate confidence.
Sherri's Grandma:
- She was very observant. She spoke with purpose. No wasted words. "She taught me how to be observant and listen."
"Coaches are great tellers. They aren't always great listeners. Questions are so much better than statements."
- Great mentors don't give you the answer. They teach you how to think. They teach you how to figure it out on your own.
What makes up a great player (beyond the skill to score a basketball)?
- The intangibles:
  - They build relationships
  - They're observant
  - They pay attention
  - They are intentional about how they "do life"
What do you value most?
- "Curiosity."
"You can't wring your hands and roll up your sleeves at the same time."
Advice: What makes your heart sing?
- Work to figure that out. What is that thing in you?

This episode is brought to you by one of my favorites. It is Storyworth. Storyworth is an amazing gift for you and your loved ones. Essentially what it is is you sign up for Storyworth and they help you supply a loved one with a question a week. So, for my case, I did this with my dad and Storyworth would send him one question per week and he would answer them and sometimes even add some cool pictures to make it more visually appealing to go along with his amazing writing. And then at the end of 52 weeks, Storyworth puts this together in a beautiful book which I now have on my bookshelves at home. Along the way, I also got to read my dad's answer. So, this is something that my family will treasure forever. He actually printed a number of copies and gave them to each of his kids. I would highly encourage you to do this. I even got to ask some of the questions each week for Storyworth. So, to take advantage of this amazing offer that they've put together for you, go to storyworth.com/leader. You'll get $10 off your first purchase that's storyworth.com/leader. Welcome to The Learning Leaders Show presented by Midsight Global. I am your host, Brian Hawke. Thank you so much for being here. Text Hawke to 66866 to become part of Mindful Monday. You, along with tens of thousands of other learning leaders from all over the world, will receive a carefully curated email from me each Monday morning to help you start your week off right. You'll also receive the tales about how my book, The Pursuit of Excellence, will help you become a more effective leader. Text Hawke to 66866. Now on to tonight's featured leader, the great Sherry Cole coached the University of Oklahoma's women's basketball team for 25 years. She took over a program in turmoil and led them to three final fours. She's the all-time winningest basketball coach in Oklahoma history and she's a member of the women's basketball Hall of Fame. She's also the author of an amazing new book called Rooted to Rise. During this conversation we discuss how to be more observant, listen better, and ask higher quality questions of the people you're leading and then why you should regularly do hard things as a leader and how this impacts your confidence and then how to be more in the moment and not let fear get in the way of your performance. There is so much to this one. Ladies and gentlemen, I know you're going to love it. It's with the great Hall of Famer, Sherry Cole. Sherry, this one's a long time coming. It is so great to see you and to have you here on the Learning Leaders Show. Welcome. Thank you so much for having me. What an honor. You go with me on my walks and my jogs almost every day. It means a lot to me. It really does. To start, your book Rooted to Rise, I've told you this privately but I want to say publicly, I prepare hard for these interviews. It's important to me to be overly prepared. I think you know that. But I'm not always compelled to read something cover to cover and you've done that. And I have to say, I am blown away. I even said to you a note privately, who helped you write this? How is this possible to write something so good? And nobody did. I mean, obviously you have editors and stuff, but you wrote this. I first just want to acknowledge how impressed I am by what you've been able to get out of your head onto the page in your book Rooted to Rise. Well, thank you so much for saying that, Ryan. It means a ton to me because I know how well read you are and I know how hard you prepare for all your guests and what is involved with all that. The writing process is something that I've done my entire life before I even knew what I was doing. It was my way to understand my world. It made me feel better. It gave me juice. And so it's something that I've always done. And I always knew I really wanted to try to do on whatever scale I really didn't know. But I was one of those people who loved basketball, loved writing, loved reading, went to college, said I want to be a high school teacher and a coach. And they said, here's a course catalog, figured out. And I did. And four years later, I got a piece of paper that said I could do that. And I started doing it. Then I got the best job on the planet. I mean, I was the women's basketball coach at the University of Oklahoma. So I'm not going to just stop doing that. It's a dream job, my dream job, because I was born and raised here. And yet I always knew that it wasn't the only thing I wanted to do. And so during COVID, I decided, just kind of hit me. Boy, if I'm going to do something else, now's probably the time past the 50 yard line in my life. So I'm going to do something else. It's probably the time. And I just started digging into a basket full of stuff that

Transcription truncated.