Human Limits

There was a great article on U.S. Olympic swim coach Teri McKeever in the NYT a few days ago.  The article describes her empowering approach and some of the unconventional and innovative things she has done like challenging ideas about mindless high yardage training in swimming.  She sounds a lot like the great track coach Bud Winter who I wrote about earlier this month.

In this Olympic season we are hearing a lot about the twentieth anniversary of the 1992 Dream Team and its legendary coach Chuck Daly.  Daly won in the Ivy League, won with the “Bad Boy” Detroit Pistons in the NBA and won with the Dream team.  From what I can tell Daly was also about empowering people and not micromanaging the super talented players he worked with.

The great UCLA basketball coach John Wooden developed his Pyramid of Success to teach his players how to empower themselves.   Legendary track coach Bill Bowerman did many similar things using a more free-wheeling, individualistic and profane approach.

When I read about McKeever, Winter, Daly, Wooden and Bowerman it seems to me they knew exactly what Daniel Pink is talking about in the video I have included on motivation.

Read about the great coaches and ask yourself how you can use their ideas to get the best out of yourself and the people you work with.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 31st, 2012 at 7:27 am and is filed under Current Events, Elite Sports Performance. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.