⏳ Read Time: 4 min

🔍 What’s in this week’s newsletter?

• 🧱 The Foundation of Leadership: Why self-awareness beats strategy

• 💬 Real Story: “My anxiety is hurting my team” — how one coach made a change

• 🧪 Research Insight: What your players already know about your blindspots

• ✅ 5 Ways to Build Self-Awareness into Your Culture

• 🎁 Bonus Tool: A game film review… for your leadership

The Idea: Know Yourself to Lead Yourself

We say it all the time: the best thing you can give your team is the healthiest version of you.

But here’s the reality: most leaders stop at awareness and never cross over into transformation.

They know their flaws. They’ve read the books. They’ve heard the podcasts.

But when the pressure hits — the game’s tight, the moment’s loud — they default back to old habits.

What separates great leaders isn’t just that they know themselves… it’s that they lead themselves differently because of what they know.

That’s what today’s newsletter is all about.

(For a bonus deep dive into this, we’ve included the webinar for our BETTER Community from this month. Take some time to watch this video yourself, and with your staff. And join the community to get access to all of our monthly calls and exclusive content, including our Culture Playbook system.)

📖 Anecdote: “My anxiety is hurting my team.”

A Power-4 Head Coach we work with said it plainly:

How’d they know? Their athletes told them.

So we walked them through the Know Yourself to Lead Yourself tool:

• They identified the tendency (anxiety when things don’t go to plan)

• They mapped the action (pacing, micromanaging, over-coaching)

• They saw the consequence (players get tight, avoid engaging)

• And they named the reality (a team that plays tense under pressure)

Here’s the win: instead of defending or ignoring it, they got tactical.

They created a response plan for when the anxiety surfaced, invited a staff member to hold them accountable, and, most importantly, practiced responding differently.

By the end of the season, they weren’t just managing their reactions. They were leading differently. And their team felt it.

📊 Research Insight: The “Game Film” You’re Not Watching

Here’s a truth every coach knows, but few apply to themselves:

In sports, we use game film to correct technique, align strategy, and raise standards.

But how often do you review the film on your own leadership? How often do you perform research on yourself?

Here’s the scary part. Your team is watching it every day:

• How you respond after a mistake

• What your body language says in high-stress moments

• Who you get short with when things go sideways

We promise — your players and staff already know your tendencies.

What changes performance isn’t just knowing them — it’s changing them.

✅ 5 Ways to Build Self-Awareness Into Your Culture

1. Start with One Tendency → What’s one leadership pattern that hurts your team during games or in meetings? Start there.

2. Create Your Tendency Log → Track: “When this happens, I tend to… and that leads to…” It’s your personal game film.

3. Pause Between Trigger and Action → Insert a breath, a phrase, or a question. Give yourself a gap between feeling and reacting.

4. Teach It to Your Team → Ask your athletes: What tendency most undermines your performance? Build reflection into the culture.

5. Share It and Get Accountable → Invite someone to call it out. Leaders who grow fast don’t do it alone.

🪞 Bonus Tool: Your Leadership Film Room

Want to go deeper?

Treat this tool like a film review for your leadership.

After a game or practice:

• What triggered a negative response?

• What was your body language like?

• How did it affect your team’s energy or response?

Then ask:

This is the path to the healthiest version of you — and the most high-performing version of your team.

🏁 Conclusion

You don’t become a transformational leader by accident.
You become one by consistently doing the hard, invisible work of self-leadership.

Know yourself. Lead yourself.
And give your team the best gift you’ve got: a leader who’s constantly getting better.

Keep Up With BETTER

Very quietly, we have built a 5 Voices Playbook where Kevin and Seth walk coaches through the nuances of coaching each of the 5 Voices. It includes a built-in dashboard for you to track the Voices of the players on your team. We are ironing out the marketing of this, so we haven’t officially “launched” it yet. But if you want, the course is ready to go today.

For a more in-depth option, reply to this email to schedule a 5 Voices session either 1:1, or for your team. These can be virtual or in person. One hour will result in more connection, less drama and more wins.

BETTER’s Solution to Coach Development

As a part of our work, we lead cohorts of leaders. It’s just one meeting a month with a topic, some homework, and sharing about how it’s going. But it’s powerful. Many of the coaches and leaders in our cohort express the following sentiment:

“I wish every coach got to experience this on some level.”

So, we thought, why can’t they?

We are launching a community around the Culture Playbook.

Until now, the Culture Playbook has been something you buy and then get. We wanted it to be so good and affordable that every coach in the country could access it.

From now on, leaders will receive the Culture Playbook as part of a guided community led by Kevin and Seth.

If you’ve enjoyed our newsletter, imagine a community where we will take you and others through a deeper level of how to install the systems for yourself, athletes, or other coaches. You can ask us questions directly. We can guide and share discussions, share ideas, and get feedback.

We will host monthly calls, and every coach will have direct access to us. We will lead guided discussions and encourage coaches and ADs to share best practices. We want it to become the absolute best resource for all things Culture Development, both at the program and department levels. Over time, we will continue to add content, resources, and offerings. You’ll get discounts on future products that the public won’t get. And no, the price is not changing.

Hundreds of coaches and ADs have already joined and are making progress on their leadership and culture. Join them today for less per year than a Netflix subscription.