⏳ Read Time: 4.5 min

New here? Read about the BETTER Team and Mission here.

And not only is it out, but last week, our book hit #1 on Top New Releases in the Sports Category! Really cool to see coaches getting and using our manual, built by and for coaches, to lead themselves first!

Haven’t gotten your copy yet?

People love excellence. It’s why truly great teams are easy to get behind, especially for coaches and leaders in Athletics.

This Indiana football team has been described as a “darling” no less than a few hundred times in all the various stories being written about them. And that’s because it’s fun to collectively watch and appreciate excellence when we see it!

But what’s far more difficult is seeing what led to and developed that excellence. Most talk about it like we understand how it happened (hey - we might even be guilty of this with last week’s newsletter). But, in truth, we are all looking in from the outside and making our best guess.

Don’t buy it? Think about it this way. No one can see how every top-level NCAA football program operates. Even if someone had a magic dust that allowed them to view the operations of 10 different programs up close, that person could still miss the subtle differences that make one program slightly more elite than the others.

You’d have to be there every day, for years, cataloguing, taking data, listening to conversations, observing practices, watching the coach in their quiet moments, to truly be able to say definitively how a program grew towards excellence.

So, we’re left to make our best guesses. And somewhere along the way, what the general population, coaches, and even athletic directors and executives view as excellence got loud.

It started to look like:

In athletics, we’ve been especially susceptible to this version of excellence. The message is subtle but constant: if you really care, you’ll empty yourself completely.

But here’s what we’ve seen over and over again in our work with athletes and coaches:

The people who sustain excellence the longest aren’t the ones who burn the hottest.
They’re the ones who are aligned.

They don’t just work hard.
They work in a way that matches who they are and what they value.

That distinction is significant.

We resonated deeply with this post from Brad Stulberg in the lead-up to his recent book called The Way of Excellence.

It resonated with us because we see this all the time with the pro golfers we get to visit with. They’ve defined excellence one way: WINNING.

Yet, in a sport where each week there are anywhere from 150-200 “losers”, finding your value can be a tenuous proposition.

The entire thesis statement of our work with the golfers and athletes we get to work with is this: “What if we could help you live a fulfilled life regardless of how golf is going?”

It’s difficult work, and it takes years of re-training your brain to value the right things. But guess what, when you live a full life, know your values, and live through them regardless of whether you’re winning or losing, guess what it does to your performance?

Just ask Scottie Scheffler.

But this isn’t just true for golfers. It’s true of every coach, AD, or leader who has unfortunately learned to tie their own value to their performance.

So, how do we do this? And how do we begin to re-shape what excellence really means for us?

Ask yourself: “What does this matter to me? What do I get from it? What part of this makes my soul sing? Would I do this if wins/money/status weren’t tied to it? Why?”

The truth is, effort without meaning will eventually drain you. Effort that’s connected to values is like a form of renewable energy to your soul.

Being tired doesn’t mean you’re excellent. It actually might be a signal that you’re misaligned.

Don’t take pride in the amount of work you’re doing. Take pride in the fact that the work is meaningful to you and the world!

Discipline, or self-leadership, isn’t about doing everything. It should be about protecting the few things that matter most to you.

Do you have a disciplined enough life that you are able to spend the majority of your time doing the things you’re best at and that matter the most to you?

I think for a long time, we’ve settled for the “character” argument with a poor, not very compelling argument! “Because it’s the right thing to do”…. just doesn’t quite capture it.

It trains your brain to focus on the right things that do impact performance!

Excellence shows up in how you treat people, prepare, and respond under pressure - not just in outcomes.

Your staff and athletes will copy how you pursued excellence, not what you say about it.

Spend less energy on sounding good. Spend more energy on being the person you were meant to be.

Excellence doesn’t need to be loud. It doesn’t need to be extreme. And it doesn’t need to cost you who you are. In fact, it should come from the deepest parts of your soul.

At its best, excellence is:

The goal isn’t to out-hustle everyone else. It’s to throw yourself fully into the work that actually matters, and to do it in a way you can sustain.

That’s not soft.

That’s real excellence.

Get BETTER’s Culture Playbook. A system designed to install a thriving, healthy, high-performance culture. Join over 1,000 coaches who use our Culture Playbook from youth club teams to national championship NCAA programs and everything in between.