Transfer Belief (Bot9 #369)
If you know me, you know I love Ted Lasso. My wife and I have watched and re-watched the whole series multiple times, I’ve got shirts, and, of course, two coffee mugs - “Be a Goldfish” and “Believe.” Lasso exemplifies one of the most important traits in any leader - transferring belief. There’s a distinct irony in the story’s setup in that Lasso has zero credibility as a soccer coach, but he does possess an incredible ability to reach, connect with, and motivate human beings. There’s a lesson in this that I’ll hold to the end. Transferring belief was the subject of the leadership training this week from Lucas Jadin of Jadin Jones and it’s been one of the major themes of my current coaching of our softball team. It seems the idea of belief is all around me at this moment.
Coaches will often choose, consciously or unconsciously, players they believe in and players they don’t. This can manifest itself in many ways and I’m certain it’s rarely executed with malicious intent. A story told by Daniel Coyle, author of The Talent Code, changed my thinking as it applied to who I would believe in and who I wouldn’t. The story is about Dov Eden, an Israeli psychologist who worked with leaders in business and the military. Eden published a study in the early 1980s showing he could predict with extraordinary precision which young recruits in the Israeli military would become the cream of the crop. Eden studied the mental and physical aptitudes of 1,000 recruits, selected a handful he labeled as possessing “high potential,” and then informed the platoon commanders that they could “expect unusual achievements” from these individuals.
And Eden was right. Over the next 11 weeks, Eden’s select group performed better than their peers by about 10 percent in both expertise tests and weapons evaluations. It seemed that Eden had “cracked the code” of talent identification, making it easier for leaders to choose who we should choose to believe in. Except it was a ruse. These soldiers weren’t really high potential, Eden had selected them at random. The power came in labeling them as high potential. By telling them they were special, they became special. That signal created a massive effect in the mind of the instructor and in the learner that led to the full expression of potential.
The moral of the story is this: Who should you choose to believe in? Those who are breathing.
Stop and think about a person who transferred belief into you. What did they do to breathe that belief into you and your performance? My answer is an easy one - my high school baseball coach, Coach Percy. He did three simple things that allowed me to begin to fully express my potential. First, he told me he thought I’d be great at something. It happened my junior year on our drive back home from our Arizona trip. He told me he thought I’d make a great coach some day. In hindsight, he may have also been sharing that I had a certain athletic ceiling, but all I heard was that he thought I’d be great at something. Second, he gave me a nickname that displayed a genuine connection. Coach Percy is from the Chicagoland area and my parents grew up in the northwest corner of Indiana. He loved the White Sox, my dad loved the White Sox, and I was enjoying that team’s resurgence in the 1990s. Coach Percy would call me “The Big Hurt” in reference to Chicago’s power-hitting first baseman Frank Thomas. I struck absolutely zero resemblance to Thomas, but he made me feel like that big of a hitter and I produced as such in my senior year. Lastly, he gave me a second chance after failure on the field. My junior year had ups and downs on the field and was derailed some by a broken middle finger. Then, my senior year, I tore my rotator cuff and was limited to being the designated hitter. I started my senior year fast but then tailed off after 4-5 games. I found myself on the bench in favor of another player for a game. I went to Coach Percy and asked for one more chance. He gave it to me and I got hot. All of these things led to me believing in myself and also a lifelong relationship.
There’s an important connection between Dov Eden and Coach Percy, as well as those they led. Their belief drove their behavior. Eden and Percy knew that if they transferred their belief into others, they’d operate differently. Both the chosen ones from Eden’s experiment and I acted differently as a result of the belief of a credible leader. Eden and Percy believed in themselves, their craft, and what they were doing enough to give that to someone else. You cannot give away what you do not possess. If you don’t have belief in yourself, how can you possibly transfer belief? Display credibility in your field. Show that they can believe in you and your ability. This is a foundational element of effective coaching. Without credibility, your belief is hot air.
As I mentioned earlier, there’s a lesson here we cannot miss from Ted Lasso. It’s a work of fiction. There’s no chance that it can actually happen. No soccer club is hiring an American football coach to lead their organization. While it teaches wonderful lessons in connection and motivation, you absolutely, positively cannot transfer belief without credibility in your sport or field of leadership. This does not diminish what he does and what we can learn here. It’s an incredibly effective use of a character in a story because we’ve all experienced similar doubts in ourselves. However, your ability in your field matters. Your exhibition of credibility matters. The best part of this seemingly difficult realization? We can all get better at what we do. We can all learn. If you can believe in anyone and see their performance rise, why not give yourself that gift? Learn how to transfer belief into yourself so you can give that gift to another person one day soon!
Here’s a link to the Deion Sanders 60 Minutes if you want a masterclass in transferring belief!