> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://adamringler.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # #035 Five Lessons of Effective Leadership - URL: https://adamringler.com/podcast/035/ - Published: 2019-02-19T14:00:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-20T02:59:08.000Z - Description: In this episode of the Decoding Excellence Show, I discuss five of the most crucial elements an effective leader MUST DO in order to empower the team around them. - Author: Adam Ringler - Tags: Decoding Excellence, #podcast, Coaching and Leadership In this episode of the **Decoding Excellence Show**, I discuss five of the most crucial elements an effective leader must do in order to empower the team around them. Inside we discuss the need to actively seek out feedback from the people around you, the need to have a laser-like focus on the people you work with on a daily basis, the need to defeat your own limiting beliefs, cultivating a space to reflect on your mind state, and ultimately how to master self-management and discipline. I think you are going to take A LOT of way from this episode and it was a fun one to record. As always, thank you for supporting **The Decoding Excellence Show**! In addition to those social mediums, you can head over to [AdamRingler.com/Newsletter](http://www.adamringler.com/newsletter?ref=adamringler.com) and sign-up for my weekly newsletter. This is a newsletter for the curious. It's chalked full of interesting articles I've read through the week, things I'm exploring and finding fascinating through my week, and a collections of thought experiences and resources I've cultivated. It's essentially a Birchbox for performance-related articles and musings. If you are looking to help grow and support the **Decoding Excellence Show**, navigate over to [Buy Me a Coffee](https://www.buymeacoffee.com/AdamRingler?ref=adamringler.com). Buy Me A Coffee is a an easy & fun way to support the show. For the price of a Grande Latte ☕ you can support the show and help us maintain the quality of the content. One hundred percent of the contributions go directly to supporting the hosting fees associated with operating this podcast. If any of the material resonates with you, I'd love for you engage with me at [@AdamRingler](https://www.twitter.com/adamringler?ref=adamringler.com) Thanks again for listening to the Decoding Excellence Show! I appreciate all the support growing this Sport Science, Strength & Conditioning, and High-Performance Coaching resource. If you have taken anything away from the show, please login to iTunes and navigate to [Decoding Excellence](https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/decoding-excellence/id1205636566?mt=2&ref=adamringler.com) page and leave us a review. --- ## Key Takeaways - Actively seek out feedback from the people around you instead of waiting for it to find you. - Keep a laser-like focus on the people you work with on a daily basis. - Defeat your own limiting beliefs and cultivate space to reflect on your mind state. - Master self-management and discipline, because leadership starts with leading yourself. - Empowering the team around you begins with how you manage yourself first. ## Listen and Subscribe Find this episode of the Decoding Excellence Show on [Apple Podcasts](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/decoding-excellence/id1205636566?ref=adamringler.com) and [Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/show/093GVrPwd9l832q3EWhVKc?ref=adamringler.com), or use the player above. --- ## Go Further in This Episode Enjoyed this conversation? Here is how to get more from it: - **Read the transcript below** to revisit key ideas at your own pace. - **Share this episode** with a coach or colleague who would benefit. - **Subscribe to the Decoding Excellence Show** on [Apple Podcasts](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/decoding-excellence/id1205636566?ref=adamringler.com), [Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/show/093GVrPwd9l832q3EWhVKc?ref=adamringler.com), or your favorite app. - **Join the newsletter** at [adamringler.com/newsletter](https://adamringler.com/newsletter/) for weekly insights on human performance. --- ## Episode Transcript *This transcript was automatically generated. While we strive for accuracy, some words or phrases may be misheard.* \[00:00:00\] Sport science, strength and conditioning, high performance coaching, welcome to the Coating Excellence Show. \[00:00:54\] It is essentially the birch box of newsletters, you don't know exactly what you're going to get week to week, month to month, but what you can guarantee is that it's going to be chock full of good things. Head over to AdamRingler.com forward slash newsletter, pop in your email and sign up today, you will not regret it and I won't spam you with 8 million different emails every week, every day, every month. Check it out AdamRingler.com forward slash newsletter. Secondly, I get emails and messages every single publication talking about how can we support the Decoding Excellence Show and the mission that you're bringing to us and the easiest way is buy me a coffee. No, don't actually physically buy me a coffee. Head over to buymeacoffee.com forward slash AdamRingler. And there you can find in an easy donation way, you can pop in your information and you could essentially buy the show a coffee, a $5 latte if you will. And what we'll do with that is those proceeds from that donation will go immediately into the hosting fees for both the website and the Decoding Excellence Show. \[00:02:06\] So we can continue to bring this show to you via iTunes, Spotify, whatever podcast player of your choice. So check it out, buymeacoffee.com forward slash AdamRingler. Hey everybody, we have a great Decoding Excellence episode for you today, a mini show discussing the five qualities, the five things I see great leaders do. If you've tuned in to any of these mini episodes, what you'll find is that I'm trying to provide some quick actionable nuggets that you can use, you can take away and apply to your coaching tomorrow so that you become a better coach. So if you get any enjoyment out of these, make sure you reach out to me on either Instagram or Twitter at AdamRingler. Let me know, I'm curious about your feedback, your feedback is really important to me. So let me know if you're getting anything, if these episodes resonate with you. \[00:03:01\] And like always, tune in, we got great interviews on the horizon from world class practitioners, sport scientists, strength coaches that are coming down the pipeline, just waiting for publication dates for those. So as always, from the bottom of my heart, thank you so much. Number one, get feedback. One of the many things that a leader can do to help supercharge their leadership ability, whether it's a strength conditioning department, sport science, or just general coaching, or maybe it's even just business management from an administrative standpoint. But one of the biggest things I see that successful leaders do and successful leaders do all the time is they actively seek feedback from either their stakeholders and their companies, their board, or people around them, colleagues that they trust. And they do this because they want to get obviously feedback. I mean, it's they want coaching. \[00:04:03\] They want to get a better understanding of what they need to improve on in their day to day interactions with the people that they work with, or what they deliver to their company. So I think it is a really valuable aspect if you are a leader and executive, trying to supercharge your leadership ability to essentially, you know, forgo a little bit of ego and have a little bit of humility and reach out and ask people, hey, what can I do to get better at X, Y, or Z? What on the floor coaching athletes? What cues do you hear me say that I might be blundering or what am I doing about my sessions about my conditioning or my speed sessions that you think could improve? And this is essentially just red teaming your own coaching coaching abilities. It is reaching out to other people and saying, what would you change? The idea of asking people that if, you know, if I was fired tomorrow, what's the first thing you would change about the way I do things? And that essentially, it removes yourself from the situation and it says, what would you change? Tell me the true, tell me the honest feedback that you would give me in a way of what's the first thing that you would do different about what is currently going on. \[00:05:29\] That common practice of breaking the status quo and constantly trying to reinvent when you're on the top. That's something that James Kerr talks about in his book Legacy. And I see many, many leaders do incredibly well is that they actively go out and seek the input from other people around them in the company. And they use that information to improve on their own coaching abilities or their way they execute their management skills or whatever facet that they need continuous improvement. And I think we all at strength conditioning coaches can continue to do that. And that is what is so great about site visits. That is great about bringing people in as a consultant or just a person to watch what you do. I love when we go and visit other facilities or we have other coaches come in and it's an open invitation. Watch what we do. Watch how we coach. Watch the sessions that we conduct and give us your honest feedback about what we can continue to do to try to increase our coaching ability and deliver maximum value for the student athletes and the programs that we work with. Number two focus on your people in the second principle. What I think is really important to discuss is that one of the best ways that you can get value within your own organization or your own abilities is really making the investment in other people. \[00:06:52\] And I know that's cliche to say, but taking the feedback that you receive continuing to regularly give feedback to other people, but also try to enrich their own career development is something that I think continues to pay dividends down in your own coaching journey and in your own road. So making that investment in other people, whether it's young interns into your program and their own career development, you wouldn't believe how often I get direct messages or letters or emails from people that we've either mentored or interned for us at some point along my own coaching journey. So I just think it's so fruitful to really, if not for the selfless reasons, which is, it's just a great thing to do to raise the professional standards of our coaching industry by helping other people. Then if nothing else there, right, the most wholesome reason, then it's a great way of building a network and building a circle of coaches that you've helped influence in some small or large facet. I think that's very important. And I just think that we owe it to the industry to continue to try to raise the professional standards and help mentor young new strength coaches coming into the field, because let's be honest, we have all stood on the shoulders of giants and continue to do so. And there's someone in this industry larger small that gave us our first shot, our first chance and mentored us and invested in us. And if you find yourself in that position, where you can return that favor on a young coach or somebody else, then I think we owe it. \[00:08:33\] We have to pass it down and pass it along that we owe that mentorship to the next wave, the next generation of strength coaches coming into this profession. Number three, self reflection coaches and great leaders and managers, executive CEOs is that all the time what they're really good at is that they're very self aware and they observe their own emotional state, their energy state and they understand through reflection what state of body and mind they're in before they lead a coaching session or they go in. So they're just they're very self aware of where they're at in their mind and in their body. And I say this is really important because you need to understand if you're you're being impatient or you're moving too quickly. And what I see with great coaches is that they commonly ask themselves questions that try to reflect on what emotion am I bringing into the session. What am I seeing? What am I feeling? What am I perceiving? And by doing so, we can combat some of those negative emotions. We can combat projecting our own inner feelings, our own perceptions, our own judgments on the athletes that we work with. And by doing so, we become much more factual observers of what is going on in the environment. And by doing that, we can make actionable changes, we can actually make factual driven assumptions about the information that we're gathering from our student athletes. And by doing so, we become more effective leaders, we become more effective educators. And we can help our athletes in a better way that's not necessarily giving them the unneeded projections of our own inner emotion. Number four, red team, your limiting beliefs. \[00:10:29\] So another great quality that great leaders have is the ability to red team their limiting beliefs and red team their bias about the way they go about their business or the decision making or the heuristics that they have when they they go about deciding amongst a narrow or limited amount of decisions or choices. So one of the things I always recommend is try to find avenues, whether it's close colleagues or situations where you can really sort of experiment on on your own thought beliefs, if you will, and see if you can sort of act as a devil's advocate and try to prove the other side to be right or wrong. And I think just by looking at the other side of the coin, we can get an appreciation that, you know, we all operate within some narrow set of limiting beliefs. And some of those help us, some of those act as, you know, Malcolm Gladwell would say like the gust of impressions from his book, link or to be able to quickly thin slice amongst a large amount of data. You know, just the very few relevant things you might need and to be able to thin slice that and make a decision, some of that helps us some of that from an evolutionary standpoint keeps us alive. But also those quick sort of decisions, right, or what we would call thinking fast from Daniel Kahneman's book, thinking fast and slow, that sort of type one thought process can help us, right, it can really drive decisions, but in some instances it hurts us because we don't thoroughly think slow, think long, think deeply. Think to try to limits our sort of self bias from the beginning and think about the unintended consequences of all of our decisions that we might make and sometimes that that that can hurt us in the long run. \[00:12:34\] So I would advocate try to create some situations where you can bounce ideas off colleagues. If you're looking at research articles like I often do try to go out and read countering research articles, right, so often we like to read the things that interest us and sort of support our own framework or heuristic that we believe in or idea that we believe in. So reading information that might counter the sort of beliefs that you have can be a powerful way of sort of equalizing our own beliefs and not being too heavily emotionally invested in one side or one camp versus the other. And what I find is that, you know, if there's people that you disagree with, too, whether it's, I mean, let's be honest, we live in an internet digital era, there's plenty of people you can disagree with on Twitter or Facebook or elsewhere, but really to get to know these people and understand the framework or the ground in which they stand on and why they believe what they believe. I think is a very important way and important thing to do so that you can essentially debunk your own limiting beliefs, you can read team your own. And by doing so, you become a better practitioner, you become a better coach, you become a better scientist, because, you know, you can ultimately seek the truth out for what it is. And you're not continuing to use information or data as a, as a poll to lean on, you can use it in a way that helps actually drive actionable change that actually illuminates what is real from what is false. And I recognize this so commonly, so often in great leaders is that they will always be confident in the decisions that they make, but they do so in a skeptical way where they know that. \[00:14:24\] You know, they've gone through it and they thought this thing out and that they are both thinking fast and slow, they are thinking about the immediate and the long term consequences of each decision, each action that they make. Number five, engage in self-management. There is a fantastic quote from Richard Feynman that says, the first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool. And I love this quote because I think it essentially sort of captures the essence of self-management in that you must be absolved from the influence and the emotional investment that you have with data or with decisions or with what your personal interests may lie. And I think those leaders that can practice self-management and can understand both sides of the coin and can both think fast and slow and practice that sort of self-awareness are some of the best leaders because they ultimately are leading from a position of strength rather than emotional investment. They are making decisions based on sound quality information and not sort of the information that only illuminates the things that they want to see. And I think this is just a great thing to practice as a leader is having some self-management, having some discipline. \[00:15:52\] The best leaders I know all are crazy disciplined in what they do, whether it's calendar items, the way they carry their business, the way they conduct themselves as a professional, as a strength coach, as a leader of a department. And I think that just having that awareness and that discipline to be able to manage your day to day, manage the people you work with, manage the data that you collect. And do so in a way where you're using the information in a profound way, in a smart way, in a very strategic way, and ultimately, I recognize this in leaders all the time. So I just want to quickly recap the principles of great leadership that I recognize and certainly wanted to try to communicate in this show, in this Decoding Excellence Show. And that is that most of the time what I recognize is that great leaders are excellent at actually going out and seeking the feedback from other people, actively getting feedback, asking their colleagues, asking their board members, asking the coaches surrounding them, whether in their weight room, their sport coaches, administrators that they work for, and they actively seek out what they can get better at. We do this all the time where coaches, we want to give the cues to our athletes and the people that we work with so they can get better. \[00:17:16\] And we ourselves as coaches need to actively pursue feedback so that we can get better. Secondly, I see that coaches all the time, great coaches, great leaders, they go out and they focus on their people that inner sell, whether it's the athletes, the assistant coaches, the interns that they work for or work with, and they invest in them because the very best investment you can make is in other people. Not only will they become emotionally invested in your development, but this is good for industry, rising tides, raises all ships. And the way that I see that is that as we invest in other coaches we make our industry better, stronger, more robust. And I think that's an important thing to do. If not for the selfless reasons of just being a good person and trying to help ease the pain and the struggle that other people go through, through their own coaching journey, but it's a great practice, a way of giving back to our industry. \[00:18:16\] Thirdly, great leaders, great coaches are self aware and they reflect often, they know what sort of emotional energy that they're bringing into each environment, each coaching session, each meeting. And that's really important for us because so often we can wrongly perceive the behaviors, the body language, the emotional state of our athletes. If we project the feelings that we have from our day to day without taking a moment to pause and reflect and ask ourselves some reflective questions about each session. Next, great leaders, great coaches also have an uncanny ability to red team their limiting beliefs. So they go and they actively seek out the input from counter, right? They're counter opponents, if you will, and say what is it about their stance that makes them believe what they believe? And by doing so, they shift from sort of type one to type two, thinking they shift from this automatic, quick, fast thinking mechanism to a more slow, more thorough, more comprehensive approach. \[00:19:25\] And by doing this, we have this balancing act of not only type one, but type two type of thought, heuristics, and we can actively play our own devil's advocate. And we can see things for what they really are and not just an emotional investment in an idea. And our last principle in this Decoding Excellence Show is just the common practice of really managing yourself and being disciplined and being aware of the decisions and the choices that we make and to pause, reflect and better understand how to be better disciplined in what we do. So that we can take the time to mentor an intern, we can take the time to appreciate a coaching session, but we can also remain steadfast and disciplined and use information and use data in a way that is ultimately right. Hey everybody, that's going to be it for this week's episode of the Decoding Excellence show. Hopefully you took something away from those five leadership lessons, something that you can apply to your coaching immediately or maybe even tomorrow, whether it's self reflection or red teaming your ideas or making sure that when you go into a training session that you're not bringing unwanted negative emotional energy and projecting it on the athletes that you work with. \[00:20:54\] But I hope you took something away from this show from this mini episode and if you did reach out to me on Instagram or Twitter, subscribe to iTunes, leave the Decoding Excellence Show a five star review and let's continue this dialogue. I think this is five really critical things that we as a coaching industry need to continue to work on for us to raise the professional standards and raise the industry. And it is my sincere hope that you took something away and some topic in this Decoding Excellence show resonates with you. And as always, there's a number of different ways that you can support the show, right. The first thing is I have a monthly newsletter that goes out, it is located at Adam Ringler dot com forward slash newsletter. And like I said in the intro, it is chocked full of great articles, research papers, sort of daily notes, things I'm finding fascinating and experimenting with and being a human guinea pig with to try to change my own behaviors, my own habits, but ultimately to really try to improve my life and get something a little bit more meaningful out of it. \[00:22:05\] So head over to Adam Ringler dot com forward slash newsletter, pop in your email and I promise you you'll get the welcome email and you'll start receiving those monthly updates and you won't regret it. I'm not going to send you a bunch of spam messages or anything like that. I really think that you'll get a lot out of it and check it out. I get questions every single time we publish either an article or the latest update to the Decoding Excellence show and the question I often receive is how do I support this show. Well, we have a new way that the audience and the crowd and everybody else here can support the Decoding Excellence show head over to buy me a coffee dot com forward slash Adam Ringler. It's actually not buying me a coffee. I know the name sounds sort of confusing or misleading, if you will, but what it is is it's a platform sort of a crowdsourcing way of donating to the show. And the idea is that you would donate a coffee, right, $5, $4 or whatever to the Decoding Excellence show. \[00:23:14\] What we do with this is we turn the proceeds directly over to supporting the hosting of the Decoding Excellence show on whether it's on Spotify or our simple cast or iTunes and elsewhere. And it supports the hosting fees for our website and the Decoding Excellence show. So if you want to support the show, you can buy me a coffee. You can buy seven coffees by yourself a coffee. Otherwise, please head over, check it out. It is buy me a coffee dot com forward slash Adam Ringler. I'll include it in the show notes. And as always, thank you for supporting the Decoding Excellence show.