Something From Everyone
A valuable lesson I was taught early on is that everybody has one lesson to teach you. If you approach all the people you meet with an "empty glass" approach, you'll be more likely to walk away with useful information or a perspective that you otherwise wouldn't have had.
Working in a multidisciplinary field like coaching, I interface with a tremendous amount of people from athletes, coaches, volunteer interns, professors, administrators, and more. Every single person I come across had something to share with me. Some lessons are refreshers; others are advanced courses that require me to take mental notes.
Nobody is too big or too small to be able to contribute to your education. The only person stopping the transfer of information from somebody else to you – is you.
• Everybody has one lesson to teach you, so approach every person with an empty glass.
• Nobody is too big or too small to contribute to your education. The only blocker is you.
• Humility is a competitive advantage. The day you decide you have learned enough is the day you start declining.
The Empty Glass In Practice
The empty glass sounds simple. It is brutally hard.
After twenty years in this profession, it would be easy to walk into every room as the expert. I have the degrees. I have the certifications. I have coached hundreds of athletes across four programs. And every bit of that experience becomes a liability the moment it convinces me I have nothing left to learn.
Here is what the empty glass actually requires. It requires you to ask the question you think you already know the answer to. It requires you to listen to the answer all the way through. And it requires you to admit, out loud, when someone with a fraction of your experience just taught you something.
Be a human, not a robot. Bring your whole self to work, and leave room in it for other people.
What Does The Empty Glass Approach Actually Require?
Everyone Is A Teacher
Let me show you what this looks like across the people I work with every day.
1. The athletes. They will tell you what is working if you shut up long enough to listen. An athlete who says "this feels wrong" is giving you data no force plate can capture. I am obsessed with athlete problems, not training tools, and the fastest way to learn the problems is to ask the person living inside them.
2. The interns. I ran an internship program at Wichita State for years, teaching eight professional interns every semester. Here is what nobody tells you about mentoring interns. They teach you more than you teach them. They bring the latest research, the newest methods, and questions that expose the gaps in your thinking. A young coach asking "why do we do it this way" is doing you a favor. Answer honestly or change the method.
3. The veterans. Pattern recognition is the most underrated coaching skill, and it only comes from reps. The coaches who have survived twenty seasons have seen every version of every problem you are facing. Their war stories are compressed wisdom. Buy the coffee. Ask the question. Take the notes.
4. The outsiders. Professors, administrators, sport psychologists, data analysts. People outside your discipline see your blind spots because they do not share your assumptions. Some of the best ideas I have brought into performance departments came from people who had never coached a single rep.
How Can Interns Teach You More Than You Teach Them?
Humility Is A Competitive Advantage
Steve Jobs said it does not make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do. We hire smart people so they can tell us what to do. Lee Iacocca said he hires people brighter than himself and gets out of their way.
Both of them are describing the empty glass as a leadership strategy. If you only listen to people who agree with you, you have built an echo chamber, not a staff. Do not work in a vacuum. Everyone on your team must be able to challenge your decisions, including the intern, including the athlete.
This is also how you keep growing. The day you decide you have learned enough is the day you start declining. Coaching is a process and an art, and art never stops demanding new study.
So here is my challenge. Today, find one person you would normally overlook and ask them a real question. The freshman. The new intern. The administrator down the hall. Approach them with an empty glass.
I promise you will walk away with something you did not have before. Everybody has one lesson to teach you. Your only job is to be ready to learn it.