It’s a unique privilege to share and bring to life the stories of leaders, authors, coaches, executives, and high performers. In 2022, The Daily Coach introduced Saturday Blueprint—a weekly series dedicated to humanizing leadership journeys and offering a platform for leaders to share their practices, mindsets, frameworks, and insights for leading and living a meaningful life.

Over the past year, this series has continued to feature an incredible range of voices—from senior military officers to executives, coaches and authors—exploring how they navigate careers, leadership, and life during both triumphs and moments of uncertainty. These stories have provided our global community with lessons that inspire and resonate deeply.

As we close out 2024, we’ve compiled a selection of thought-provoking quotes from this year’s Saturday Blueprint series.

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Can you share your 3 Ps?

They’re something I’ve done throughout my career. Prepare, practice, plan. 

Prepare is do your research. Seek out the lessons learned. Find what hasn’t worked in the past. Think through and prepare for those moments. 

But then you have to take the next step and practice. In the flying world, we use a concept called chair flying, where we sit in a chair, face our wall which has a cutout display of the cockpit, and we sit there and visualize. We think through critical radio calls, critical steps, maneuvers, walking through the entire mission as if we’re in the cockpit. I’ve realized that applies outside the cockpit as well. When we visualize and practice something in advance, we prime ourselves for action and can effectively cope with stress. It’s about building muscle memory and connections with our team. 

Then, it’s that final step of planning for contingencies. It’s important to have a positive mindset, but I also think it’simportant to think about the potholes down the road. What can go wrong and what are you going to do in those moments?

― Kim Campbell, Retired U.S. Air Force Colonel

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I want to ask you about a quote of yours. “Great coaching is fierce love.” Can you elaborate on that thought?

There’s a danger in coaching, particularly in life and executive coaching, where you’ve gone into it because you like being helpful. You can fall into a dysfunctional relationship where you think your job is to save the other person. Actually,what’s really powerful is to give people responsibility for their own freedom. There’s this paradoxical way of showing love. 

What does it mean for me to be the greatest champion for this person, to be all in on their success, and growth, and focus? But the seduction of that is you kind of move into that rescuer mode. There’s a plague of niceness in the world of coaching. The fierceness is where you go, “So, I’m going to do all I can to help you be the best version of who you are.” What that means is being willing to not just encourage but to push, and to provoke, and to say the hard thing. Fierceness doesn’t mean being an a--hole.

― Michael Bungay Stanier, Bestselling Author

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What practices or habits have sustained your consistency, drive, and purpose throughout your coaching and executive career?

When people ask me how I’ve been able to succeed with teams, even those at the bottom that no one wanted to coach, I always come back to the same principles. First and foremost, wise use of time. Time is a non-renewable resource—when it’s gone, it’s gone. I make sure every second is used effectively, from how practices are organized to how systems are implemented.

Beyond that, I’ve studied greats like John Wooden, Bobby Knight, Gino Auriemma, and Pat Summitt to understand how they sustained success over time. Through this, I’ve identified six key pillars: talent, culture, leadership, a system, practice, and support. These six elements are essential for consistent success.

You don’t win without talent, leadership, or culture. Support can sometimes be lacking—especially in women’s sports, where I’ve had to win despite limited resources—but when you have it, it makes a world of difference. Culture is also critical. Players need to feel safe, valued, and trusted in a positive environment. And, of course, you need a clear system and well-organized practices to bring it all together.

Practices, in particular, are your laboratory. That’s where you teach, fix issues, and prepare to execute. If your practices aren’t strong, you won’t perform well in games—it’s that simple.

For me, the “big three” are talent, leadership, and culture, but all six are interconnected. Whether in sports or the corporate world, when these pillars align, you’ll consistently achieve success.

― Lin Dunn, Hall of Famer and Indiana Fever Senior Advisor

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You’ve worked with one of the preeminent coaches in the sport for more than a decade now. What makes Coach Bill Self elite?

Coach Self is the best culture, team, relationship and leadership builder in all of sports. 

His leadership style emphasizes empowering those around him. He fosters a culture where his assistant coaches, support staff, managers and players are trusted with responsibilities and encouraged to ask questions and make decisions. That approach (inspires both) confidence and accountability, as well as a sense of ownership in the success of the team… Everyone in the program becomes a caretaker and contributor once you become a Jayhawk.

(He’ll say), “The pie is big enough for everyone if we all just do our job.” What that means is that if we collectively create an environment where everyone gives themselves up for something greater, it gives us the best chance. 

― Fred Quartlebaum, Kansas Director of Basketball Operations

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What’s the key to persuading a skeptical audience in your eyes?

I call those my “Chicken Little” moments. The easiest way to overcome those are to pull in additional stakeholders. Who else is this issue important to? Who else can amplify my message? Typically, if I’m at a place where what I’m saying is not being recognized or acknowledged, it’s a reflection of a lack of credibility I have with that audience. That’s something that comes with time. 

The first thing I do is turn to some of the more credible voices to give amplification to my message. If that doesn’t work, then I also do a perspective check. Let me make sure I’m grounded in reality and not being chicken little. Is this really an issue that deserves the level of attention I’m giving it.   

Never be afraid to let new evidence change your mind.

― Brittany Masalosalo, Chief Public Policy Officer at HP Inc.

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Can you share your list of the six Ds that you feel destroy culture?

1. Doubt- When kids lack confidence or they hesitate in what they believe, that’s going to hurt your team and your culture.Our job as coaches is to build confidence. 

2. Distrust- Can I trust you? Can we trust you? If your players can’t be trusted or a coach can’t be trusted, it will hurt culture. 

3. Delay- Being late, procrastinating, not following through. 

4. Disbelief- It’s, again, self-confidence. They need us to believe in them. 

5. Defensiveness- This is not being coachable, not accepting feedback. If you get defensive when someone is trying to make you better or always have a comeback, that’s going to eat away at a culture. 

6. Distraction- I think it’s the most challenging in today’s world. Kids have so many people on the outside talking to them. Half the time as coaches, we don’t even know what’s going on. We don’t know the social media impact that might be happening. That’s hard to deal with in today’s world.

― Greg Berge, Coach, Author and High School Principal

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What advice would you give to your younger self?

I would tell my younger self: Trust your inner knowing. There’s an inner wisdom inside of you, longing to guide you home. You already have so much of what you need within you. Sure, your experiences and everything else will shape that, but there’s this current running through us all, full of wise information if we learn to listen.

Another thing I’d say is experiment. Be curious. Play. When you try things on and allow yourself to explore, you reconnect with that childlike sense of wonder that some of us lose along the way. It’s important to give yourself permission to mess around a little, to rediscover joy in the process of figuring things out.

― Anna Brooks, Founder and Steward

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You wrote a piece recently on your website about expanding your identifiable skills: Being enthusiastic, being curious, learning from mistakes. How do you strategically learn from your mistakes?

It’s funny. Coaches are probably the only people who actually like to talk about the value of losing… The only place that Ithink successfully talks about learning from losing is sports because it’s a zero-sum game. You either win or you lose every time you’re out there. 

There’s something a friend of mine calls the “entrepreneur’s nightmare,” where sometime in the middle of the night, usually a Sunday, you wake up with a knot in your stomach and say, “What’s going to happen tomorrow?” You have a constant drive to figure out how to tackle the next task, and I think that’s what drives a lot of people who are successful. 

Never really being satisfied, but I think also learning from other people and what they did to get better and how do I apply that to what I do? Those are the interesting challenges and opportunities that exist. 

Whether it’s my 10-year-old nieces or people in the Hall of Fame, you can always learn from anybody if you’re open-minded.

― Joe Favorito, Marketing and Strategic Communications Consultant

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A heartfelt thank you to every guest we had the honor of featuring this year. Your time, perspective, and willingness to share your journey with The Daily Coach have been invaluable.

We’d also like to express immense gratitude to writer and journalist Trevor Kapp, who led this series from its inception in October 2022 with ESPN’s Jay Bilas through its November 2, 2024 edition. Trevor’s unmatched curiosity, grace, work ethic, and commitment to excellence have left an indelible mark on the series and The Daily Coach as a whole.

We’re looking forward to kicking off a new year of the Saturday Blueprint series with you next week!

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