Chris Carlisle is a motivational speaker, bestselling author football and strength coach for 35 years. He has a BS in secondary education. A master's degree in history. University of Arkansas. Chris is the only coach ever to have won championships at every level of competitive football. High school. Junior college, major college university of Tennessee, USC two times, and the NFL Seattle Seahawks. Chris works with corporate executives, athletes, teams, small businesses, and highly motivated individuals, helping them set up a championship culture and they move or die mindset. Hello, Chris, welcome to the business superfan podcast show.

Thank you, Freddy. Thank you for having me. I look forward to have an opportunity to talk with your group and and learn a lot from you. I always, every time we talk, I learn a lot. And so this is exciting.

Yeah. Excited to have you on the show. So tell us, how did you get started that led you to get into professional football?

I was always involved with football. When I was a kid, it was watching football, it was collecting football cards, it was playing football through sports. And I remember a time when I was 10 years old and I was playing football with a buddy, Nate Lau, and we're in his backyard playing and it was like a Tuesday because Monday Night Football, at that time, Howard Cosell would go over the halftime and he'd go over each of the games because we only got three channels at that time. Yeah, I remember those days, NBC and then PBS, of course, but you only were able to watch a couple games and then the Monday night game and at halftime on Monday night, Howard Cosell would go through all the highlights of all the games that went on. So me and they allow it go in his backyard and play slow motion football where we would go ahead and reenact those plays. And I remember telling Nate when I was about 10 years old, it was about fifth grade, and I said, Nate, one day I'm going to win the Super Bowl and that was 10 years old. And so I started this climb, this desire to go ahead and move through. And I thought at that time I might play in the Super Bowl. All right. And then after high school and college, It came realistic to me that I wasn't able to play at that level. So I got into coaching and coaching always been something I'd love to do. I was actually coaching baseball teams when I was in my teens little league baseball. So coaching has always been part of my life. And so I lived in this idea of coaching. And then I went through the high school and then junior college and then in the NFL. So that was the path I took through playing through to college, graduating, becoming a high school coach, then getting into junior college coaching, and then had the opportunity to be in the NFL for nine years.

That's amazing. That's a great story. What led you to write your book, Move or Die?

Move or Die. I've been writing a book for 25 years. It's been a process with me that I've been writing. I'm, I love to write. It's a way that I clear my head of things that get in there. And when you speak it, when you think it, it goes through very few filters, but when you go to write it, then it goes through your mind. You've got to write each letter of each word. And if you have that BS indicator in your head, that you know when you're telling yourself the truth or not, you when you're writing it, you really feel it. And so I was able to go ahead and get into a situation where I kept writing writing. So after I finished my coaching career, I had a lot of time because to write a book, and this was handwritten, typed, there was no AI at that time. It was not something that I put in and a computer spit it out. And it was a process I went through. Here are the problems that I went through in my life that took me from a high school football coach. To A NFL Super Bowl champion and all these problems I had. As I went out speaking, I found people more and more people had these same problems. So I thought, let me go ahead and write this down so people that haven't heard me speak can go ahead and say, okay, at this part of his life, when he is just starting, here's the problems he had. Chapter eight is called Leave your mark about what you do after you retire, and just sit back and wait until you die, or do you move on from that profession into another step in your career? And that's where I was. I went into another step of my career. I had already had it planned out. And to leave your mark means, how can you move forward? Everything farther ahead and all your information you've gathered in your life. How can you hand that out to other people to help them move along their path?

It's the same thing when I wrote my book I didn't use any AI tools or any of that stuff. I actually did it during the pandemic and I created the first version and I passed it around to get feedback before I went too deep into it. And the feedback was, eh. It was lukewarm, wasn't nothing exciting. So I basically scrapped it and started all over. And that's when I got the idea of, a sports team has got, super fans that got their faces painted. They're wearing the jerseys, they got the banners. They're cheering. They got the bumper stickers. They're promoting that team. And the idea was, how can businesses create that same fandom? As a sports team, and that's when I started throwing this ideas of creating business superfans, and they're basically brand advocates, but I call them superfans, they're out there promoting the thing. I didn't do it exactly like you, but what I did is I started writing some stuff down and then my fiance, I'll go back to her and says, Hey, I threw, 600 words today. Oh, I had 1200 words and so she was my cheerleader to say, okay, how many words did you throw down today? And so now it became a contest of how many words I could do and it was bit by bit. And I, eventually put it together to where I have the book creating business superfans. So you did it over a course of a lifetime. I did it over a course of a year. So different approaches.

But I think they both work for us.

Yes,

I think that's what when we start doing writing a book you don't have to follow one methodology It's how best does it fit your style of writing? Is it right a little bit every day or is it take the compilation of all the writing you've done or all the Thing you've done through your life and make it into a book and I think too many people get caught up on I can't do that. If I can do it, anybody can do it.

Sure.

I was not great grammatically. That's why I did hire an editor. I did the same thing. I did the same thing because if not, it was too much how I spoke and sometimes that is not relatable as you read. And so she was able to put her magic into that book. Yeah. I enjoy reading it after because I gave her 600 pages of material eight by eight by 11 pages and it turned into a 186 page book and she said, all this information is great. But just this much fits into what we're talking about. And that's a great thing is really give them more than you're going to need. So they can go ahead and take that outsider, that third person look in and say, okay, if I'm reading this book, this is how I'm looking at it. And so that, that helped me, that really, made it, A quick read, an easy read, easy to understand, easy to follow.

Sure. Okay. So let's go back to sports here. And how important is a team's culture to win that Super Bowl?

If teams don't win, it's because of culture. Everybody has the same opportunity to pick the same athletes. It's not like college, it's, it was when you're able to recruit and everything, if you have better facilities, if you have a winning team, you could recruit a little better. Today, if you have enough bankroll, you can go ahead and buy athletes. That's what they're more worried about. But in the professional level, you get the same number of picks as everybody else. You have the same choice. as everybody else. And so when you're picking the same type of athletes, then you turn to your culture. Culture starts on top. All right. Yeah, the person on top has to have a great foundation. Because if you don't have a great foundation, you can't build a structure. That's simple architecture. Same thing in sports. Same thing in business. If you don't have a firm foundation, if you don't understand why you're there, what you're going to do and how you're going to do it, it's not going to work. And so as a leader, that structure goes all the way down from the top to the bottom and in order to get people to buy in, they have to trust you. Trust comes out of consistency. If you're consistent in the way that you show how to work and the way that you speak and the way that you react to other people, then you can get people to buy in to your culture. If you're all over the place, if you have no idea where you're going the next day, making stuff up as you go, then the people who are working under you, Don't understand where you're going.

Yeah, we had talked before. So about that, the ladder and, of when you guys were, this team got knocked off, that team got knocked off. Share that story with us because that made a huge difference.

When I was at the University of Tennessee in 1998, we were able to win the national championship and at that time on the wall outside the locker room there was a ladder and Every Monday after a win we would all gather up the whole team and they would put the team's name that we just won And then the team that we were playing the next week And it was, don't look ahead. We don't know what's on the farther up in the ladder. We're just focused on this one rung today and when they put the score up of the game from the previous week, everybody's cheering. They put him up. Oh, you're going to get it. So we go to work and we have that great focus. Everybody can go ahead and message that throughout the facility. It's the next step one step at a time. Don't get ahead of yourself. Don't get caught up in all of this stuff because we have that many rungs to go. Just focus on the next one. And it worked. It worked great. Phillip former had it tuned in. All right. And we won the national championship. And this was the year after Peyton Manning had left. So this wasn't Peyton Manning's senior year. This was the year after he left when T. Martin was a quarterback. And so still had a bunch of great players there. The next year and we had same roster coming back, but we're really good. An coach former comes out of and he's walking with a w his car beautifully ornam now east Tennessee, you'r smoking mountains and the there. So again, and so hand this stick, and it called it the synergy stick, and everybody's trying to wrap their mind around the word synergy. All right, and he tried to explain it and it seemed like he didn't have the whole grasp of what he was talking about. And so we went back into the weight room and went into it was hard to go ahead and message his message. And so people took it in different directions, and it was never centered that, synergy is about working together and bringing everybody in, into a commonality. And that was not really understood, and it was hard to teach to all the players, and so there was a kind of a dysfunction that the culture of the team had changed. Now, I jump ahead to USC. Seattle under Pete Carroll same culture same belief It didn't matter if you came in year one or year nine at USC or year one or year nine at in Seattle It was the same belief system the same Always compete was a philosophy. We had the three rules always protect the team, be early, no bitching, no whining, complaining. That's a wooden thing. John Wooden, that he got that from, but those were his three ideas. Then he had the style. What was the style of the organization? And he always told the story. Every year, it didn't matter where we were at in this, on this, told the same story. that if my best friend came to practice, never seen his practice before, this is what I'd like him to say to me when he came after. They have great effort. They have great enthusiasm. They play smart and they're so tough. Great effort, great enthusiasm, play smart, great toughness. This is what, and so when he told us to the team, Hey, this is what I, this is our style. This is who we want to be. We want to have great effort. And so the players go, okay, I can check, check. I can do that and so when they weren't doing that, hey, that wasn't great effort and that's part of our style. Oh, okay. Boom, click into it. And so for 18 years, I worked with Pete Carroll at USC and Seattle, same stories. If you look at my notebooks and I took copious notes, every meeting, If you start at the beginning of the season each year for 18 years, it was the same meeting, the same issue. And you're going to go, wow, people get bored with that. No, because every year the roster would change new coaches, different players. And he had to make sure he reminded the old players and taught the new players. This is how we do things that way. Everybody's on the same point in the culture and everybody can message the same way he didn't like we did in Tennessee. He didn't change. the message. He kept the same message all the way through. So there was a consistency of thought. So we could have trust all the way through. So everybody throughout the facility could speak the same language. That's why we were successful at USC. That's why we're successful in Seattle, was because we had the same culture all the way through.

Yeah. And that's some that transcends into business. Same aspect is in the business. It's gotta be from the top down, that, the management empowers the employees. I really don't even care for the name employees are really teammates and getting that culture in a company transcends into when they're talking to prospective customers, the tonality that's going on there, the energy comes across and becomes more attractive and so with everybody on the same mission, understanding what the goals are and not changing them all the time. Like you said, this is the same thing. Repeat, and you got new players, you make some adjustments. That's in turn, you start creating superfans of the team members. And that transcends into customers becoming superfans. I would think a team creating superfans because of their performance, the things that they're doing, they're recognizing their fans, they're waving, they're doing things like that. So that in turn is attracting, more superfans, wow, so and so just acknowledged me, and made eye contact with me, those are huge. So yeah, it's very important. The culture is paramount for a company as it is in sports.

I just spoke with two small businesses and I'm working with a lot of small businesses right now because they're starting to understand, companies like Amazon and Google, they've always brought in speakers. They've always brought in people to go ahead and re message their message so that the employees all get this BNN data. We did it with Seattle. We'd have Bill Russell come in, or Steve Kerr come in, or Clint Bruce come in, and Clint Bruce, if you're not familiar with the name, tremendous speaker was a Navy SEAL, played in the NFL, played college football, and he had a great message about not being average, because average has no secrets, is his point in being, is that you can be elite, Or you can be poor, but don't be average because average has no secrets. But these businesses I spoke to and they, and we were talking about, I said, now when I come in, what are we working on? What, who, what is your target for me to be there? I'm just not going to walk into a business and put my philosophy out there. What I want to do is message what the leader of the office is wanting to get done. So they were talking about this person and that person and this person and that person and all this problem. And I said, okay, what's your vision? What's your mission statement? What's your philosophy? No, I don't know. What is it? You need to know so they know, because if you have problems with them, it may be not be them. It's you. That you're not the one who's setting the tone. You're not setting the message, giving the foundation. Now you may know where you're going, but if they don't know where you're going, then they can't get there with you. So they're going to go ahead and take it upon themselves to do what they think they need to do to get their job done. Now, it may not be the way it may not be your style. They may dress differently than you want them. They may talk on the phone to potential clients differently than you want them to speak. Don't get mad at them if you haven't taught them. What I've seen is that sometimes these small business owners who've been in it five to 10 years and starting to expand their business and bringing people in, they forget to teach that next level of people, their style, their vision, their statement and so they rely on their employees. Other teammates to go ahead and pass it on. Nobody knows it like the person who planted the seed. When we're talking about like wineries, nobody knows the vineyard, like the vine master, you tell people, and some people know what the red grapes are on the white grapes are, but only the person who is over control of everything understands their age, their maturity, and what kind of fruit they turn out.

Yeah.

You're not there to touch everybody, who knows what kind of wine you're making.

And the other thing that you bring up is it's important to have that documented, SOP, standard operating procedure because word of mouth gets diluted. We only remember 20 percent of what we're told at best. So if you're got, as you just described, new, somebody new comes into the company and they're doing it. What they think is the best way because they don't know any better or they got verbally trained And so they don't remember exactly because there's no handbook or procedure guide of this is what you do I'm sure in football you the plays are written out, you can go back and what was that maneuver? What's that thing? It's not verbally taught. It's diagramed, and this is, this is the count and all that stuff. I played a little sports in my time. So the same thing with business is they need to have a playbook to run the company.

I'm gonna put this on there. If you just hand a new employee a, a book with your standard operating procedures in there, how many are gonna actually take it home and take time to read it?

Very little.

Here's what I did when I'm coaching and I bring a new coach onto my staff there with me. They're going to stand next to me. They're going to listen to me. They're going to watch me because this is the way I want it done. Now my second in command my, my right hand guy, then I would, after a couple of weeks, I'd pass the new person off to them. So they could hear it in a different way because, you don't want to message the same message As the top guy because if you keep telling the same story All the way down the line it becomes static then, right and I always use this example. So if the leader of the company uses the karate kid with the Mr Miyagi with the wax on wax off with and the whole point of that is you've got to do the little things, right? The big things will all come about. So take your time, do little things right. Now, if I message the same karate kid, and so does the receiver coach, and the running back coach, and the linebacker, and the defensive coordinator, then all of a sudden it becomes static the next time the head coach stands up there. And it's ah, we've heard this all before. But if I come in and I say, okay, I've got a story for you. There's two bulls standing on a hill. An old bull and a young bull. And the young bull comes up to the old bull and says, Hey, let's run down to that herd of cows and get ourselves a cow. And the old bull nods and goes, How about if we just walk down the hill and we get them all? Okay same function now. We're talking about, We're going to take our time. We're going to go ahead and do this right. And in the end, we get everything. Okay,

I

don't have to tell the Miyagi story. I can tell my bowl story and the linebacker coach will tell his story, the wide receiver coach. And so now they've heard different stories. But they all go to the same meaning, the same message that we're messaging from the head guy all the way down, because we understand what his message is, that we're going to go ahead and do the little things right. And the big things will come out of that. And so too many people want to just go ahead and be parrots. Don't be parrots. Help your teammates your next in line, come up with their own stories. And that's where you can sit around after work and you can talk about your philosophy to everybody and then have them give you feedback about, what do you think about when I say this? And then you help them develop their stories. Yeah, it takes a little bit, but if your company is really important to you, then it takes a time.

Right.

This is your future. This is your vision, your passion, everything you want in life. That's why you started that business. So take the time. Absolutely correct. Absolutely correct. And help grow it from the inside.

Yeah, it's absolutely correct. Because now you got everybody rowing in the same direction. You can't be rowing a boat. with multiple people, with individual oars, and not everybody's in sync, because the boat's not going to go anyplace, or if anything, it's going to go in a circle. Exactly. So it's paramount that everybody's, going in the same direction with the same message, and I agree, different versions of the same message is important, but the message has got to be consistent.

Yes.

And so that's important. So that brings me up to, I think we talked earlier about it one of Phil Jackson great basketball coach talks about the strength of the team and each is each individual member. And the strength of each individual member is the team. Talk, share a story how that applies in your professional football career.

Well, Phil Jackson actually stole that from Rudyard Kipling. When Rudyard Kipling said, the strength of the wolf is the pack and the strength of the pack is the wolf. And so I'm going to go ahead and give Kipling his background. I didn't know that. So great.

It's all good, man.

Hey, I was always said I was the greatest thief of coaches. I didn't have many original ideas of how to do lifts or how to do technique, but when I put it together, that's where I was unique in what I did. So I was a little bit different in that way. And it did pay off. When we look at a sport and you can imagine. If you know the game of American football, if the offensive line does not sacrifice for the quarterback, then the quarterback will get hit every time. Okay. But the quarterback will also sacrifice for the offensive line. He'll get them out of bad place. It's called an audible. He'll get up. He'll call them out of bad place that we're going to go ahead and get blown up. And so he'll put them in the best situation with the best blocking scheme. And that's where the individual. helps the pack and then the pack helps the individual and we go back to Pete Carroll's rules and Pete Carroll had three rules. Rule number one is always protect the team and always protect the team was what we're talking about with a pack and the individual. Protecting the team meant don't take a cheap shot in practice at one of your teammates. Wide receiver gets up in the air and a defensive back and cut him in half. You don't have to do that. Just show that you're there. All right, without the game. Okay, that's the whole thing. Get your body right. Run through the, run past the person and we all know you got it. You didn't have to do it. Also protect the team means when you get in front of the media. Make sure you're going ahead and protecting the team there. You don't need to grind your knife against another player by bagging him against the media. Don't talk down about the team. Always put out the positive message. If you have a problem, then let's go sort it out. You can either go to the individual, or go to the head coach, or your position coach, and you can sit down, let's go ahead and find out if there's something here we can solve.

Yeah,

Because it's about protecting the team. The team is always first, and so the individual sacrifice a lot to protect that team, but at the same time, that team is supporting and giving everything that you need as the individual. And so that goes back to the symmetry of a team and an individual of a employee of a business that if you're not taking care of your teammates, your employees, Then don't expect them to step up when it comes to doing extra work for the team, for the company.

Absolutely correct. And you hit a really strong point there that I want to reiterate is, when that player was on camera and, really focusing on, talking positive about the team, because the worst thing that they can do is chastise a fellow player publicly in front of everybody. It's the same thing when a business owner instead of pulling an employee individually and having a conversation with them, calls them out in front of all the other employees, now that creates a double whammy because number one, that person is embarrassed and they feel awkward because they've got chastised publicly. Second of all the rest of the teammates are going, wow. That could happen to me. So now all of a sudden you've got an apprehensive culture that you've just converted from an energized culture to an apprehensive culture, and I'm not going to do anything extra. I'm not going to go beyond because, heck, I could get myself chewed out in front of everybody and I don't want that.

100%. 100%. We always talked about if you make an error, if you make a mistake, make it 100%. Don't just halfway, try to hold somebody may, go ahead and if you're protecting the quarterback, then tear, pull the defender down. If you're getting beat on a pass, pull the wide receiver down. We'd rather take a 15 yard penalty or a ball spot penalty than the touchdown. And so when you go ahead and give your team the ability to make mistakes, then they're going to go ahead and try harder for you. And they're going to play closer to the edge, which you've got to be on the edge when you're playing or when you're working to get away from being average. Go back to Clint Bruce, because average has no secrets. And so the great ones, if you look at the top corporations, the, the Amazons and the Microsofts and all of those, all those people took risks and sometimes they blew up and they went, okay. We know that's not the way we're going to go. Some of them paid off in bundles of money and so if you want your employees to always be working the edge, give them a little bit, and within the framework, of course. We're not doing stuff on your own within the framework of the organization because we message the right thing, this is our style within that message, then we know that the employee that the team or team member can go ahead and be their best.

So let's jump back Chris, to the book. What's the book about?

The book is a step through life of here's the mistakes that you can make, and here's why we can, or how we can go ahead and solve those before we make them. It's simply just stories from my career from my life, from being born with handicaps. I was born with two handicapped feet. The doctors told my parents, your son will never run like the other children and my mom said four words to him, and I can repeat them. She said. "We'll see about that." That's how much we didn't worry about that. Why I was growing up, because I didn't walk well, I fell down quite a bit, knocked my two front teeth out. Just, I was starting to learn how to speak, I developed a speech impediment. Remember in fifth grade, we're sitting outside the parent teacher's conference, my mom's in this room with the speech therapist. And she says, he's never going to be a public speaker. My mom said four words. We'll see about that. All right. In 2000, I was diagnosed with cancer, and everybody goes, oh, how did you take that? I had four words, because they gave me a 40 percent chance to survive. We'll see about that. Because I looked at Ted Williams with the Boston Red Sox hit 4 0 6. That's hitting the ball 40 percent of the time. And he's known as the greatest hitter in baseball. 4 0 6. And I had a 40 percent chance in baseball. That's hitting the ball 40 percent of the time. I had a great chance. And you're not going to tell me because other people with the same situation I had didn't make it. That's okay. That was them. I knew who I was.

Right.

So when they stuck the needle in my arm and started pumping me with the first dose of chemo, the nurse said, this is some bad, and I'll clean it up. This is some bad stuff. You're not going to be able to work through this because you're that far down the road. We've really got to be aggressive with this. All right. Two weeks after I started my chemo, I get a call middle of the night. It was Friday 2 AM. So it was really Saturday morning and I pick it up. And this guy is just all hyped up and, Hey, how you doing? And I just had chemo on that Friday morning. And so I was going through that process of, the metallic taste in my mouth and being fatigued. And he goes, this is Pete Carroll. I've never met him before. I just got the head job with University of Southern California. And I want you to be my head strength coach. And I said coach, I need to tell you, be transparent. I was this guy. I was been diagnosed with cancer. There was a two second break. And he goes, is that going to change you as a coach? I said, no, sir. He said, can you be here on Monday? So remember now this was Saturday at 2am, and so got up the next morning I didn't sleep much of course packed the bags got on the plane on Sunday on Monday I was standing on the floor at 5 a. m. Getting ready for my 6 a. m. Group. Now. I had a choice in that situation, we all have choices. We can go ahead and say, Oh, coach, I'm going to try to battle this, and I don't know if I can, I'm going to see how this all turns out, or I can say, no, we'll see about that and hop on the plane and go out there. Now, I never missed a day of work. I didn't feel good. I was sick. I was nauseous, but I never stopped working, and here's another thing. There are only two people in the building that knew I had cancer myself and the head coach. Cause I said, I don't want anybody to know about it. I don't want anybody to treat me differently and feel sorry for me. I want them to come at me and so I can go to work now because of this, because I pushed through, I didn't think about it for one minute during the day. Now, of course it was nauseous. I didn't feel good, but that's okay because we all have choices. Can you do it or not? And that's one of the stories from the book in that, I talk about perseverance and resilience. I could have taken the doctor's words. My parents could have said, okay, he can't run. So we'll just, put them in a chair and hopefully develops. Or I had speech impediment. My parents didn't sit there with flashcards with words and make sure I went through the words and pronounced the words properly and learned how to speak and I wouldn't have taken the job as a tour guide at a historical park in western Nebraska, Fort Robinson. So I spoke to hundreds of people a day, forcing myself to learn how to breathe properly and speak. Those were all choices I make and everybody that's listening to this has that same opportunity. You have that choice either to accept what you're doing and live somebody else's dream and work for their dream or live for your dreams and work towards what you want in life because you get one chance at this and everybody goes, Oh, when you're diagnosed with cancer, what went through your mind? You're going to die. We're all, I'm sorry, but everybody's going to die. We're all going to die. So if I'm going to die, I'm going to die coaching my butt off. All right, because that's where my passion was. That's where I needed to be. It was my own mental health that I was taking care of there. Not sitting in bed, not having people worry about me. Worst thing could happen. You fall into that soft spot that, oh, woe is me because everybody else is worried about me. There must be something wrong. No, you got cancer. You're going to do one of the things. You're either going to beat it or you're going to die. Or you're going to get in a car accident. Or you're just going to not wake up one day. Hey, when I go out. I'm gonna go out in flames. They're gonna say, man, that guy lived everything. There was a book, John Kennedy an unlived life, and I thought, I don't want that he had a lot of things he wanted to do.

Sure. I want to slide, I want to slide into that box.

I'm going to go in when I get there to the pearly gates, if I get that far, all right, and they're going to look at me and go, man, you used it all up. Didn't you? Cause I got scars. I got to the titanium. That story is in the book. I've got, all my issues and scars and internal scars, all the dragons that I fight every day but I fight them with voices. Because I'm a big voices and choices belief. The choices you make come from the voices that are in your head. If they're all negative, you're going to have negative choices. You're going to make bad decisions. If all everything's been telling you, you're terrible, you're not good enough, then you're going to believe them all of a sudden. We'll see about that. It was like, okay, nothing can stop me.

You get what you're focused on. So you focus on negativity. You're going to get negativity. You focus on positive stuff. You're going to attract more positive stuff. It's weird, but it works.

Yep. It really does. It does.

I remember used to go to a Mercedes dealership and I would go sit in a 500 SL cause I wanted one. I didn't have the means to getting one, I was manifesting it and I'd go in there and, it was my car and I got to know the whole car all the insides, how it worked, everything else. And one day situation came up and I ended up getting a used one. And the guy goes, you want me to go through the cars? No, this is my car. I know this baby already. It was just like dumbfoundus, he didn't understand what I had mentally prepared myself So I totally get what you're saying because you attract the right type of energy, and you look at people that are, that feel victimized, that, it's, look at all this is happening to me. This isn't fair. And this is that and blah, blah, blah. But the reality is you're attracting that stuff.

You have a choice. You have a choice right there. When all this bad thing are happening to you. Okay. I got cancer. Oh, that's a bad thing. Or is this a challenge to me being better? I didn't get that job. That's okay, because it was a challenge. Okay so I'm trying to learn my lesson here, because that's what life is. There's a bunch of lessons that we get to learn. So everything that doesn't work out right, is a lesson that you can learn next time. I know I need to be better prepared. I'm going to use example with you and I. So the first time you and I talked, my speaker, my microphone didn't work. My lighting was terrible. Everything was wrong. So what'd I do this time? I came on 15 minutes or 10 minutes early. to make sure I checked the lights and check my volume, checked everything. So when we came on this time, I knew everything was going to be right because I did not want to mess up our opportunity, the time that we were going to be together. Cause I, I wasted 15 minutes of our time last time and 15 minutes. I can do so much with 15 minutes and it tore me up that I wasted your time with my foolishness that I didn't get things right. So this time I came in ready to go. When I was 10, I was going to win a Super Bowl. Now it took me 40 years to do that.

All right.

How long will you, when I'm talking to your fan base, how long will you hold onto your passion? If it doesn't happen this week, do you go there you go. If it doesn't happen that opportunity, do you just throw up your hands? Would you go on to your next opportunity? I learned Nelson Mandela said, I never lose. I either win or I learn. I never lose. I either win or I learn. And that's how I've adapted. That's one of the voices in my head that if things don't turn out, that's okay. What did I learn out of this?

Exactly.

Get better at doing. So the next opportunity comes. I'm ready to go. And we have that choice. But too many people, and you hit it right on the head, Freddie, when you talked about the negativity that people bring upon themselves, that they didn't get it because somebody else's problem. No, I take total responsibility for everything I do. If I fail, it's my fault. If I'm successful, I give all the credit to somebody else because they helped me get to where, because I took the time to go ask the questions.

Yeah, it's it brings back to my computer days I was teaching at a a college, a local college, and they had bought the computer system from our company. It was computer aided engineering. And I was teaching the class, and one of the things that I had an epiphany was, instead of them coming and asking me the questions, first off, I told them, look it up in the manual to take a look and figure it out. So they became self-sufficient. And if not, ask a colleague because then both of you are helping one another because a colleague's gotta take a look at it, 'cause he wants to try get the right information. I created a team in environment, in a classroom where people were helping one another to learn the material and I ended up having the highest, success rate and people signing up for the advanced class because they learned, the information that they needed to learn to be able to do computer aided design work on a computer.

And that's just part of the process right there. And it came as an epiphany in that it was different than the way you thought before.

Yes.

And so again I talk about in my book, the first chapter, the three deadly bullets I carried with me. Okay. Arrogance, ignorance, and inflexibility. I was so arrogant when I graduated from college. I didn't even apply for an assistant's job. Why would I want to sit behind somebody I knew more than? That's how arrogant I was when I came out in the profession. Now, I had my epiphany when I was driving that school bus home and we were one and three. All right. I didn't know a thing about football. I didn't. I knew how to play. I knew plays. I didn't understand how to coach. So I went back to work. I actually told them after that first year, I'm the wrong guy for this position. I'm not going to help this school be better. So I went off, became an assistant. I still carried the ignorance with me because I still thought I knew everything, and I also carried with me the inflexibility. The inflexibility came from, I grew up with three mentors and coaching that I've watched. Bobby Knight from Indiana, the basketball coach who throws chairs across the gym floor. Bo Schembechler from Michigan and Woody Hayes. Okay, and Vince Lombardi, of course. So those four guys were the guys, and here's two things they had in common. They won championships, and they yelled. So I took the yelling from them that if they yelled, and if I yelled more, and louder, and longer, I'm going to win more championships. After 11 years, this is how well it worked. I had 33 wins, 77 losses, and one tie. So if you hired me, you got three wins every year because I was following that pattern. I got into that box, Freddie, where I thought, It's not me. It's not me. I don't want to get on a pulpit too much. I believe that God goes ahead and nudges you into your lane that you need to be and then you'll nudge and nudge and nudge. Okay. Eventually he'll roll up a newspaper and hit you across the nose. Okay, that you know now you got to get over and he'll try to change your life. I was so stubborn he had to take a chicken house fan which and that was a chicken house fan in the weight room of the my most recent head coaching job at Subieco Academy. So I plugged it in when I walked into the weight room and sparks came out and the cord was all frayed. Mama Carla did not raise an idiot. I'm not going to touch that cord again. I'll switch it off at the motor. And so when we were going outside, I looked at the motor, I looked over the top and there was no switch on this side, so it must be on the other side. I leaned in and the fans, which are this big, by this and turning it thousands of rotations a minute, crushed my skull. So the scar I have that runs down here All right. This is all titanium. Okay, this whole part of my face is all titanium Crush my skull tore the brain sac shards of skull are put into my brain. So I just got this happened in June, first practice happens in August. I'm getting ready for practice and the neurosurgeon's going through, okay you can't strain because if you strain, it causes intercranial pressure, it'll kill you. You can't hold a sneeze in intercranial pressure, kill you. Check. All right. Can't lift weights because this check. All right and you can't yell. I checked my coaching toolbox and he took my sledgehammer away. How was I going to coach? How was I going to coach without my biggest tool? So that first practice I went to with my brand new team, I couldn't speak any louder than this. You know what happened, Freddy? For the first time in my career, in 11 years of coaching, the players wanted to listen to me. They wanted to be coached. They wanted to hear what I had to say. The dynamics changed. I didn't want to intimidate them. All right. The dynamics changed. There you go. And the epiphany came. Now, from that point of having 33 wins in 11 seasons, I ended my career with over 285 wins and championships at the high school level, the college level, the junior college level, and in the NFL, because I changed the way I did it. Now don't wait for a chicken house fan to hit you in the head to change the way you go about your operation. All right. That's a long story for the moral right there. And that's also is, and that's what the book is, these stories of this is how I did things wrong. This is what happened to me, but here's how you can save yourself from the chicken house fan, right? Be open to new ideas and be willing to say, I might be the problem. Let me go talk and ask people. So I've become the king of stupid questions. I will go out and ask anybody. If I don't know, I will ask the people, Hey, what about this? How does this, how did this work? So my degree is in history. I have a master's degree in history. My undergrad is in social science. I became a strength conditioning coach. Never took a physiology class at kinesiology college, a movement class, but I went to the best people in the world and sat down with them and with a pen and took the time and grind it out and learn, and became the student again so that I could learn everything. Then I took what I got from there and I brought it to somebody else and they helped to line it out, and then somebody else, and they narrowed it down and all of a sudden I had a great package that I could take to a team. That could help them to become what they wanted to be and help those athletes become who they wanted to be. And so that's, that was my path. And that's what the book is about. It's hard to say in a sentence, the stories in there are applicable to, here's what happened in my life, but you can do it better.

Very cool. Yeah, that brings me, reminds me of when I first became a sales in a computer industry, I went to a company and all I had to do was get them to renew the monthly subscription of the software that they were using. That was it, nothing more, and so they started asking me, about this competitor that they're looking at and everything else. So what did I do? Start talking about all the negative stuff. Needless to say, they called me up one day and says we're no longer using your stuff, so you need to come pick it up. My district manager just blew up and rode me up and down, verbally, and made me go pick up the equipment, which back then was a tech support guy that would handle that. I had to go pick it up, and I at least had the wherewithal to ask the guy, why did you not renew with us and went with somebody else? He goes all you did was talk all the negative stuff about the, the competitor that we bought and what they did was they talked about all the great things that you do, but here's why they're better. It was you know, two by four right across the forehead

Or a chicken house faint

Yeah, because it was like, I never looked at it that way, I was, they can't do this, they can't do this, but I never really edified our product and how it could help them with their business. That was a monster teaching moment. Because from then on, I, won numerous sales awards because I changed my approach completely to talking about where the business wanted to grow, and my tool was just a vehicle. That would help them to get there. So I started creating superfans from customers because they were achieving their growth. They were going from a 40 man tool and die shop to 120 man tool and die shop, because I was helping the owner achieve their vision. There's times where, they would say, hey, can your software do this? I say, no, go and buy this package because it's, what they specialize in and we don't specialize in that. That gave me the credibility, and in turn, they were my superfan to where I could turn around and says, Hey, Chris, call Bob at this company up in Rockford, Illinois. They'll tell you about the how our, technology has helped grow their business. Same approach as what you're talking about is, those epiphany moments, if you realize them and capitalize them, can change the trajectory of everything.

Without a doubt. Yeah, I've had I think three or four in my life that have changed the way I go about. We talked about, I went from winning the Super Bowl as a player and I didn't work out and then as a football coach and I don't think I had all the tools. It was a great dream of mine to be a football coach and win a Super Bowl. But I didn't have the mental capacity as far as like an offensive coordinator. They need to think three or four plays ahead and they need to understand they're juggling a lot of balls, formations, personnel, all this stuff. All right. I didn't have that ability. I'm a fixer. I can see something wrong and fix it. I found my niche. In that I still was following my dream of winning the Super Bowl, but it came in the vehicle of being a strength coach, which was perfect for me. It's where I'm at my best because like I said, I can fix. I can see things that are wrong and I can give the right cues because I'm a communicator. So I don't tell, I teach, and I think when we talk about being the best at what you do, we need to become great communicators.

You got to pull people up. That's really the bottom line, is our job is to pull people up.

So the communication goes through three phases. There's the problem, now where does the problem go? Does it become, constant nagging, or do we sit down and say, okay. What are ideas that we can go ahead and change that problem, and it's just not you sitting out. It's everybody who touches the product that is part of this process, and even some people from the outside. They may have again, like my editor had that third person view that they can look in and go. That's simple. Take this out,

Right

Then the third phase is problem solve. So you have a problem, you have a bunch of ideas. Now, what problem is most efficient in a way that we can do this so that it can stick. It's not just a Band Aid. that it actually fixes the problem, but you've got to have that open communication within your organization that you don't think that you're invaluable. That that I don't know everything. When I was coaching, I hired a young lady named Tatyana Ubikova. Tatyana was from the Ukraine, was a triple jumper, went through the Soviet system and in training, because at that time the Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union. They teach and coach at a whole different level. They teach you and they want to break down, they'll take 10, 000 and they'll break down 9, 999 to get one, that one super athlete. So she comes through the system. Now she has a degree in business, but I hired her as a strength coach because her coaching fundamentals, her understanding and the way that she motivated people was amazing. I brought a guy named Char Gahagan and Char was a national powerlifting champion, because he understood how to get people stronger. I didn't have that. I didn't have this., I was a speed guy. I stole all my ideas from a guy named Vince Anderson, who trained Olympic champions. So I got all my information from him. I was a speed guy. Then I got a guy that was a plyometric guy, a jumping guy. So I brought all these people in because I knew my strength, and I knew my weaknesses. When we sat down to organize a program, it was all about taking their input, their communication on how to do this best. Then I took what I do best is that I took all that and made it into a cohesive program that we're able to get all that stuff done. So as a leader, as the top of the pyramid of the culture, you've got to be able to be humble enough to say, I don't know.

That's very important. That's a huge statement.

There is the micro manager and the micro leader.. The micromanager has his hands and everything and thinks he knows it all. The micro leader knows what's going on, but allows you to do what you do best because you understand what it is that you're doing. Through the culture of the organization, because of messaging, because of we have our style set, we have the foundation there, so the structure is strong. He allows you, or she allows you, to go ahead and be the best person at your job, and you don't have to worry about them nitpicking. They may sit down with you and go ahead and explain, I saw you doing this, and Pete would call me in and go, hey, I saw the guys doing this. Why are you doing that? I explain how that turns on the VMO, the vastus medialis obliquus, turns on the glutes. It helps with knee support, helps with hip ability, and it turns the glute on so that we have our hamstrings safe. Oh, I didn't know that. Okay, you wouldn't, but that's why I'm here, and then he would go have fun with that, all right. And we'd go do that, but I understood why we were doing it.

So I'm going to wrap up here. One of the things I want to reiterate is the fact that when you brought in those subcoaches that specialize in different things you in turn really created superfans from them as well as the team that you were working with because you were making them better and perform better. So it was always about them being able to perform at the level that they needed to perform to win the games. That all tied together in a collaborative team effort.

Here's a byproduct of that. Every one of those coaches that I brought in went on to win championships with their teams also. Because of the work we all did, they took it out and they said, okay. They applied their own magic in it and they will be able to be successful. So it's, when you're a manager who's lifting people up and wanting them to go ahead and grow within your organization, and when they're ready to open their own shop, then you're all for it. I'm going to give everything I have to you so you can go ahead and do it because I believe I can still do it better than everybody, but you go do your stuff.

Yeah.

Take all our information.

Yeah. Great. So how can people find you, Chris?

Thanks so much. I'm on Facebook, I'm on Instagram. My website will have all this and Freddy will have the QR code when we finish this. But it's info@thecoachcarlisle.com or on, on my website is theCoachCarlisle.com. If you pull that up, my website's there. You can order my book from there and I will sign it. I will personalize it to you. And then you can find my blogs and I just finished my 100th blog. And so it's just articles that I've had. It's again, stories. I'm actually going to take those 100 and make another book out of it.

Oh, cool. Great.

It's just step by step, and it goes from the five P's passion, preparation, practice, performance, and perseverance. Those five things I've found make up the championship mindset.

Excellent. Chris, it's been a pleasure having you on the Business Superfan Podcast show. It's been a great conversation and we'll have you back on again because we've got more to talk about.

I got four more stories.

Okay, we'll get into those, we'll do it. We'll get you on another show and continue to continue the conversation, buddy.

Thank you for the opportunity. It's been great talking to your group and good luck everybody and go ahead and live your optimal life.

All right, man. Thank you.