- The Great Coaches: Leadership & Life
- Posts
- Becky Burleigh
We believe sport provides a learning environment for leadership and life, and so we interview Great Sports Coaches from around the world to find ideas to help us all be better people.
Our newsletter provides the best ideas from those interviews.
We hope you find one or two ideas that you can share with your family, friends, and teams.
Latest Interview
Our Great Coach this week is Becky Burleigh, the American soccer coach who led the University of Florida Gators for 26 years prior to her recent retirement. At the time of her retirement, Becky had a winning percentage of 75; in terms of her total number of all-time wins, she is ranked second of all Division I coaches.
Becky became the inaugural head coach of the Gators in 1994; four years later, she coached them to their first NCAA title. During her tenure at Florida she also led the team to 14 SEC championships and coached 17 “All-American” players.
Alongside her colleague Brett Ledbetter, Becky Burleigh runs the very successful ‘What Drives Winning’ conferences that are attended by Great Coaches from across the world.
Becky is clearly very enthusiastic about both coaching and helping others, and this really came across in the thoughts and experiences that she shared during our interview.
Some personal highlights were:
Her personal belief that no task is so important or critical that it should be allowed to get in the way of bringing your best energy to your team.
The importance of courage in coaching.
Why the tactics you deploy will never be as important as the way you choose to treat others.
How she controls her emotions and aims to make sure that her feelings never get in the way of her being the coach her team needs her to be.
Many of the points she raised are highly applicable to the workplace, but her technique for controlling her emotions particularly resonated with me - let me know how it works for you if you decide to give it a try!
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Leadership Insights
Average, Good, Great.
In this clip, boxing coach Ben Davidson shares what he thinks makes the difference between being an ‘average’ coach, and being a ‘great’ one.
If you like this, you can find more than 1200 other insight videos on our website, covering a variety of leadership topics such as setting up new team cultures, establishing team values, or helping others with their inner voice.
All of the insights are indexed, searchable, and can be downloaded to share. Some may require a one-time purchase or subscription - check the individual insight’s description for more information.
Leadership Skills
Where does the line fall between self criticism and self reflection? How can being aware of your own actions and contributions make a positive impact on your leadership, coaching, or team work?
For this lesson on self reflection we’ve put together a series of clips from interviews with 10 different Great Coaches, each sharing their own unique insights and personal experiences with the topic.
Some of the key points and highlights from the lesson include:
The importance of reflecting on your own performance before giving feedback to others.
The simple reflection ‘loop’ that can help you avoid becoming overly critical of yourself.
The impact that practicing self reflection can have on your development, performance, and how you manage fatigue.
Different techniques that you can use to start practicing self reflection and build personal accountability.
Want to find more content like this? You can find lessons on a wide range of leadership-related themes and topics on our website:
Ideas
If you were listening to our podcast last week then you’ll already be familiar with Cliff Mallett and Sergio Lara-Bercial, who joined us for our episode on “Serial Winning Coaches”.
Serial Winning Coaches is also the name of their latest book, which shares the secrets, experiences, and practices of 17 serial winning coaches from across 10 different sports and 10 different countries.
“Learning from Serial Winning Coaches provides performance coaches and directors, coach developers, and researchers with the knowledge and tools to affirm and challenge policy and practice and conduct further research to inform future policy and practice in the identification, recruitment, and development of performance coaches.”
There Is No Algorithm For Leadership
There is no algorithm for leadership, which is why we have interviewed more than 200 of the sporting world’s Great Coaches to find ideas that can help us all to become better leaders.
We bring audio and video insights from these coaches into our presentations, each uniquely tailored to meet the needs and challenges faced by your team.
If you would like to learn more, please get in touch.
Partners
This newsletter is brought to you by Macquarie University Business School’s MBA program. Designed to empower, challenge and transform, the Macquarie MBA gives you the business skills and knowledge you need to succeed in an evolving global economy.
The program bridges the gap between theory and real-world application, bringing together world-leading professors, executives and industry partners to teach you how business can be used for good.
I have started working with the team at Macquarie on some projects and can attest to the quality of the people and material. To find out more, search for Macquarie University Business School’s MBA.
Find out more: https://www.mq.edu.au/macquarie-business-school
Contact Us
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