Ep. 137 - John O' Sullivan - The Mental Toughness of a Champion Teammate

[00:00:00] Welcome to Mental Toughness with Dr. Rob Bell.

[00:00:13] Each week, Dr. Rob sits down with athletes, executives, and expert coaches to talk about

[00:00:18] mental toughness and their's back. His new book is titled The Champion Teammate, Timeless Lessons to Connect and Compete and Lead in Sports and Life. So I'm holding up the right here for the picture. Be nice. Our guest today, John O'Sullivan. John, man, thanks so much for taking time, buddy. Rob, thanks for having me back on, man. I always enjoy our conversations,

[00:01:42] whether you're on my podcast and vice versa and just our emails and so much

[00:01:47] other stuff. So it's great to be here again.

[00:02:43] So Jerry and I came up with the idea for the book, and it was really like, we do a lot of work with teams,

[00:02:47] and Jerry's been at it for four decades,

[00:02:49] and I've been doing it the last seven, eight years.

[00:02:52] And we're like, what is, and a lot of our teams say,

[00:02:55] hey, we wanna do a team book read together, right?

[00:02:58] And so we're like, well, let's write that book

[00:03:01] on being a great teammate.

[00:03:02] And then of course from that, you're gonna get culture,

[00:03:05] and you're gonna get leadership,

[00:03:06] and you're gonna get all this other stuff. that he was doing his part. We had to have difficult conversations. I mean, probably most of it around, you know, titles and book cover art more than the content of the book. And so, so this was a really interesting process, but it went really well. And Jerry and I are actually working on another one together right now, but, but it was really fun.

[00:04:21] It was really fun to do a book with a partner like that

[00:04:24] cause that was new for me.

[00:04:26] Yeah, that's awesome.

[00:04:27] And I'm glad it was got writer's block, but to have everything come together where it's like, this is something that can help. This is an important topic. I mean, there is a, it is, it's like running a hundred mile race, man. There are a lot of dark times that kind of go through it. Did you have any of those at least coming through the? Oh, for sure. And I mean, every book I've written,

[00:05:40] I've had chapters that just pour out of me, and I really hard to let people know that you have a for college teams, high school teams, even down to middle, like we've had middle school teams use it. And they do it as well. And so, you know, the chapters are three pages, four pages. It's a story and an idea. And then there's sort of, you know,

[00:08:22] we call it raise your game, like of rules as a coach, you end up just being a police officer, right? You're just going around punishing people for breaking rules. And it's not to say that you shouldn't have any rules, right? But in our experience, what we found is the best programs have really high standards, right?

[00:09:41] And standards are things that we aspire to, right?

[00:09:45] So we aspire to be a great teammate. and some of these other, some of the programs I work with, when you're a senior, now you have the honor of carrying the water. You have the honor of picking up the cones, right? You do, you don't ask anyone to do things that you're not willing to do yourself. And that's a standard that very quickly

[00:11:01] brings new players into the fold.

[00:11:02] You're a college freshman, you're coming in there

[00:11:05] and you've got an all American senior picking on the sideline, especially in games like soccer or lacrosse or hockey. You know, there's no time that you know, it's American football, maybe the coach is calling the play. But then we love the quarterbacks who call the audibles, right? That's the intelligence on the field. And so that really has to start early. Right. And so when I

[00:12:21] coach youth teams, that's a big thing. It was it was funny, Rob,

[00:12:24] like this past weekend, my I, but that's over many years of this group at halftime saying first five minutes, go with your position group and then bring something

[00:13:41] back to the team.

[00:13:43] Right.

[00:13:43] That doesn't just necessarily happen organically.

[00:14:42] when there's not psychological safety. If when they don't feel psychologically safe,

[00:14:45] then you see them act out,

[00:14:47] then you see them not take ownership,

[00:14:49] then you see them deflect, complain, blame,

[00:14:52] wherever that's gonna be.

[00:14:53] But can you talk about in your experience,

[00:14:56] how you've seen that play out

[00:14:57] and just the importance of psychological safety?

[00:15:00] Yeah, and so this is the game that they tense up and they freeze up or whatever. And I know with athletes you've worked with, it's very similar, right? If I start thinking about what this putt means, you know, it might not be the my teammate gonna say if I miss this free kick or if I make a mistake or if I'm playing badly and things like that, or what are my parents gonna say or what is my coach gonna say? So yeah, I mean, I think, you know, creating the right environment, that's what coaches are, we're the architect of the environment

[00:17:41] and from what's being taught and what they're learning

[00:17:45] to am I not afraid to make mistakes He's so invested that you can't help but like want to play for the guy You know and you know, I don't know him I've never spoken to him, but you just can look at how he interacts with the people around him He's always got a smile on his face and he's fiery gets angry or whatever

[00:19:01] but there's like

[00:19:03] There's an ease and there's a joy to his work and he's stepping down because he's like I'm I can't

[00:20:03] culture and communication, because as coaches, we tend to just dive deeper into the X's and O's of our sport. But that's

[00:20:08] you like no, no college athletic director has ever fired their

[00:20:13] football coach, because they didn't know enough about

[00:20:14] football. Right? They fire them because they can't communicate,

[00:20:18] they can't recruit, they can't build culture, they don't have

[00:20:21] standards, the disciplines poor. So cuddly and he goes downstairs and says to his mom, you know, hey, there's this dragon. She says there's no such thing as dragons. And all of a sudden it gets bigger. You know, and throughout the day, as it, you know, sometimes they'll be like, oh, you know, we're sorry that you're here at this time because we're dealing with this. I'm like, this is the exact time I should be here. Right? And I'm gonna go into the locker room with the team and we might not be out for two hours, but I'm going to make sure that this gets brought up

[00:23:01] and we're gonna address it because it's not going away.

[00:23:04] And everyone knows it and everyone feels it,

[00:23:07] but you can't stick your head in the sand That's why I look at the really important of having those crucial conversations. Yeah, and I mean, the situations can be different, right? It can be a general discipline behavior thing where a college team, people are going out, they're going out the night before games, they're drinking, there's whatever, right? And sometimes it's one person who's causing problems

[00:24:22] and I've addressed that, but I don't ambush a player, right?

[00:24:27] I pull that player in this conversation, so please know that it might be difficult, but I'm not letting anyone gang up on you either. Because you're not 100% wrong. What part of the book was most important to you? Well, it was funny, we wrote these chapters

[00:25:43] and wrote these parts and then we can't,

[00:25:45] you wrote these, we want standards and not rules and things like that. So yeah, so those are one.

[00:27:01] And just, again, every chapter has a story.

[00:27:05] And I mean, there's some of put our guests into different buckets, right? And so if we talk about the coach bucket, right, this really common theme from people like Steve Kerr and Phil Jackson and Tara Van De Veer

[00:28:20] who just broke the NCAA wins record

[00:28:22] and Cindy Timschel, Hall of Fame lacrosse,

[00:28:25] Nancy Stevens, field then, you know, from, you know, psychologists and stuff like that, that we've had on just, you know, the idea that, you know, you can't have an absence of fear, you can't have

[00:29:42] an absence of nerves or stress, right? The golfers you're Ask it the same way. But what question should I be asking that? Have forgotten to ask Um, I I don't know that you've necessarily forgotten to ask it But what I would say is that you know as the subtitle the book says this is you know being a great teammate in sports and life and I think

[00:31:01] Sport is such a wonderful place to get reps dealing with adversity

[00:31:06] Working with other people working with you, people will seek you out. And what an amazing skill that we can learn through sport if we allow sport to teach it, right? So experience that adversity, deal with that difficult person.

[00:32:20] Don't protect your kids from them.

[00:32:23] Encourage them to go and reach out

[00:32:25] and learn from these moments.

[00:32:26] And so I think that's the kind of,