Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Up Your Average is the “no nonsense” podcast made for interesting people who think differently. Learn to navigate your life with unconventional wisdom by tuning in to Keith Tyner and Doug Shrieve every week.
If you can't handle the criticism, get out of coaching. It's just part of the business. But the one thing about the criticism, it's it's aimed at the position you hold, not you personally. You see, they'll try to make it personal, and you'll you'll feel like it's personal. But the reality is once you're not in that position anymore, you know, they're they're they're throwing it at the next guy.
Caleb:Welcome to the Up Your Average podcast, where Keith and Doug give no nonsense advice to level up your life. So buckle up and listen closely to Up Your Average.
Keith:Mark, it is it is great to have you. Doug, I know you haven't spoke with Mark before, but when I when I think about the Schrieve family and I think of Caroline and her athletic prowess at Arkansas, I think you probably have a good vibe for the kind of athlete's lifestyle.
Doug:Yeah, we do. Mark, my wife played volleyball for Arkansas, the Razorbacks, Woo Yeah. Pig, And she had a wonderful experience there, and met a lot of really great, great people who helped her along the way to become the person that she is today. So I'm grateful for coaches. You might find this pretty interesting.
Doug:Her high school volleyball coach, Steve Shondell, I believe he's the most winning volleyball coach in the history of high school sports. A fascinating person who focused on feet work and fundamentals. They would practice even without They a wouldn't even have a volleyball, and they'd be practicing. Her little class of 32 kids were state champions, even up against the big school. So it's pretty good stuff, Mark.
Mark:That's nice. Gotta love it.
Doug:Yes, gotta love it.
Keith:Mark, I had spoke with you a number of years ago about our mutual friend, Bob Warren.
Mark:Right.
Keith:And Bob was a big influence in my life years ago.
Mark:And Me too, as you know.
Keith:Yeah. And one of the I think what attracted me to you from conversations with Bob is Bob would say all the time, what you do isn't who you are. Right. But who you are has a big influence on what you do.
Mark:Yeah. And
Keith:as a younger man, I was a really driven, performance driven dude. And that idea sounded really easy, but it sure was hard to tone down that driven personality.
Mark:Yeah. Well, and I don't necessarily think you gotta change your personality so much as just know that you're a born again believer in Jesus Christ who happens to do whatever you do.
Keith:Yeah, man. I
Mark:was more of a calm personality, was just me. I had other guys that Coach Bowden was very gregarious, I mean, he's the strongest believer I know, but his personality, he was totally different than mine when it came to how he would approach game day and everything else.
Keith:In that process, I think what really struck me is, you know, is Doug and I are investment advisors, and you kind of live and die by the sword. Probably the best investors are right half the time, and that's probably not too far off from coaches. You're probably the best are what, winning 60% or so?
Mark:Oh, you get in the Hall of Fame if you're like 65 or something. Yeah. And
Keith:so if you're used to being an A student and getting 90%, finding yourself in a career that is 65 if you're the best, or 50, that's a whole different mind shift.
Mark:Yeah. Yeah, no doubt.
Keith:So I think the thing that struck me was, as you were coaching SEC football, and SEC football was the kind of the top of the rung at that point in time when I spoke with you, the question that I had for you was how do you take what you do and then have an unsuccessful week and go back to life without it disrupting your apple cart? That was kind of the question that kind of started my conversation with you.
Mark:I don't remember what I said, but we just let it rip whenever you want.
Keith:Well, you had said something to me along the lines of the responsibility or that loss is on the role, it's not on me. And that really, that was just a really profound statement to me.
Mark:Yeah, well in that regard, you know, Coach Pound used to tell us, If you can't handle the criticism, get out of coaching. It's just part of the business. He said, But the one thing about the criticism, it's the as the position you hold, not you personally. He said, They'll try to make it personal, and you'll feel like it's personal. The reality is once you're not in that position anymore, they're throwing it at the next guy.
Mark:And that they kinda, like even right now, me as a retired coach in Athens, Georgia, nobody says I'm stupid anymore. No one says I don't know what I'm doing anymore. All think I'm an awesome guy, but I'm not in the position anymore.
Keith:How do you think, how do you help? That sounds easy with a certain level of maturity and experience. Like, how would you help a 25 year old figure that out?
Mark:Right. Well, I think I'd say the very thing Coach Bowen said about criticism and just trying to understand that if you're the head basketball coach, like Pat Kennedy during the time I was coaching at Florida State, I might be driving home or driving to work or whatever, and be listening to the Pat Kennedy show. And you get all the callers to call in and say, all the dumb things he did, why'd you do this, why'd you do that? You knew Pat was a great coach and a great guy and all that kind of thing. And you hear somebody else catching it, don't feel like the lone ranger.
Mark:But the bottom line is, just like right now, Mike Bubble calls plays at Georgia. And so he's the guy. He's the guy who catches all the crap. But when he's not in that position, he didn't catch it. It's just the way it is, but you just gotta know it's coming and be able to focus on your job and do, The bottom line is you're making decisions all the time.
Mark:You gotta decide what is your When you make a decision, who are trying to please? Are you trying to please the fans? Are you trying to please the AD? Are trying to please the player the player's parents or your assistant coaches? You gotta decide what you're gonna do.
Mark:For me, was like, I felt like if I made a decision that God was pleased with, then let's go, let's let it rip. And regardless of what everybody else thinks about it, because no matter what you say, somebody in their group is not gonna be happy. It's just the way it is.
Keith:Yeah, that's a really good word. As a young businessman, kinda kicking the tires, trying to figure things out, I concluded that the person who can make the most decisions in the shortest amount of time with the greatest accuracy will make the most money. And that seemed like a big deal at that point in time, but I realized that a lot of people just don't want to, they don't want the responsibility of a decision.
Mark:Leadership's not easy. And leadership, it'll eat your lunch, it'll eat you up. It'll slowly take your health. It'll slowly take your mental health because of the constant pressure of having to make decisions and the consequences of those decisions fall on your responsibility. So it can wear you out over time, for sure.
Keith:And it sounds like Coach Bowden really influenced you in that kind of direction of your life to help you to be better at making decisions.
Mark:Yeah, there's no doubt. I mean, of all the coaches I've ever been around, and thank goodness he was the first guy I worked under, he truly had his priorities in order. I mean, was truly faith, number one. It was truly family, number two. It was truly football, number three.
Mark:And a lot of coaches preach that, but not many live it out like he did. And so again, his goal was to make a decision that was pleasing to God, not necessarily making somebody happy, because he knew he couldn't make everybody happy. So that's kind of what he based his decision on. When you live your life that way and you prepare your heart and your spirit for that relationship with God, with Jesus, and situations come up and you have to make a decision. Sometimes you have time to pray about it and get peace about it and then do it.
Mark:And sometimes you gotta make that decision right now. And the closer you are to God in your walk, the greater chance you have of making a decision that He would be in alignment with, that He would be pleased with.
Keith:I guess coaching is probably when I think about it, place where the decisions are just quick and coming at you. So it's not like life decisions, but it's what are we gonna do in this instance in a game?
Mark:Yeah, during the game, obviously, if you're calling plays, every twenty five seconds you gotta spew something out, and you gotta have something ready to go that quick. And there's other things in games or even in life that you have more time to contemplate and think about and pray and meditate. Like I said, try to get some peace about a direction that you wanna go, but sometimes in life you gotta make the call right away. Matter of fact, when I said make the call, I wrote a book and the name of the book was Make the Call. And it talked a lot about making decisions that are split second, and some that you've got time to really pray it through and think it through.
Keith:One of the things that has been for me, like how I've managed time is by roles, and even as Gimbal Financial is our business, really, it sounds like what you said about Coach Bowden, I'm looking at our mission statement, just said for our business, we desire to radiate God with every action and decision we make to benefit our families, our employees, our clients, and our business associates. And so when we put our clients third in that priority list, there were some people that were offended by that. Sure. But I don't see how you can really be effective in anything if you don't put those other priorities in place.
Mark:Yeah, no doubt. We had a relatively small mission statement that I took with me to Georgia, but the last line, besides all the, do your responsibility with excellence and all that kind of stuff, at the very end it said, Honor God with what you do. And I would tell the staff, We really don't need the first part of this mission statement. We just need to read the last line, which says, Try to honor God with everything we do. And if you do that, you're gonna give your best, and you're gonna do what's best for the company too.
Keith:Yeah, I found these things very challenging in corporate America, because the mission statements a lot of time would trump the priorities of life. Yeah. And as we were developing our mission statement, what I had discovered in the late nineties was that corporate America had kind of made growth their God. Instead of just being profitable, they want growth of profits. So we we finished our mission statement with the sentence that we'll view growth of our business as a result of God's provision, which sounds passive, I think, to people.
Keith:You're not You're not gonna gonna go out and grind it out. But at the same time, I found that grinding it out didn't always create results either.
Mark:There was no doubt. Really when you come to mission statements, a lot of times, if you ask half your employees, what's the mission statement? They're not gonna be able to quote it for you. It's something that sometimes it's ingrained and sometimes it's not. But I think the leader has to believe in the mission statement and he has to live it out on a daily basis.
Mark:And if he does that or she does that, then that gives the greatest chance of everybody around you, everybody who's looking to you for leadership, to buy into it as well. But mean, you spend a lot of time on a mission statement and make a nice plaque and put it in everybody's office and all that good stuff. But I mean, how many people I mean, it might be sitting right behind them on their desk on the wall, and they couldn't quote it to you if they tried it in most places.
Keith:This may be the only time I've talked about it publicly in a decade. I don't even know. It just, I saw the parallels with what you're expressing and what drives us to our days. What I'm wondering, and I see, I've spent, think from Bob's influence, a good amount of my time one on one mentoring young men. And I see an epidemic of a lack of confidence out there amongst young men these days.
Keith:And I can see some parallels from what you're saying about criticism and increasing your confidence level. I'm just wondering how you help these young men that maybe grew up that every kid's a winner and they didn't get the Bob Knight approach of
Mark:training Well, and things mean, I mean, I was just gonna bring that up. I mean, if they stop giving a trophy to everybody and don't keep score, how are they gonna learn to handle when they don't succeed, when they're young? Everything is like, Great job, Johnny. Great job, Jill. Oh, that was beautiful.
Mark:That was perfect. And you play these tee ball games and nobody wins, nobody loses. We even go into Little League and beyond sometimes. It's like, let's go ahead and do some real world competition, and whoever wins wins, whoever loses has to live with it and maybe work harder the next time and can overcome some negativity. But when the path is paved too smoothly for our young people, and when they grow into real life situations, they have a hard time handling it.
Mark:But I think the big thing is, gotta give them responsibility, count on them to do it. If they make a mistake or they fail, and you help correct them and set them back on the right track. And then when they succeed because of doing things right, instead of somebody just trying to say, Great job, then they know on the inside that they're improving, and they gain confidence as they go.
Keith:What do you see with, like during your coaching days, I assume the kids that were stepping on the field with you that were often the best player on their team before they got to you. How did they navigate that process
Mark:in Toughest thing. Mentally, that's the toughest thing for those players was exactly what you said, being the best in their city, being the best on their team, just because they were the physically gifted. Sometimes not necessarily a great work ethic that went with it, they just were, they were used to that. And then all of a sudden they go onto a campus where every single guy on that team just about was that guy. And now you guess what?
Mark:You gotta compete for your playing time. You gotta compete for your ability to do all the things that you dreamed of doing. And a of guys just flat out have not had to compete. And so that's a shock to their system. That's one of the greatest fears coming in for most of them.
Mark:They're like, Man, am I gonna fit in? Can I play here? Do I belong here? And again, that's where you gotta give them basically an assignment, so to speak, as far as the things that they need to do, a checklist, the things that they need to do in the weight room, and in the classroom, and in the meeting room to have success, to show them older players, more experienced players, and kind of point them to a relationship with that older guy. Mean, we used to have what we call brother's keeper.
Mark:We had the juniors connect with the freshmen and the seniors connect with the sophomores. And so the young players could have a mentor to kind of help show them the way and help them kind of be responsible for those guys to make it, and keep an eye on them, and make sure they're doing the things they need to do to continue to create the culture of the team, but also improve to the point where they gain the confidence to compete at that level. So they definitely I mean, there's some that show up and they're still freaky, the freak of the freaks. There's very few guys like that that just show up in college and they're better than everybody there. Maybe 5% of the population at best, but the rest of them gotta earn it.
Keith:I played high school sports against Donnie Mattingly, so I got dominated all the time. Exactly. Yeah, I know exactly what you're talking about. Well, let me let me put it let me see if I can get you to help. Let's say we've got a 30 year old young man.
Keith:Let's say he played college sports. Did he did well in that avenue. But now he's in the business world, and he's he's finding out he's ordinary, kinda like what you're saying on the on the sporting field. What what would you do to encourage that 30 year old man? He's doubting himself.
Keith:His confidence is waning. Maybe the business world isn't. They're they're not giving him a trophy. They're slapping him around. How would you encourage him to start putting one foot in front of the other to gain confidence in spite of maybe not his great success?
Mark:Right. Well, first of all, he's not ordinary. He may be performing in an ordinary way, but who knows what his potential may be. If he's an athlete, okay, he's been coached, he's been taught, he's been corrected. I mean, in football, we film every single practice, every single play.
Mark:And then we go on after practice that evening, the coaches look at it and grade that film. Every single player gets a grade on how he performed in practice. And the next day in the segment meetings, the player meetings, that position coach watches that film with that kid, and he shows them the things he did well and the things he didn't do well, or a teammate doing it right, or a teammate making a mistake. So there's a lot of feedback that can say, Hey, this would have been a better way, or we can't do it this way, we need to do it this way. And so, if you have that kind of communication, where it's not like you're picking on one guy, but everybody's getting coached, everybody's getting taught, everybody's getting corrected, everybody's looking at it.
Mark:Then everybody understands that's just the way we do things here. But why are we doing it? To make you feel bad, to make you feel inferior? No, it's to help you grow and help you get better. Even learn, you can learn from your teammate's mistake possibly, or your teammate's success.
Mark:It's just like we had a kid, people wouldn't know the name, obviously, Pollock. I mean, David Pollock showed up and that kid just started working. He outworked everybody. He was literally the hardest working guy on the team as a true freshman. In the beginning, he was kind of a pain in the rear to the older guys, And kind of making people look bad, but in the end, when they started to see the type of success he had because of his work ethic, everybody just said, well, maybe I need to work that hard too.
Mark:And so you never know who you might learn from. It might be a rookie, might be a new employee, or it might be somebody, an older sage with the gray hair, you know?
Doug:Hey coach, what did your dad do for a living?
Mark:My dad was a computer programmer at IBM. He started out as a tool and die maker, which I have no idea what that is. He worked at a place called Western Electric, then he as a tool and die maker, and then he went to IBM to be a tool and die maker. And then when the PCs first started coming out, they needed computer programmers, but didn't have enough. So he took an aptitude test at IBM, scored high enough to be a guy they wanted to train, be a computer programmer, and that's what he did for the last probably fifteen, twenty years of his time at IBM.
Doug:Did he teach you anything about leadership?
Mark:Yeah, he did. He taught me to show up every day, do your job, people called him Honest Lou. I mean, my dad's name was Lou, and he was definitely the most honest man I've ever met. A guy that people trusted explicitly, and a guy that was a quiet personality, but a guy had a wife and five kids and showed up to work every day to provide for us. And so he taught me a steady work ethic and how important it is to pursue integrity in your life and in your career.
Mark:And he said that with actions more than words.
Doug:Wonder what it was like for him to see your team losing.
Mark:You know, I would never know. He would never say a peep. And if he really thought something, he'd probably keep it to himself. What about, he was just a quiet, humble man. I know he enjoyed coming to the games and getting a chance to watch me do my thing, but he never Well, he knew baseball, but he didn't know football.
Mark:And so he was gonna try to act like he knew what was up. Some fans are critical who really don't know what they're talking about. In the coaching business, we say they don't know that they don't know. And it's not trying to be mean, but there's a lot of fans that really don't know what's going on in the staff room. They don't know what we studied for hours in film, what the game plan was, why we decided to do this.
Mark:I always felt like you could take a fan and put him in our staff room and let him see exactly what we do and why we do it. Then go to the fast forward to the game and say, What play should we call the first time we get it on the five yard line going in? He's gonna say, We need to call this play, because that's what we all decided on because of watching film. That's what we practiced. The defense is what their defense does the highest percentage of the time.
Mark:So this is the call. So yeah, well, let's call it. Well, if it works, you're a genius. If it doesn't work, you're an idiot. So when the bottom line is, a lot of fans truly don't know that they don't know what they're talking about sometimes.
Mark:And that's another reason why you shouldn't get your feelings hurt if somebody's criticizing you.
Doug:From a fan or a fanatic point of view, I can see that. Was there ever a media person that you really clicked with?
Mark:Oh, there's a lot of them. I understood the media had a job to do, they'd have to ask certain questions or go certain places. The only thing that I really had to kind of put my foot down on was the harsh criticism of a player or players, even if sometimes it's one thing to say, Hey, he stunk it up that day. But if they're getting personal with these kids, sometimes I'm like, once again, you really don't know. So every so often I get hot with somebody because of that, but for the most part, I would say 95% of the people in the media I dealt with, I've got a good relationship today.
Doug:Last night I was watching our 13 year old at a wrestling match, and I don't know much about wrestling, but I was watching him, and it went several rounds, and I kept wondering this thought is, What does God care about my son wrestling right now?
Mark:Right.
Doug:Well, how would I you answer
Mark:would say he likes to struggle. I have a lot of respect for wrestlers. My brother Craig, my younger brother Craig was a wrestler, and I watched him prepare, and I watched him get in the mat and compete. And guess what? You're the only one in there, man, as far as human beings are concerned.
Mark:And so you're in there and are battling. I mean, the reason why those rounds are only three minutes, because you can't go much longer than three minutes. With that exerting that kind of energy and using that much of your strength and your will. But the bottom line is in life, we're gonna have tough times, we're gonna struggle. But the one thing about being in the ring, you're there by yourself physically, but spiritually, God's in the ring with you.
Mark:And I think that asking God for strength, and asking God for health, and asking God for the ability to finish, so to speak, I think God loves that when we call on them when we're struggling.
Keith:Thank you. Mark, I saw sometime in the last probably fifteen years, a couple things that really impressed me with you, And one of them, probably fifteen years ago, I don't know when, we were on the phone and you were on your way to the office, and you were getting some Chick fil A or something for breakfast.
Mark:Very good chance it was Chick fil A.
Keith:Yeah. I was very impressed. The enthusiasm of the drive I think it was drive through, the workers. And Yeah. One one of the things that I believe is you can tell a lot about the character of a person by the way they treat somebody who has really can't do anything for them.
Keith:And I was just, like, eavesdropping on that situation. It was just really an encouragement to my soul to listen to your A.
Mark:Well, mean, how hard is it to be respectful? How hard is it to be kind to somebody? How hard is it to say, You know what? I appreciate the fact that you're working first of all, and the fact that you're doing a good job, People in your office like raises, okay? People like bonuses, but they also like to know, can you have some positive feedback when something you good and make a point of it.
Mark:Even on our football team, Monday after a ball game, had a team meeting and we gave out props for all kind of different categories that guys did well. And when you not only pat somebody on the back because they did something well, but you do it in front of their peers, it's even more meaningful to them.
Keith:Yeah, really encouraged me. Being around successful people over my lifetime, and that ability to not let success get in the way of your humility, that's just a rockstar move there.
Mark:Well, other thing is the community service that we would do as a team, for the point you were making earlier, I wanted the guys to be able to help somebody who can't help them back, whether it's Habitat for Humanity, or whether it's going to the food bank, or whatever it is. We even went on a mission trip or two for the guys that wanted to go. And so in the summertime, in the springtime, every single guy on the team had to do some kind of community service so he could feel what you were talking about, feel what it's like to help somebody without them helping you. And most of these guys show up thinking the world revolves around them a little bit, and then they don't think much of others at times. But you give them a chance to really jump in there and help somebody and see what that does to their life or their day.
Mark:If you can make somebody's day that feels good, it feels good to them, but it feels good to you too. So we always try to give a taste of that.
Keith:So here's the second one, and I don't have a reference, I can't tell you where I saw it, but some point, and I found this to be a greater value than if somebody told me they're in the hall of fame. But some article I read in the last decade or so, it was a poll of college football coaches and who they would want to coach their own sons. And unanimously, you were the guy. I don't know if you saw that article or what, but Yeah, to me that spoke
Mark:it might've been one of those preseason magazines or something like that, but somehow they had a poll of, I don't if it's Division I coaches or what, but it feels good because you wanna feel like you're not only highly competitive, you're not only a guy that can win at a great level and bring players in and develop them as players and as people, for them to continue their dream of playing ball in the NFL. If they're not cut out for that, they're ready for other things in life. So you feel like if you get your peers to say, you know, that's the guy I'd have my son play for, you feel like you might be doing something right.
Keith:I'm fortunate, a year ago, my son joined our team here, and I get to stare at him across the desk here. And yeah, I would have been very selfish at who I wanted him to perform for, so that How sets us
Mark:does he address you?
Keith:Dad.
Mark:Okay, yeah. Because my son coached for me a couple years at Miami, and he didn't call me Coach Richt he called me Pops. Yeah. Not many assistant coaches you know, have that luxury.
Keith:Yeah, that's very cool. Well, we've sure taken a good amount of your time. Is there anything else? If you think about those young men, they're lacking confidence as we bring this to close. Any other trade tips you could offer to them this afternoon?
Keith:Yeah,
Mark:by the grace of God, one popped in my brain right now, and it came from my wife. And so I might come home and say, You know, this guy's not getting it, blah, blah, blah. And she'd be like She said, Let me make sure I get this right. She said, Does he know you believe in him? Wow.
Mark:And I said, He hadn't done anything for me to believe in, honey. She said, That's not how it works. She said, First you believe in him, and then they grow into your expectations for him. And that was probably the top two thing I learned from my wife in this coaching business, that was monumental in the way I thought.
Keith:Sounds like you married up well.
Mark:You know what the other one was? No. Was at Florida State, and we had Charlie Ward as our starting quarterback. In our traditional offense, he really wasn't doing very well, quite frankly. But when we got in trouble and got into our two minute offense, the no huddle spread two minute offense, he thrived.
Mark:Every time we got him two minute drill, bang, bang, down the field, touchdown, came back and won the game. She said, Hey honey, Charlie seems to do pretty good at the end of the game in the two minute drill. She goes, Why don't you start the game in it? I was like, it's not a bad idea. So the next game we played, we played Maryland.
Mark:We started the game with the two minute drill, basically, did no huddle, fast break, and we had like eight fifty yards of offense. And I mean, we scored, I think we had 10 drives and 10 touchdowns, and it was crazy. But it's amazing what'll happen if you listen to your wife.
Keith:That is a good word. Well, it's been an honor to hang out, and you're welcome on our podcast anytime. In the meantime, I hope you have a great weekend.