Duke basketball coach Kara Lawson is considered one of the greatest coaches and leaders in basketball. She was a great player herself at Tennessee and in the WNBA, and she has played with and coached many great players as well.
At the 22-minute mark of an interview with Supreme Lending Southwest, Coach Lawson was asked, “What do the best players, coaches, and leaders do?”
Coach Lawson said being great and being a leader starts with competence. Competence is the ability to do something successfully or efficiently. Before you can be great and lead, you have to be very competent at what you do. You have to put in the work by devoting time, lots of time, into developing the skills needed to be great at whatever you do.
Coach Lawson says too many people either try to skip over or try to speed up the process. It takes hours and hours and hours of practice to be great at anything, and you can’t quit or skip steps.
We want to get to the promised land, but we have to embrace the period of development, and she says that some people have to live in that period of development longer than others because we are all being prepared for something different. Complaining about your period of development because it’s taking you longer than others is futile because what you are called to do will be different than what someone else is being called to do.
Coach Lawson says one of the biggest ways to fail and fail quickly is to decide it’s time to be out of the period of development before you are ready.
Confidence comes from competence, and competence comes from time and work. Development and spending time becoming competent in every area is one of the keys to being a leader and being great.
SOMETHING(s) TO THINK ABOUT
1 - What is your biggest takeaway from Coach Lawson’s message about competence?
2 - What is one goal that you have for yourself?
3 - What is one thing you have to be great at so that you can achieve that goal?
4 - What can you commit to doing every day to help you become great enough to achieve that goal?
For a printable PDF of this post, click here: Kara Lawson: What the Best Do
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