Motivate Your Team! Cheer Up A Friend! Inspire Yourself!
Motivate Your Team! Cheer Up A Friend! Inspire Yourself!
 |
|
| Wooden's Wisdom - Volume 13 | Issue 757 |
| Craig Impelman Speaking | Championship Coaches | Champion's Leadership Library Login | |
|
"CORRECT IT AND MOVE ON" (JOHN WOODEN AND LARRY FARMER) Someone once asked Larry Farmer what John Wooden was like after a loss. Farmer laughed and said, "I don’t really know. It only happened once in three years." Farmer finished his UCLA career with an astonishing 89-1 record and three national championships. The one loss he was referring to came at Notre Dame in 1971.
Coach Wooden walked into the locker room after the game and said, "We got whipped. No whining. Let’s get a shower and get out of here. Only say good things about the other team." That was it.
More remarkable still, Farmer told me that Coach Wooden never mentioned the game up again. Coach Wooden acknowledged reality, corrected the perspective, and moved on.
This was Coach Wooden’s leadership philosophy. Correct it and move on.
If a player cursed and was kicked out of practice, Coach Wooden corrected it immediately but did not bring it up the next day. He did not revisit old errors or remind people of past failures.
That did not mean he approved of every decision, and it certainly did not mean he lowered standards. Nobody who played for John Wooden would ever accuse him of having low standards. But there is a tremendous difference between correcting behavior and condemning a person. Coach Wooden corrected behavior without permanently attaching people to their mistakes.
Modern psychology helps explain why this approach was so effective. Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize-winning psychologist who pioneered research on loss aversion, demonstrated that people naturally focus more on negative experiences than positive ones. Psychologists call this negativity bias. Our brains are wired to replay criticism, embarrassment, disappointment, mistakes, and failure.
Clayton Christensen, the Harvard Business School professor famous for The Innovator’s Dilemma, found something similar in business. People are often very good at identifying problems but much less skilled at identifying solutions. Most people can immediately tell you what they do not like. They do not like losing, criticism, failure, or embarrassment. But ask the next question—What do you want?—and many people struggle.
"If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." – Henry Ford
Martin Seligman, widely considered the father of Positive Psychology, spent decades studying resilience and human flourishing. His research suggests that people who learn from setbacks and redirect their attention toward constructive action are far more likely to thrive than those who remain trapped replaying failures.
Coach Wooden understood that the purpose of correction was improvement. Coach put it this way: "The purpose of criticism or discipline is not to punish, embarrass or ridicule, but to correct and improve. It is very difficult to antagonize and teach at the same time."
Once the lesson has been learned, continuing to replay the mistake may become counterproductive.
Coach Wooden continually and quickly redirected attention toward the next positive proactive action. He was not asking his players to ignore mistakes; he was teaching them to learn from mistakes without living in them.
"A mistake is valuable if you do four things with it: recognize it, admit it, learn from it, forget it." – John Wooden
Yours in Coaching, Craig Impelman
|
“Love is the most important word in our language.” — John Wooden Eldorado Gaily bedight, Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)
|
|
For more information visit www.woodenswisdom.com |
|
© Copyright 2026 WoodensWisdom.com | # of Times Wooden's Wisdom Issues Opened: 8,016,870
Hosting & Design by:EverydayWebDesign.com
