Have Unreasonable Belief

Perhaps the greatest skill a head coach can possess is the ability to make their team believe they can do something.

I’m not talking about just ordinary, rational belief. I’m talking about unreasonable belief.

To be able to generate unreasonable belief, you must be able to convince dozens of naturally-skeptical athletes of the greatness that they possess. In turn, they must also then see that same greatness in each of their teammates, and trust that they collectively have what it takes to overcome the odds.

The skill here is that you can’t sell them bullshit.

That’s why when I read vivid recollections, like those scattered throughout C. Vivian Stringer’s autobiography, I can tell how skillful she is as a coach. She can describe the nuance of this challenge at a level that many can’t.

Faith In Things Not Yet Seen

Stringer’s book is littered with examples of her trying to convince her teams that they can overcome unreasonable challenges. This shouldn’t come as a surprise, as she’s the first coach in college basketball to take three different schools to the Final Four.

However, one particular example stands out.

Playing a tournament in Florida, Stringer’s unranked Iowa Hawkeyes beat #7 Auburn and then #3 Virginia, before facing off with #1 Texas.

Determined to convince her team they could overcome the juggernaut team in the country, Stringer conjured up everything she had in her coaching toolkit.

For years she’d collected stories of those who’d triumphed through sheer willpower and belief, and she chose this one game to use them all:

• The mother who lifted a car to save her baby.

• The woman with no arms who swam the English Channel.

• The young man who went on to hold the world record for the Mile, despite having been so badly burned that doctor’s recommended his legs be amputated.

“Nobody believes in you,” Stringer told her team, “that’s why you have to believe in yourselves.”

She continued:

Herein lies the challenge of generating unreasonable belief: you can’t sell them bullshit, but you must sell them something not yet seen.

There is little or no evidence, but they need to believe anyway.

Unranked Iowa defeated #1 Texas.

Progressions Of Belief

We often talk about belief after extraordinary feats — like beating the #1 team in the country — but they play out more regularly than that.

As any team goes through their development lifecycle, they’re going to face periods where they need to have varying levels of unreasonable belief.

It might be that they need to believe that they can progress from a bottom-half team to a top-half team.

It might be that they can progress to being a consistent playoff team.

It might be that they can progress to regularly beating the other playoff teams.

It might be that they can progress from being a consistent playoff team to a genuine title contender.

It might be that they can be the #1 team in the country and deal with getting every opponent’s best game.

All of these progressions bring unique challenges that require different versions of that same unreasonable belief.

There will be players whose belief drops off because they don’t think they have the capacity to reach the same level of performance as the pressure ratchets up. There will be others whose doubt becomes too overwhelming. And there will always be people around them that just want them to have more ordinary, rational beliefs.

But Vivian Stringer wants you to keep dreaming. “There are always going to be people who tell you why you can’t,” she says. “Some don’t want to see you succeed because your success will make them worth less in their own eyes; some don’t want to see you hurt by pursuing something that you may not be able to achieve. But to my mind, it is far, far better to have worked hard and tried hard — even if you come up short — than to count yourself out and spend the rest of your life wondering what might have been.”

Cody’s Notes

• Generating unreasonable belief is often portrayed as motivational speeches - like I’ve done here - but the reality is it actually takes hold in more intimate settings, like player meetings and unit meetings.

• The ramifications for selling bullshit will be that your trust becomes degraded and ultimately they’ll stop listening to you.

• Showing evidence of great play and great teamwork, particularly against difficult opponents, can help snowball you towards greater belief.

• Presenting opponents as bulletproof with no flaws is not a good strategy. Even the #1 team in the country has flaws, it’s your job to find them and figure out ways to exploit them.

• You must factor in other influencers in a player’s life - their parents, advisors, former coaches. Remember, every kids wants to be an astronaut or a rockstar until they get to high school and are told that they should just play it safe and get an accounting degree. We condition young men and women to not dream.