Jerry Lynch (author of The Competitive Buddha) talks about competition, cooperation, and coming together to seek greatness.
Great coaches have one thing in common that we don’t talk about much: they demonstrate love in their coaching. You hear about passion, you hear about drive, and you hear about communication, but we often avoid talking about love. Dr. Jerry Lynch has spent his career working at the intersection of sports psychology, leadership, and philosophy. This is where you find many of the hidden topics like love that can be the biggest drivers of performance. On this week’s GAINcast Lynch joins us to share some of his reflections on coaching, self-improvement, and Buddha.
Notes and quotes
Dr. Jerry Lynch is the founder and director of Way of Champions, a human growth and performance consulting group geared toward helping others master the inner mental and spiritual game for sports, business and life. He brings decades of experience consulting on sports psychology, leadership, performance, and more to various sports and teams such as North Carolina, Duke, Maryland, California, Syracuse, Stanford, Harvard and Middlebury. In the past 30 years alone, he has been part of 55 Final Four and 39 National Championship teams at the collegiate and professional levels.
- 0:00 – Introduction.
- 4:15 – Reminiscing on first encounters and a different time in the world of sports psychology.
- 7:30 – Finding the courage to pursue his own path in his life: “I’m not interested in making a living, I’m interesting in making a difference.”
- 11:30 – Background and education.
- 16:45 – The roots of sports psychology: “There’s a societal image of psychology. If you hire a psychologist you must have had something seriously wrong with you, rather than just wanting to be seriously good.”
- 20:00 – The power of philosophy: “You never forget philosophy. It is something that creeps into your spiritual nervous system and you behave in certain ways because the thoughts have permeated your soul. It’s the same with coaching or parenting.”
- 24:00 – Love in coaching: “The greatest most profound success strategy that any coach can use is when you demonstrate love. Your athletes will go the distance for that.”
- 32:15 – Passion vs. love: “You can be passionate about a process, but love is about people.” “Love isn’t about sitting back and letting it flow. You can be the flow. You need to really demand; that’s a sign of love.”
- 36:20 – Being a better version of you.
- 38:45 – Changing with the times as a coach and stories about Anson Dorrance.
- 49:00 – The competitive Buddha: “The competitive Buddha is almost an oxymoron. But competition it is not about butting heads, it is about cooperation and coming together to seek greatness. Competition pushes you to the highest level.”
- 56:30 – Way of Champions conference.
To hear more about these topics you can listen to the full episode above. If you like what you hear on the GAINcast, don’t forget to give us a review and subscribe on iTunes.
Further reading
The following links were referenced in the podcast or provide some additional reading material on the topic:
- Our monthly GAIN Master Class Series features speakers from all aspects of performance. We just announced the lineup for next season starting in this month and opened up registration. You can learn more here.
- The GAINcast is also sponsored by HMMR Media. Join HMMR Media to get access to a vast library of online training resources, video, articles, podcasts, and more.
- You can learn more about Lynch on his website Way of Champions, including details about the upcoming WOC Conference and the WOC podcast.
- Lynch is the author of several books. His most recent book is The Competitive Buddha: How to Up Your Game in Sports, Leadership and Life. His past books include Thinking Body, Dancing Mind: Taosports for Extraordinary Performance in Athletics, Business, and Life and Way of the Champion: Lessons from Sun Tzu’s the Art of War and Other Tao Wisdom for Sports & Life.
- A few recent episode were referred to in this episode including GAINcast 218: The fundamentals with Ron Adams and GAINcast 215: Peanut with Kristen Gambetta Anderson.
The Competitive Buddha
How to Up Your Game in Sports, Leadership and Life
Connect Spirituality to Sports. The Competitive Buddha is about mastery, leadership, and spirituality. Learn what you need to keep, what you need to discard, and what you need to add to your mental, emotional, and spiritual skill set as an athlete, coach, leader, parent, CEO, or any other performer in life. Understand how Buddhism can help you to be better prepared for sports and life, and how sports and life can teach you about Buddhism. Discover how people from all parts of the world have brought together the Buddha and athletics for greater fun, enjoyment, and pleasure during their performances. Dr. Jerry Lynch demonstrates how certain timeless core Buddha values inspire you to embrace and navigate unchartered waters, and understand the Buddha-mind and the Kobe Bryant Mamba Mentality.