What Drives Winning is a book, a website, a series of videos, and a yearly conference that focuses on how successful coaches, well, win.
Founder Brett Ledbetter has spent the last several years interviewing the top college coaches in the country in search of commonalities in their approaches. He sums up his findings succinctly:
"If I had to boil it down to one sentence, successful coaches focus less on the result, more on the process, but they recognize that character is what drives the process, which drives the result."Ledbetter's notion of "character", a word often used but seldom explored, is ultimately the driving force in winning. Echoing the sentiments of New York Times columnist David Brooks in his new book The Road to Character and his now-famous TED talk, character-development has largely taken a back seat to our culture of personal glorification and selfie sticks.
Particularly striking was Ledbetter's six-minute talk on reframing the way we as coaches set goals for our teams. Many highly successful college coaches, it turns out, don't set goals at all:
One could spend all day looking through the What Drives Winning website, but for a very practical example, at the three-minute mark of this video Ledbetter gives an excellent example of how a coach with character acts: