#191: Coach Phil Jackson on sustaining success (2025 edit)

2025-11-13

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Winning is difficult – and maintaining success can be even more challenging. In this session, Coach Jackson and some special guests joined us to discuss the topic of “sustaining success.”1. Reading your team when things are going well. Understanding them. “Getting out of their way.” Winning gets to be habitual.2. Little inconveniences bringing a team together in new, deeper ways (hotel example in bad weather). Maintaining a positive orientation: “Life’s an adventure, let’s go get it!”3. You...

Winning is difficult – and maintaining success can be even more challenging. In this session, Coach Jackson and some special guests joined us to discuss the topic of “sustaining success.”

1. Reading your team when things are going well. Understanding them. “Getting out of their way.” Winning gets to be habitual.

2. Little inconveniences bringing a team together in new, deeper ways (hotel example in bad weather). Maintaining a positive orientation: “Life’s an adventure, let’s go get it!”

3. You can’t count on just “replicating what we had before.” Examples of players having off-season surgery that change what you have coming back on a team.

4. You have to maintain vision for your team.

5. “Dance of the wounded egos.” Guys overvaluing their roles on the team.

6. “It’s all of us. It’s about how we all fit together.”

7. As a coach something to think about: “Where does this person think he fits into our team effort? How can I make him feel important but also that we will go on regardless?”

8. Getting away from the game after the season. Focusing on family.

9. Also using the off-season to envision what the team would look like.

10. “We always held something back.” Reflecting in the off-season: “What are we going to do differently this year?”

11. Allowing veteran players to teach newcomers what it means to be part of the group and “earning his credibility.”

12. Losing assistant coaches to head coaching positions.

13. Dividing players into groups with a particular coach who they’d get to know intimately. A mentor who would help them to get better.

14. Jordan and Kobe having specific things they worked on in the off-season. Setting the model for other players.

15. Keeping pace with a changing game. Growing as a coach.

16. Phil Nevin on rules changes that affected coaching baseball.

17. Responding to the analytics movement.

18. Mark Sweeney on staying in the game “mentally and physically” as he prepared each game.

19. Davey Lopes as an important coach to Mark.