In partnership with
Welcome to The Growth Compass!
🚩Reminder: We have given all subscribers access to our FREE Growth Compass Library (updated) that you can access HERE and new updates to the Coaching Vault for our premium community!
Here’s where we are headed today:
Dan Lanning on Focus⚡
Brad Stevens on leadership and other mental fitness principles🥇
Favorite posts I found this week 🏆
Free mental fitness links 👇
This week on The Growth Compass Premium (Upgrade today) →
Pat Riley on culture, leadership, and winning (Saturday)
What to know about the science of motivation (Wednesday)
Signs that your team doesn’t trust each other (Monday)
Let’s dive in…
Dan Lanning on Focus
"Realize the work is what matters. Not the praise. Not the critique, but the work."
"If you can keep that the main thing, you'll have success."
🚨 Automate yourself appearing on Hundreds of Great Podcasts
If you're an entrepreneur of any kind, frequent podcast guesting is the NEW proven & fastest path to changing your life. It's the #1 way to get eyeballs on YOU and your business. Podcast listeners lean in, hang on every word, and trust guests who deliver real value (like you!). But appearing on dozens of incredible podcasts overnight as a guest has been impossible to all but the most famous until now.
Podcast guesting gets you permanent inbound, permanent SEO, and connects you to the best minds in your industry as peers.
PodPitch.com is the NEW software that books you as a guest (over and over!) on the exact kind of podcasts you want to appear on – automatically.
⚡ Drop your LinkedIn URL into PodPitch.
🤖 Scan 4 Million Podcasts: PodPitch.com's engine crawls every active show to surface your perfect podcast matches in seconds.
🔄 Listens to them For You: PodPitch literally listens to podcasts for you to think about how to best get the host's attention for your targets.
📈 Writes Emails, Sends, And Follows Up Until Booked: PodPitch.com writes hyper-personalized pitches, sends them from your email address, and will keep following up until you're booked.
👉 Want to go on 7+ podcasts every month and change your inbound for life? Book a demo now and we'll show you what podcasts YOU can guest on ASAP:
3 Things: Mental Fitness, Team-Building, and What I’m Chewing on This Week
1. MENTAL FITNESS: Master the Moment
The greatest mental performance coaches in sports all land on the same truth: the present moment is the only place performance lives.
Ken Ravizza spent 40 years teaching this to athletes at every level - from Little Leaguers to the Chicago Cubs team that broke the curse in 2016. His philosophy was simple: "It's about being in the present moment. Not the past and not the future."
Bob Rotella built his career helping golfers stay locked in for four hours of mental warfare. Jim Loehr's work on mental toughness has shaped everyone from tennis players to Fortune 500 executives. Different sports, different contexts - same core principle.
When your mind drifts to the past, you carry mistakes with you. When it races to the future, you're playing outcomes that haven't happened yet. Either way, you're not where your feet are.
Ravizza had a phrase for this: "Be where you need to be, when you need to be there."
He gave Cubs players miniature toilets to keep in their gloves - a literal reminder to flush the last pitch and focus on the next one. It sounds ridiculous. It also worked. During the rain delay in Game 7 of the 2016 World Series, Jason Heyward's message to the team was pure Ravizza: forget everything that just happened, play like the team with the best record in baseball and they did.
The ability to stay present isn't something you either have or you don't. It's a skill. It's trainable. And it's the foundation for everything else.
Ravizza developed a system called the Traffic Light to help athletes recognize when they're losing the moment - and how to get it back. I'll break that down in a an upcoming Premium newsletter.
For now, the question is simpler.
This week's question: Where does your mind go when the pressure rises - to the past, the future, or the present? And what's one thing pulling you out of the moment that you need to flush?
2. TEAMS: Brad Stevens' 3 Things Every Leader Must Master
Brad Stevens was asked, "What advice do you have for young leaders?"
He didn't hesitate. He gave three things:
Be Yourself. "Be yourself, number one." People don't buy what you say - they buy who you are. They know when you're being fake. When you aren't authentic, you lack the confidence, passion, and ability to connect. You have to lead your way, with your personality and style.
Invest in Growth and Development. Great leaders develop people. People today want to know that you care about them, their growth, and their future. When you invest in their development, it shows them you care and want what's best for them - not just what's best for the organization.
Set and Live to the Standard. Leadership requires you to do more. It means setting high standards and then holding yourself and others to those standards. People follow what you do, not what you say. Be consistent in your character, actions, and approach.
The through-line across all three? Stevens put it simply: "The best leaders are warm and demanding."
Yes, there are great demands. But yes, we realize you're a human being and we're here to help.
That balance - the ability to challenge people AND care for them - is rare. Most leaders default to one or the other. They're either so warm they avoid hard conversations, or so demanding they burn people out.
Warm and demanding is the standard.
This week's question: Which side do you default to - warm or demanding? And what would it look like to strengthen the other side this week?
3. WHAT I’M CHEWING ON: Do You Have a System for Confidence?
I talk to coaches, athletes, and executives all the time who say they want more confidence.
So I ask them: What are you doing to build it?
Most of the time, the answer is nothing…they're just hoping it shows up.
They're not asking themselves questions.
They're not reflecting on what builds their confidence and what drains it.
They're not tracking patterns.
They're not deliberately working on it.
They treat confidence like weather - something that happens to them - rather than a skill they can develop.
Here's the thing: you don't accidentally become confident. Confidence is built through preparation, through evidence, through reps. It's built by keeping promises to yourself. It's built by recognizing what you've done well instead of only fixating on what went wrong.
But most people never operationalize it. They never turn "I want to be more confident" into a system.
They'll spend hours on their craft, their strategy, their tactics - and zero time on the mental architecture that holds it all together.
If confidence matters to your performance, it deserves more than hope - it deserves a process.
This week's question: What specific actions have you taken in the last 30 days to deliberately build your confidence? If the answer is "nothing" - that's the gap.
Free Mental Fitness Links 👇
For coaches and leaders:
For athletes and performers:
All of these posts and more are in the Coaching Vault.
That's a wrap for today. If you want to spread the joy, make sure to refer the newsletter to someone you think would benefit!
What I am reading and listening to:
Want More?
What'd you think of today's edition?
🔖We’ve added more to our FREE resources online here and growing content library here!
🔖Interesting in advertising? Fill out this survey and we’ll get back to you soon!