Leading with Emotional Intelligence: Hands-On ... - always yours

DEVELOPING OTHERS TOOLS AND STRATEGIES 193
• What are his daily practices?
• What are the pitfalls he needs to be aware of?
EARLY LEARNING EXPERIENCES
“Both of my parents were teachers. My mother taught English
and my father was a baseball coach. My mother helped me understand
the value of language and how to talk about my feelings. She
constantly told me it was OK to share how I felt and convinced me
I’d be more successful and satisfied if I were really in touch with
other people. I think that’s why I’m particularly successful coaching
women. My father was an old school coach for 41 years and was
highly organized and competitive. I spent a lot of time watching and
learning from him. I believe I had the best of both influences.”
Coach French had great role models for many of the EI competencies.
His father demonstrated conscientiousness, initiative,
leadership, and achievement orientation, while his mother taught
empathy, communication, accurate self-assessment, and emotional
self-awareness. This blend of utilizing and integrating both logical and
emotional aspects of the brain continued in his formative training.
As a graduate student at the University of the Pacific, French
became the pitching coach for the baseball team. The head coach,
Tom Stubbs, a lot like French’s father, was very efficient and organized.
He knew all the relevant statistics of the players and the
game and was quite structured. In his graduate classes, Coach
French was learning about coaching theory, sports psychology, and
the body-mind connection.
Fortunately, Coach Stubbs was a strong believer in developing
others, and he let Coach French teach and practice visualization,
meditation, and progressive relaxation with the pitchers in particular.
The team won games and, as French remembers, “The players felt like
I really cared.” His experimenting and risk-taking were paying off.
Coach French was building a philosophy and practice for educating
the whole person—physical, mental, and emotional—and he
received immediate positive feedback on his techniques. The suc-