Saturday Blueprint With Andy McKay

There’s a metaphor Andy McKay frequently uses when he talks to athletes about performance.

“The worst thing I can imagine is getting to the top of the mountain and realizing you just climbed the wrong mountain,” he says.

To McKay, the assistant general manager of the Seattle Mariners, it’s largely about recognizing how fleeting success can be and making sure he’s driven by something other than the scoreboard.

“You have to have a higher purpose,” he says. “Whoever I’m working with, it’s always just about being as good as you can be.”

The Daily Coach caught up with McKay recently to discuss forgiving yourself after failure, how crucial it is for leaders to recognize their insecurities, and why the best coaches are the ones who avoid making excuses.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Andy, thanks a lot for doing this. Tell us a little about your childhood and what drew you to coaching baseball. 

I was born and raised in Detroit, but got out to Sacramento, Calif., pretty young and have lived there pretty much ever since. Like a lot of people, I found sports — specifically baseball — as a pretty instantaneous passion that’s really driven pretty much everything I’ve done in my adult life.

I played in college, but I had a pretty good understanding of my limitations on the field, and I began coaching very early. I was interested in the Xs and Os and technique and coached every position, but it was more about leadership.

It was more about performance psychology, communication and culture. I thought those would ultimately be the biggest separators, and I still do to this day. I had a pretty clear sense at an early age that the soft skills were the difference-makers.

You coached at the University of Tampa, then returned to your alma mater, Sacramento City College. Did you have a pretty good sense of what you were doing early on as a coach and what stands out to you most from your first years in the dugout? 

I still don’t know what I’m doing. My first year as a coach, we won a National Championship, and my first year as a head coach, we won a state championship. Coaching, teaching, leading, mentoring, communicating, all of these things I want to be really good at, there is no finish line to them.

Early on, you just have no idea what you’re doing, but you did the best you could. At the same time, you have to be incredibly confident, while also knowing there’s something better out there.

One of the best things I’ve ever read was by a trauma surgeon. He said the key to being a high-performance surgeon is forgiving yourself. So many of your patients die on the table, and they haunt you constantly. The way you can forgive yourself is finding the lessons learned in their situation and knowing I’ll be better for the next one.

As you coach players or coach coaches, which I now do more of, you have this understanding that I’ve failed so many of them because I didn’t know this 20 years ago or 10 years ago. You’re always evolving, which means you’re always going to be looking back with regret. I could’ve been so much better for this player. I think that’s just part of the deal.

Even with your early success, it seems like you maintained real humility and perspective around the job.

Leadership is so unbelievably hard. It’s a never-ending pursuit. That was the biggest thing. I had clarity on that very young. If you wanted to teach somebody or help them, they had to follow you. Therefore, you had to be worthy of following.

As I worked, it became clearer and clearer to me that leadership was always about getting someone from Point A to Point B. If you go back to the original sense of the word “coaching,” coaching was a mode of transportation. Flying coach, the train had a coach.

If you work off of the model of getting someone from where they are to where they want to be, the next thing you have to understand is that what’s in between those two realities is always hard. Nobody needs a really good teacher to keep them where they’re at or to be average. It’s always about taking this next, huge step. In between, it’s all hard. There’s nothing easy about it.

What do you think a lot of coaches and leaders get wrong or struggle to come to terms with?

Professional athletes all want the same things. They want to get to the league. They want to stick in the league. They want to make some money, and they want to win. There’s nothing easy about any of those things. That began helping me understand leadership was about partnering with that athlete to get them through what’s really hard.

I’m not sure coaches are really hard. Like, “Oh, he’s a hard-ass coach.” No, what you’re trying to do is hard. The coach is just your partner, and there’s no way around the hard.

If you’re going to lead people, the first hard thing you have to do is the hard work on yourself to figure out who you really are as a person so that I can lead authentically from my heart and who I am. If you don’t do the hard work, people are following your ego, they’re following your insecurities, they’re following your fears.

You have to do that work on yourself so that you can be yourself, and you can’t be yourself until you know yourself. What I just described is massively hard work. If you’re going to lead people, you have to get the visions and the images and the thoughts out of your head on to paper, and then you have to bring them to life for the people who are following you.

When did that perspective come to you and what do you think hard work on yourself looks like? 

Coach (Pete) Carroll’s book had a massive impact on me and what happened to him after getting fired in New England. He didn’t have a job, so he had nothing to do but go back through 20 years of notes and journals and ideas and get it all on to paper for himself. That period of really deep reflection is what really created USC and now the Seattle Seahawks. He’s one of three guys now to have won a National Championship and a Super Bowl, and that all happened after he got fired twice, after he really had to do the work to figure out who he was.

So, it can be therapy, just having someone to talk to, anything that causes deep reflection on who you are and what your triggers are.

What pulls me away from who I want to be? What are the things that ignite my nervous system and get me to behave in ways that I probably don’t want to behave?

On the other side, what are the things that make me thrive? What are the things that bring out the best version of me? How can I start scripting it a little better? How can I bring awareness to those things in my life?

There’s that old analogy you always hear about in therapy: Who’s driving your car? You want to drive your car. You don’t want your fears driving your car. You don’t want your insecurities driving your car. But those things are always with you. You just want them in the seat next to you, not driving your car.

Nobody’s past is really their past. It’s always present with you. But you have to have that awareness around it and keep striving to have that awareness of, “Is this really me or is this my ego talking right now?” That’s a lifelong journey that no one’s ever going to actually solve.

You’ve touched a lot on regret and insecurity. What do you think good regret is and what does bad regret look like?

The Athletic had a great article on (Miami Heat Coach) Erik Spoelstra and what made Spoelstra, Spoelstra. Well, losing to the Mavericks. I’m sure he could look back and say, “A better version of me as a coach, maybe we don’t lose that.” It’s an ongoing conversation in a coach’s head. You have to have that level of ownership.

Bad regret is you didn’t learn anything or you failed somebody and you didn’t have to. If you’re leading people, your deficiencies become their deficiencies. That’s a huge load to carry. You have a lot of regret with young people who are following you when you know you could’ve done better.

In any sport, every coach leaves training camp or spring training and has access to the same 50 excuses. You can put them on yellow post-it notes and put them on your white boards. They’re available to everybody. The challenge is to not start pulling them off the board and taking them. Once you do, you’ve just turned yourself into a victim.

Every coach has access to bad luck, the travel, injuries, players don’t want it bad enough, no one cares enough, officiating. Once you start allowing yourself to go down that road, you’re in big trouble. Often times, the best coach is the one who is the last to pull the post-it notes off the wall.

Q&A Resources

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