'It Wasn’t the Event. It Was My Response'

He had played on one of the nation’s top Pop Warner Football teams, going undefeated in four seasons.

But when Brian Kight got to high school, lining up with many of the same teammates, the results flipped. His team won just seven games in three years.

“It was a shocking, shocking experience for me,” Kight said.

But it was also a valuable one — and gave him critical insight and perspective into the impact coaches can have on their players.

Kight is now a keynote speaker who consults with coaches and leaders across the country and pens the widely-read Daily Discipline newsletter.

The Daily Coach caught up with him recently to discuss the positive and negative impact of his youth coaches, why leaders need to be careful utilizing sports analogies, and the two guarantees of life.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Brian, thanks a lot for doing this. Tell us about your childhood and some key lessons from it.

My parents divorced when I was a year old. I traveled back and forth between them. They lived about two hours apart — San Diego and Los Angeles. It started with driving me back and forth and meeting halfway, then once I got to be 8 or 9, my mom was a flight attendant, so I flew back and forth by myself. I did that every weekend of my life until I got my driver’s license.

My parents were really different people. The homes were different, the environment was different, the culture was different. But what I got benefited me because I had two parents who had really different standards, but showed me two different ways of navigating the world successfully. They both gave me a ton of love, which is the only thing a kid really need besides structure.

You were a pretty good football player growing up. What influence did your coaches have on you?

I played Pop Warner football in San Diego on an unbelievably good team. We went four years without being beaten and two years where our defense didn’t get scored on. We weren’t a juggernaut from Texas, but we had great youth coaches and a system in place.

When I got to high school, we had a lot of the same players. My freshman year we went 1-9, then 2-8 my sophomore year, then 4-6, or something like that.

The only thing I’d ever known from the sport I cared about was greatness and really good coaching and practicing hard and coaches caring about the players while still being demanding.

High school was drill instructors who could not have given less of a s--- about players. I remember one coach saying, “I don’t care whether we win or lose this game. I’ve coached enough in my life where wins and losses don’t matter to me.” I’m thinking, “This makes no sense, Coach.” It bothered me. I had an expectation of going to high school and that the quality of the coach would go up.

When I went to college, I had that expectation again. But it was not elite or exceptional. It was good people, a lot of young coaches, but it left a lot to be desired. I wanted to know why people 20 years into this career still did not listen to people even though they’d never won championships. Why do you have a big ego if this is your second year coaching and you can’t put together a game plan?

It was really the spark for me that there are people running the show who are basically kings and queens, and they don’t answer to anybody. Nobody can tell them what to do, and they can treat players any way they want to… I had the acute thought of, “If you’re going to coach me this way because that’s how I get better, I accept that.” But then I’m gonna ask the emotionally logical question, “Who coaches you that way?” I found that didn’t exist, and I said, “I’m going to go do that.”

It sounds like you had pretty opposite ends of the spectrum from a coaching perspective. Looking back on it, what do you think you learned from your weaker coaches that you could apply to the rest of your life?

When we’re losing or getting our teeth kicked in, we’re very much (in our heads). Our prefrontal cortex is working over drive trying to figure out what’s wrong, how do we get this, trying to solve. It’s like in a relationship. When you’re in a relationship that you love, you’re not thinking a whole lot. You’re just experiencing it. It’s amazing. When the relationship gets difficult, we get so far in our head and the next thing we know, we’re finding every little thing.

If I didn’t have the really high-quality experience I had early, I couldn’t have compared it to anything. I would’ve just thought it was normal. But I knew (the bad experience) wasn’t what football was. This was the bottom of the barrel.

That’s what I think about when I look at teams and coaches. It can be so much better than this. We don’t have to accept this ugly, gross, mean, awful experience.

You have some pretty interesting thoughts on how we need to be careful with applying sports to our work and personal lives.

People need to do a better job recognizing where the things in sports don’t work in life. Sports has very defined boundaries, very explicit rules, exact and specific roles and positions. There are also people who referee it.

That is not life. There are no rules in life, no boundaries in life, no real roles in life other than the ones who choose to believe in. Sports gives us a contained place that actually gives us comfort because it’s so structured. We really appreciate having security, structure and boundaries because then we know how to operate. Then, in life, we don’t even know what direction to go in because we’re allowed to do anything, and there aren’t these rules.

You frequently tweet E + R = O (Event + Response = Outcome). Can you elaborate on that equation a bit?

My dad taught me E + R = O when I was a teenager. I started taking it super seriously my senior year of high school. In college, it all expanded. I started seeing it socially, academically, financially, people who responded poorly to events consistently got really, really bad outcomes.

I dropped out after one semester of college, moved back to L.A., started waiting tables for a year. Imagine what an aggressive, competitive 19-year-old living on the beach in L.A. would do. I did that. The responses were downright bad and delivered immediate, serious consequences. It wasn’t the event. It was my response. The outcomes weren’t happening because of my environment but because of what I was doing in my environment.

I went back to college, finished there, graduated, moved back to L.A. again… I really started to craft and cultivate it and came to the recognition that every outcome in my life was a consequence of my responses, not my events. The events happened, and in every event I was in, I had choices, attitudes, perspectives, emotions and actions. If the event happened, that wasn’t the end, that was the start. If I wanted great outcomes, I couldn’t rely on the event.

What are some ways we can effectively respond to negative events?

The first thing I do for myself is to actively practice the mentality of “That could be me one day.” I look at somebody who goes broke as “That could be me” or someone who misses a flight and a contract with a client as “That could be me.”

I see a lot of people thinking they don’t deserve certain stuff that happens to them. To me, it’s a selfish point of view like you don’t deserve that, but somebody else does.

When that happens, I spend zero energy asking the question “Why me?” It’s just life. It’s not happening for a reason. It’s just happening.

This prevents me from being a victim of the world.

The second thing is I think we’re guaranteed two things in life. We’re guaranteed opportunity, and we’re guaranteed adversity.

We don’t know when they’re coming. We don’t know what they’ll look like. It’s hard to recognize which is which when it shows up. What I’ve done is I take a step back to say whatever I think is opportunity might just be adversity in sheep’s clothing. Whatever I think is adversity might be a sheep in wolf’s clothing.

You think a lot of leaders are ill-prepared for what success can bring.

You see a lot of people who perform really, really well and get more criticism. The world criticizes people who perform better. Nobody ever told that to the 16-year-old. As a 16-year-old, we’re taught that as you perform better and become a better leader, you get celebrated. Nobody ever says that as you become a better leader, more people are going to dislike and borderline hate you.

The 16-year-old starts doing a really good job, gets some haters and is super-confused and starts to resent the people who are doing that and the role they’re in. I want people to make sure they’re not surprised by the adversity or the presence of this in their life.

You’re going to experience this. Accept it from the beginning. Whenever it comes into your life, remind yourself, “Oh yeah. I knew something like this was coming.”

Then, go respond.

Q&A Resources

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