The R.E.A.L. Man Program is a strategic and progressive character development program designed to help middle school, high school, and college-aged students to reach their full potential, in every aspect of their lives.

The 20-lesson program is a blueprint for success, which is aimed at helping students understand and live out the principles of a positive and influential life.

The foundation for the program can be described as:

Respect all people,
Especially women.
Always do the right thing.
Live a life that matters.

Here are a three videos about the R.E.A.L. Man Program.

The first video is a short description of the program. The second video is of an actual lesson taught by a coach at a school that utilizes the R.E.A.L Man Program. The third is an overview of the program.

The second video is a YouTube video, so you will need to be on a server that allows you to access YouTube.

There is sound with each video.

If you are interested in finding out more about the program, contact:

Kathy DiCocco at 203-206-4801 or email her at kdicocco@hopefoundation.us

Or click here to visit The R.E.A.L Man Program

Please click the play arrows to view the videos.

R.E.A.L. Man Overview

Learning to do the Right Thing

James Vint on the R.E.A.L. Man Program

This post was provided by InnerDrive, a mental skills training company

How do we become better leaders? An effective leader is someone who can create an inspiring vision, motivate and inspire their team, manage the delivery of that shared purpose and then coach and improve that team in order to achieve that end goal. So what are the best leadership skills, and what are the keys to becoming a better leader?

1. UNDERSTANDING YOUR LEADERSHIP STYLE
According to research, there are loads of different leadership styles and they vary between men and women. However, 4 main styles have been commonly agreed. These four leadership styles include autocratic, democratic, laissez-faire and transformational. By finding out what type of leader you are, you will then be able to identify your strengths and areas in which you need to improve.

For more ideas on how to help your team members develop and improve, have a look at our page on how to improve metacognition.

Autocratic

This leadership style includes, close supervision, lack of input from followers, complete control and solo decision-making.

Democratic

This leadership style includes, shared decision-making responsibilities, social equality, creativity and high engagement from group members.

Laissez-faire

This style includes, little direction from the leader, lots of freedom for group members, team members are responsible for making all decisions and a great deal of autonomy.

Transformationala-better-leader

People who have this leadership style are often described as energetic, passionate, enthusiastic, trustworthy, creative and intelligent.

A more in-depth description of these styles can be found here.

2. Be a role model

This doesn’t necessarily mean leading from the front, as keeping a watchful eye from a distance can allow your team to develop their own forms of leadership and management strategies. This point refers to the way you, as the leader, exemplify your behaviours and characteristics for your team to follow. Your actions can have a profound impact on the behaviours of your team. Research has shown that by showing your organisation what is possible, a leader can empower them to develop their own skill sets.

3. Be authentic

Being authentic in your approach to leadership provides your group with a true understanding of who you are as a person, away from your professional role. Research has shown that by doing what is promised, being visible to your organisation and being honest helps manifest a sense of trust within the group you’re leading. Be true to your values and in doing so, your team can understand the direction you want to take them in.

4. Listen to, and communicate with, your team

Research has shown that non-verbal cues like body language, facial expressions, eye movement and hand motions are an important form of communication. Matching your non-verbal cues to your actions and words can help with authenticity.

Whilst verbally and non-verbally communicating with your team, it is also important to listen to what they have to offer. Be an active listener, in doing so approach conversations with concentration and regard for the speaker’s thoughts and considerations. Likewise, studies have shown that skilled listeners also pick up on the speaker’s underlying thoughts and concerns by tuning into their non-verbal cues, showing genuine care for the person’s feelings and morale.

5. Motivate your team

Leaders can motivate people in various ways, but by making sure the individuals inside the team understand that their investment of time and effort is something worthwhile, and can encourage the desired actions. Evidence indicates that this can be done by providing recognition and praise, offering rewards, inclusion and by being passionate.

Final thought

John F. Kennedy once said, “Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other.” Highlighting how leadership is a constant learning process and that it can most definitely be taught. Anyone can become a great leader as long as you are willing to listen and learn.

IMO, one of the most important life lessons coaches can teach their athletes is the lesson of refusing to make or accept excuses. I have assembled some quotes in this article that I hope will help as you work with your athletes to eliminate the use of excuses in your program.

Excuses allow us to stay in our comfort zones. But for growth and improvement to take place, we have to move out of our comfort zones. By refusing to accept the option of making an excuse, you hold your athletes accountable and force them to move out of their comfort zone to complete the skill, drill, play, workout, or whatever your objective is–and then take responsibility for the results.

If your athletes know that you will not accept excuses, they are more likely to strive to find a way to succeed through perseverance and extended effort rather than giving up on themselves and their teammates too soon by taking the easy way out of looking for an excuse. Many times, we find success on the other side of simply making one more intelligent effort.

A No Excuse team rule also teaches the lesson of not being afraid to accept failures and defeats and not feeling the need for rationalizing with an excuse. Setbacks and mistakes are a part of the improvement process, and as such should not be feared, but rather learned from. No one can learn from mistakes if they offer an excuse because they are attempting to cover up the mistake rather than embracing the opportunity to learn from it and get better.

I hope that you can find a few words in here that you can apply to your program!

Excuses are the nails used to build a house of failure. ~Don Wilder and Bill Rechin

Don’t make excuses – make good. ~Elbert Hubbard

He who excuses himself accuses himself. ~Gabriel Meurier

Several excuses are always less convincing than one. ~Aldous Huxley

Maybe you don’t like your job, maybe you didn’t get enough sleep, well nobody likes their job, nobody got enough sleep. Maybe you just had the worst day of your life, but you know, there’s no escape, there’s no excuse, so just suck up and be nice. ~Ani Difranco

How strange to use “You only live once” as an excuse to throw it away. ~Bill Copeland

Don’t do what you’ll have to find an excuse for. ~Proverb

No one ever excused his way to success. ~Dave Del Dotto

Excuses are the tools with which persons with no purpose in view build for themselves great monuments of nothing. ~Steven Grayhm

And oftentimes excusing of a fault. Doth make the fault the worse by the excuse. ~William Shakespeare

A lie is an excuse guarded. ~Jonathan Swift

Hold yourself responsible for a higher standard than anyone else expects of you. Never excuse yourself. ~Henry Ward Beecher

Whoever wants to be a judge of human nature should study people’s excuses. ~Hebbel

There is no such thing as a list of reasons. There is either one sufficient reason or a list of excuses. ~Robert Brault

We have more ability than will power, and it is often an excuse to ourselves that we imagine that things are impossible. ~François de la Rochefoucauld

Difficulty is the excuse history never accepts. ~Edward R. Murrow

Pessimism is an excuse for not trying and a guarantee to a personal failure. ~Bill Clinton

I attribute my success to this: I never gave or took an excuse. ~Florence Nightingale

We are all manufacturers – some make good, others make trouble, and still others make excuses. ~Author Unknown

One of the most important tasks of a manager is to eliminate his people’s excuses for failure. ~Robert Townsend

Success is a tale of obstacles overcome, and for every obstacle overcome, an excuse not used. ~Robert Brault

An excuse is a skin of a reason stuffed with a lie. ~Billy Sunday

Bad men excuse their faults; good men abandon them. ~Author Unknown

He that is good for making excuses is seldom good for anything else. ~Benjamin Franklin

It is wise to direct your anger towards problems – not people, to focus your energies on answers – not excuses. ~William Arthur Ward

It is better to offer no excuse than a bad one. ~George Washington

We have forty million reasons for failure, but not a single excuse. ~Rudyard Kipling

The person who really wants to do something finds a way; the other person finds an excuse. ~Author Unknown

If you always make excuses to not follow through you deserve the weight of anxiety on your chest. ~Author Unknown

Justifying a fault doubles it. ~French Proverb

A man can fail many times, but he isn’t a failure until he begins to blame somebody else. ~John Burroughs

The best day of your life is the one on which you decide your life is your own. No apologies or excuses. No one to lean on, rely on, or blame. The gift is yours – it is an amazing journey – and you alone are responsible for the quality of it. This is the day your life really begins. ~Bob Moawa

Never ruin an apology with an excuse. ~Kimberly Johnson

This post is also found on the Coaches Toolbox, a collection of free resources for coaches of all sports.

By Dr. Cory Dobbs


A note to student athletes. Excellence Begins by Sweating the Small Stuff. Do you have one minute to help your team? Sometimes simply taking one minute to help clean the weightroom can make all the difference in the world.

The small stuff matters.

To me, a clean and attractive restaurant is the best indicator that the people running the show—at the restaurant, school, hotel, you fill in the blank, care about the people that use the facilities (and this includes the workers!).  Make no mistake, the restroom screams commitment to excellence.  It takes great leadership to ensure clean restrooms.  If you want to be different—successful—a great place to start is your locker room (And here’s the kicker…each and every one of you will be running a show somewhere and sometime in the future.).

How do you and your teammates care for your locker room?  Do you use it and wait for others (coaches, janitors, etc) to pick up the mess?   To me, a clean and attractive locker room tells me the people running the program care (Come to think of it, the way you take care of your playing field, court etc. tells a lot about your commitment to excellence).  If you’re a team leader then you’re running the program.  We are all leaders.

The small stuff matters.  What little things might you do today to make a big difference in your team?

Humility matters.  Your actions reflect not only on you personally, but also on your team.  Act in a manner that honors yourself and your teammates. Act in a manner that will reflect well on you and the others in your life.

Today’s headlines and daily news stories are filled with accounts of self-centered and irresponsible professional athletes.  The world of sports often breeds excess—it is noble and ignoble, beautiful and ugly.  Sports reveals the best and the worst of human nature in a highly visible action-packed arena dominated by intense emotion.

Humility is the quality of being respectful.  It is displayed in conduct that dignifies others.  Humility is found in the small stuff.  How you talk to your teammates reveals your care and concern.  How you listen to others reveals your commitment to them and your team.  Leadership matters.  And the best team leaders model humility, they serve and honor their teammates.  We are all leaders.

Sometimes one minute makes all the difference.

How long does it take for you to care for your locker room?  Your playing field?  Your teammate?  My guess is you can do a lot in one minute…and when all those small one-minute actions accumulate…

The small stuff matters.  What little things might you do today to make a big difference in your team?  Select at least one thing.  And do it.

You can make excuses for not doing that one thing.  If so, then excuses are probably small stuff to you.  And remember, the small stuff matters.  In the final analysis, it is the small stuff that determines what we draw out of sports and what we draw out of life.  The little things make all the difference.

To find out more about and order Sport Leadership Books authored by Dr. Dobbs including Coaching for Leadership, click this link: The Academy for Sport Leadership Books

by Cory Dobbs, Ed.D., The Academy for Sport Leadership

In 1953 New Zealand mountaineer Sir Edmund Hillary and his Nepalese Sherpa Tenzing Norgay reached the summit of Mount Everest—the first to do so.  Conquering Everest was and is one of man’s greatest challenges.  The grinding mental, emotional, and physical aspects of the climb along with intellectual problem-solving are the heart of the challenge.

In 1996, Rob Hall and Scott Fischer led a commercial expedition team attempting to climb Everest.  Hall and Fischer were considered expert climbers, both having scaled the summit of Everest.  The two highly talented climbers were hired by a motley crew of inexperienced hikers who made the trek to Nepal to attempt the climb under the guidance of the esteemed Hall and Fischer.

Jon Krakauer, a journalist, was a member of the climbers joining Hall’s team.  As it turned out, Krakauer ended up chronicling a tragic expedition in which five people lost their lives, including Hall and Fischer.

The two leaders, very experienced and somewhat arrogant, “rightfully” behaved authoritatively.  Both Hall and Fischer issued and demanded adherence to their rules for a safe and successful climb.  Krakauer recorded a self-confident Hall reminding his team “I will tolerate no dissension up there.  My word will be absolute law, beyond appeal.”

One team member recalled, “Rob had lectured us repeatedly about the importance of having a predetermined turnaround time on summit day…and abiding by it no matter how close we were to the top.”

Knowing the descent from the summit to be perilous, the leaders invoked a two o’clock rule.  The Sherpa’s, guides and clients all understood that if a climber had not reached the top by two o’clock in the afternoon of “summit day” they were to obey the order and turn around and abandon their bid for the summit. Yet Hall and Fischer would go on to ignore the safe-guard and not retreat down the slopes upon the clock hitting two.

Krakauer’s book of the expedition, Into Thin Air, exposes the autocratic nature of Hall’s leadership.  Hall had a pecking order and no one was to question his decisions.  As Krakauer recorded, “Passivity on the part of the clients had thus been encouraged throughout the expedition.”  And the Sherpas and guides too were afraid of Hall’s rebuke, unsure of the consequences of displeasing him.

The Idiosyncratic knowledge and unique skills of Hall and Fisher were not enough to overcome the blizzard they encountered on their way back to Camp IV. Having scaled Everest they were in grave trouble.

The vulnerabilities inherent in self-reflection lead us to develop mechanisms to bypass or minimize the embarrassment or threat that we might experience when we scrutinize our thoughts, feelings, and actions.  My sense is that both Hall and Fischer never really had to answer to anybody but themselves, believing self-reflection to be something for the other guy.  After all, why do you need to question your assumptions and behaviors if you’re successful? And the more successful, the less likely you are to self-reflect.  Bragging of their conquests and boasting about their track records led them to believe they were above their own rules—those were for the novice.

I’ve seen it time and time again, coaches that dismiss the practice of self-reflection tend to create cultures that turn out to have unintended and unpredicted side effects that degrade the environment.  These coaches fail to recognize or respond to value conflicts, often violating their own standards.  It is striking that many coaches choose to overlook the practice of self-reflection.

Thankfully what you do is not a matter of life and death.  However, deep inside your coaching bubble you might just find walking your talk difficult at times.  Contrary to the popular thought that all coaches are grounded in reality, it ain’t always so.  Like Hall and Fischer we all have times we simply ignore our rules.

Here’s where the rubber meets the road: the following seven questions require you to turn off the noise for fifteen minutes daily and sink your mind into your walk and your talk for the day.  If you are serious about self improvement, just like you ask your student-athletes to be serious about improvement, then adopt this process as a daily routine.  Learning to lead ourselves, just like leading others, is a truly a life-time project—our own Mt. Everest.  My guess is that after a solid month of performing this after action reflection you’ll seamlessly work your way into doing reflection-in-action.  Remember, reflection is all about growth and development—yours and your players.

Daily Self-Reflection Questions

What did I say I would do today that I didn’t do?

What did I do today that will affect team cohesion?  (positive and / or negative)

How did I relate to the players today?

What did I do today that is not something I’m proud of doing?

How did I lead the players today?  Coaches?

How did I follow the players today?  Coaches?

Based on what I learned today, what will I do tomorrow?

To find out more about and order Sport Leadership Books authored by Dr. Dobbs including Coaching for Leadership, click this link: The Academy for Sport Leadership Books

About the Author

Dr. Cory Dobbs is a national expert on sport leadership and teambuilding and the founder of The Academy for Sport Leadership.  A teacher, speaker, consultant, and writer, Dr. Dobbs has worked with professional, collegiate, and high school athletes and coaches teaching leadership as a part of the sports experience.  He facilitates workshops, seminars, and consults with a wide-range of professional organizations and teams.  Dr. Dobbs previously taught in the graduate colleges of business and education at Northern Arizona University, Sport Management and Leadership at Ohio University, and the Jerry Colangelo College of Sports Business at Grand Canyon University.

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Coaching for Leadership: How to Develop a Leader in Every Locker. ($24.99)