SKILL FLUENCY 101
Image Credit: Johnson City Press
It’s amazing how much intensity comes from what you emphasize.
Pat Summit (1952—2016) was an American collegiate women’s basketball coach at the University of Tennessee (1974–2012) who led the squad to eight National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) championships (1987, 1989, 1991, 1996–98, and 2007–08) and compiled more wins (1,098) than any other Division I college basketball (men’s or women’s) coach in NCAA history, a record that stood until it was broken in 2020 by Stanford’s Tara VanDerveer.
In addition to collegiate basketball, Summitt also coached on the international level, leading the U.S. women’s team to gold at the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles. She was named NCAA Coach of the Year seven times (1983, 1987, 1989, 1994, 1995, 1998, and 2004), and in 2000 she was declared Naismith Women’s College Coach of the Century. She was also inducted into the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame (1999) and the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame (2000). In 2012 Summitt was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Her memoir, Sum It Up (written with Jenkins), was published the following year.
In 2011 Summitt was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer disease. Although she continued coaching for one more season, many of her duties were handled by her assistants. Summitt stepped down as head coach in April 2012, but she remained a part of the Lady Vols’ coaching staff in an advisory role under the title “head coach emeritus.”
A look back through archive photos and videos of legendary coach Pat Summitt, who spent 38 seasons as the head coach of the University of Tennessee Lady Vols, with a 1,098-208 record. She served as a coach, mentor, mother-figure, trail-blazer and role model to many. Summitt passed away on June 28, 2016.
SKILL FLUENCY 101
A deep understanding, knowledge, and ability to correctly and effectively execute the fundamentals; prepared to cover the details.
Skill fluency is knowing all of the details related to complete a particular task and being able to execute them well. It goes beyond knowledge and execution. It includes timing and the ability to improvise when necessary.
Timing is not about speed, per se. Timing refers to how quickly we can make (good) decisions under pressure. Can we pivot and pass under pressure?. A quarterback considers where to throw the ball. A surgeon decides where to make the next incision. A NASCAR driver determines when to press on the gas. All these individuals are under immense pressure. The quarterback risks losing the game and perhaps the season based on how they play the ball. The surgeon risks losing their patients. The driver could take a turn wrong and die and make the course deadly for others.
If we don’t respond quickly to challenging situations, we could find ourselves in trouble. To be effective, we need to execute our skills, correctly, and at the right time.
Any measure of competency requires a command of the basics. The higher the skill, the more nuanced and detailed we are in carrying out the fundamentals. Therefore, a person with limited skills can become more skillful if they work hard at the basics.
Gaining proficiency in executing the fundamentals and learning to do them quickly increases our potential for success. To achieve significance through our efforts, it’s a good idea to select an activity for which we’ve got at least some natural ability.
How do we focus on the fundamentals and increase our fluency?
PRACTICE
We can’t do much about the IQ we were born with. But we can impact our brainpower and potential through education, training, and experience. There will always be those with natural talent. For the rest of us, the path toward success and reaching our unique potential is deliberate practice.
Apart from sleeping, list the top five activities in which you spend the most time. After each bullet below, circle the one phrase that best describes you:
People drain me, people energize me, or I prefer small groups.
I communicate best with: spoken words, written words, or artistic expression.
I like working with: things or ideas.
I am most skilled: working with my hands, solving problems, selling, or teaching.
Measure the time spent in your top 5 time-consuming activities against the choices above. Are you spending most of your time doing what seems to come naturally and getting better at it?
And, there may be a fundamental skill that if you don’t learn, will hold you back. What single skill do you need to learn, that if you got better at, would make you more effective?
COMMIT
[ ] I commit myself to avoid the distraction of trying to learn too many things; I will focus on a “critical few” to develop and hone to gain greater fluency in the basics.
FURTHER READING/ WATCHING
Reach for the Summit: Recognized as "the best women's college team ever,” Pat Summitt presented her formula for success, which she called the "Definite Dozen System." In each of the book's twelve chapters, Summitt talks about one of the system's principles--such as responsibility, discipline, and loyalty--and showed you apply it to your own situation. Along the way, she used her own remarkable story as a vehicle for explaining how anyone can transform herself through ambition. Pat Summitt's story will motivate you to achieve in sports, business, and the most important game of all--life.
Sum It Up: Pat Summitt tells for the first time her remarkable story of victory and resilience as well as facing down her greatest challenge: early-onset Alzheimer's disease. Pat Summitt was only 21 when she became head coach of the Tennessee Vols women's basketball team. For 38 years, she broke records, winning more games than any NCAA team in basketball history. She owed her coaching success to her personal struggles and triumphs. She was a role model for the many women she coached; 74 of her players have become coaches. Pat's life took a shocking turn and despite her devastating Alzheimer's diagnosis, she led the Vols to win their sixteenth SEC championship. Pat continued to be a fighter, facing this new challenge the way she's faced every other—with hard work, perseverance, and a sense of humor.
Pat Summitt interview with Charlie Rose: College basketball coach Pat Summitt talks about her book, "Reaching the Summitt: The Definite Dozen System for Succeeding at Whatever You Do."
In Her Words…
“A lot of people succeed once but they never understand why. They don’t examine what they did right or wrong. It’s important to define your method and know what you did right, so you can re-emphasize it.”
“There is nothing to be ashamed of in short-term failure, or in making a mistake, so long as you deal positively with it.”
“The reason success is so hard to duplicate is because we tend to stop doing the disciplined things that made us successful in the first place.”
“Success is not complicated. The truth is, it’s a simple matter of focus.”
“If you pay fierce attention to a few fundamentals, you can fight complacency. You can try to do fifty things not very well, or you can emphasize a few things to perfection.”
“Defining your method [for success] and emphasizing it doesn’t mean being inflexible.”
“You don’t win basketball games on first shots. You win them on send and third and fourth shots.”
“Follow-up is the secret to continued success in anything. That’s why we set specific goals for every game. Win or lose, we evaluate whether or not we met those goals. That way, you learn to compete, not only against the opponent but against yourself.”
“Multiple achievements lead to spiraling expectations. With each additional feat, you create pressure to perform. It gets harder and harder to do what you’re supposed to do. Eventually, high expectations are a killer.”
“Continued success is about load leveling. It’s about putting together all the life skills we’ve talked about…to form a strong foundation. With that, you can build success after success—because real success is about developing a value system.”
What we don’t see on the resumes we review or the job descriptions we want is the litany of emotional entanglements we bring to our roles, uninvited, to the team and organizations we work in. Alongside technical skills, people who can master a range of subjective skills are better able to influence, deal with ambiguity, bounce back from setbacks, think creatively, and manage themselves in the presence of setbacks. In short, those who learn lead.
Observing subjective qualities in others past and present gives us a mental picture for the behaviors we want to practice. Each figure illustrates a quality researched from The Look to Craftsmen Project. When practiced as part of our day-to-day, these qualities will help us develop our mastery in our lives and work.
References:
Summit, Pat. 1991. Basketball (WCB sports and fitness series). William C. Brown Publishing.