PP28 Gregg Williams€¦ · 11 GreggWilliams% with!Dawson!Church! Extreme!Focus!! 1...

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Gregg Williams with Dawson Church

Extreme Focus

Dawson: Gregg Williams served as the defensive coordinator for the Saint Louis Rams American football team. He started his National Football League career with the Tennessee Titans, where he coached defense for 11 seasons, from 1990 to 2000, including four years as the defensive coordinator for the team. Williams has 22 years of NFL experience and has consistently led some of the top defenses of the league. He returned to the Rams in 2014 and is known for his success in working with difficult players.

Gregg, it is such a pleasure to have you here. I know you specialize in working with problem players, and sometimes problem behaviors of whole teams. When the culture of a team is entrenched in that way, how do you change it?

Gregg: I’ve been doing this now for 33 or 34 years. I was a pretty good player at the lower levels. I wasn’t good enough to play at the professional level, but I believe with all my heart that I’ve been placed on this earth to be a mentor to young men, especially difficult young men.

I grew up with a farming background. I spent a lot of my early childhood in a farmhouse that had no plumbing, heating, or electricity. I had to learn to work for everything I ate every single day. I really didn’t eat store-‐bought food until I was a full-‐scholarship player in college, so I’ve learned that hard work ethic.

Both my parents are still living and healthy. What I learned by example from them is basically the way I ended up formatting my approach in coaching. I was a hard-‐nosed player when I played. I was able to play a lot of different sports and be very good at a lot of different things.

When I was growing up, I thought I was going to be a doctor. I got a full ride and had a chance to go into orthopedics. That’s what I thought I was going to do, but I still had this itch to coach. I thought, “I’m going to get a degree in psychology.” I got three degrees in education.

I thought, “If I don’t like this coaching part of it and I still have this itch and competitive fire about me, then I’ll go back to med school and do that.” I have no problem telling everybody right now that I’m a competition addict. I love to compete. For the last 25 years, I’ve had the opportunity to compete at the highest level of my sport in the world. There are only 32 people in the world that do what I do at this level. There are 32 teams. This is the very highest level.


It’s a production business. It’s about producing every single day. Every day is an interview. There are thousands of people ready to take your position. You have to have extreme focus and an extreme work ethic because everybody’s replaceable.

There are 32 owners in the National Football League. With the exception of just a couple of them, they really don’t know a whole lot about football. They’ve got to buy stock in people like me to help them make more money because these owners understand how to make money. They buy stock in me to help train the people that fuel the business in the National Football League. It’s the most powerful sports brand in the world. I’ve been really fortunate to go into the places I have. How I go about changing the culture there is with discipline and work ethic.

Being semi-‐intelligent, I’m able to understand what makes most people tick in the industry. What Mom and Dad have let go by in most of these young men’s lives, I don’t let go by. I close the gap immediately and make them bow with discipline and structure, and I make sure they earn every single aspect of respect and trust.

I love them to death once they bow to the brand and the sport. It’s not easy to do if you don’t have as much credibility in the sport as I do. Sometimes coaches end up bowing to players. I’m just not that way. We’re going to be about winning. We’re going to do things the right way and we’re going to do it with structure, integrity, discipline, honesty, and all of those types of things.

These young men have been patted on the back for so much of their lives that sometimes they’ve forgotten what it is to say, “Please, thank you, yes ma’am, and no ma’am.” Sometimes they’ve forgotten how they have to focus and pay attention to the real details of life. When they start doing the real details of life, then maybe I might teach them a little bit of football.

I say that with a smile on my face because nobody in the National Football League does more on defense than I do as far as the multiplicity of what we do. You’re going to have to get in line, do the right things, and earn your spot every single day. Otherwise it’s going to be a quick exit interview.

Dawson: You say that you have this mission of mentoring difficult young men. I tend to work with people who want to work with me. If they don’t want to work with me, I just let them go their own way. I don’t think I have the patience you do to hang in there with them.

How do you deal with those people who are initially resistant? After all, they have a lifetime of bad habits to overcome. How do you handle your own impatience, and how do you handle them in that situation?

Gregg: I believe that 99% of the people I come in contact with in my job now want to please. That other 1% I come in contact with, nobody in the world can please until they change their mind to get on board.

I’ve got great instincts on people now. One of the things that I’ve got to do is get rid of that 1% so it doesn’t start chipping into the other 99% to 2%, 3%, 4%, and 5%. We’ve got to move those people out. It’s okay that they get bounced. I’ll give people a second opportunity, allow them to come back. They all say, “Okay, coach, how do you want me to do these kinds of things?”

I don’t spend time with people that don’t want to buy into the message or the direction of winning as a team and what our organization and team message is. When people believe they’re more important as an individual over the team and the organization, you can’t win with those kinds of people.


I believe with all my heart that the three most important things you have to do to have a successful company, team, classroom, or anything is hire good people, keep good people, and get out of the way and let them do their job.

If you’re the person in charge and you don’t get number one right, you don’t have to worry about number two and number three because you’re not going to keep the people and you’re not going to get out of the way and let them do their job.

It’s important to have some type of criteria on what you’re looking for by job title and job description. After all these years, I understand and know the types of things I’m looking for. The reputation I have is that the people I get a chance to mentor have with me the best years of their careers and their lives. Why is that? It’s because they desperately want to please and buy in, and they know that we’re so much more powerful as a team than a bunch of individuals.

I spend an awful lot of time studying our military. How does our military take some of the most screwed-‐up kids in our society, people that can’t cope in everyday walks of life, and get them through boot camps and training to become the most powerful military in the world? How do they do those types of things and the psychological behaviors involved with getting those young men to do the right thing at the right time, time after time? I love that aspect of what I do. It’s the psychological toughness and the mental toughness training that goes along with the physical toughness training.

Dawson: That is such a key. These athletes have the physical ability to perform at that high level, but what often interferes are their habits, their self-‐talk, and everything else going on in their minds other than the physical. They can perform that physical task absolutely perfectly, but then what else is going on that might interfere with that? If you can take care of those other things that stand between them and that consistency, then you can turn them into champions.

Gregg: Habits are harder to break than they are to make. If you’re in charge of any position or company, be careful what you say if you’re not ready to back it up. If it comes out of my mouth, I have to make sure I back it up.

I say that every day is an interview. They’re interviewing with me every day. I’m interviewing with them every single day. They want to see fairness in me. I believe morale will always stay high in any walk of life, any company, any position, group, or classroom as long as everybody believes that they’re being treated fairly. When one person is not treated fairly, whether it’s too critical or too nice, what happens is that everybody else starts doubting the message coming out of the leader’s mouth.

It’s not easy to be consistent, Dawson. It’s not easy to be fair every day. I have to focus on making sure that I don’t inappropriately say something that I’m not willing to back up or that I’m not willing to say that this is what our mantra is. Even with our own children, once you’ve said those kinds of things, you have an obligation to follow through.

That’s what I’ve done more than anybody else in the league. I’m not afraid to tell the owner, the head coach or the person in charge that that’s not how we’re doing things. You didn’t hire me to do it that way. If you want to go ahead and do it another way, that’s fine, but don’t hire me because we are going to do things a certain way.”

Our production numbers are really high. I’m the only defensive coordinator in the history of the National Football League to go to five different organizations with five different coaching staffs with five different groups of players with five different styles and schemes of play, but be top five or top in the world at what we do.


Why is that? It’s because I conform schematically to the talents I have to work with, but what I don’t compromise on are being on time, dotting all i’s and crossing all t’s, fastening your chin straps, and getting ready to play hard and tough, and I will not compromise on effort and toughness. I have defined what that is on a big poster in the back of the room. If you do not perform with maximum effort and toughness, you don’t belong in our business, in our room, or on our team. Go play for somebody else.

Dawson: What is your definition of maximum effort?

Gregg: When I talk about effort when you’re playing with movement on the field, it has to do with burst, recognition, and finish. With burst, you’ll see a noticeable body-‐lane change on film. Recognition is when you’ve seen and recognize where the ball is going and you start to move in that direction. I have a very defined way about finish. A lot of times when you get there, you finish in a bad mood. You finish very forcefully. All of those things are shown through their aggressive habits and how hard they play, but you can see on film the body-‐lane change, the maximum speed, and exactly how fast they got there. When one guy pulls off, I have an obligation to not let him play.

These guys make lots of money, and sometimes when they make lots of money, they think that protects them from doing their job the way you want them to and that they can do it the way they want to. Guess what? I may not be able to cut them because of cap violations or cap reasons. I might not have the final stroke on that, but while I’m here, I decide who plays. I have no problem with having you standing over on the sideline by me.

A long time ago there was that great psychologist that came out with timeout for children, and all of a sudden they were putting them in timeouts instead of spanking them. When I grew up, timeout in my family was my dad getting a second wind to whip my ass again. Timeout was him resting to make sure that I understood we’re going to do it a certain way.

Timeout with these guys is that I just have them stand over by me. They soon learn that I mean business on those kinds of things and they take such ownership and it becomes so gratifying for me to see them change and to see how much they believe it’s their idea that this is how we’re going to play.

As soon as I can get them in the room—empowerment is very powerful—when I can get them to believe it’s their idea that this is how we’re going to do things and they’re saying things right, I back off and I promote leadership in the room and among the ranks. It becomes an easy thing to do.

Growing up on that farm a long time ago my dad told me, “When you’re working with thoroughbreds, son, you know that horse you want to put the saddle on? You’re going to have to break that thoroughbred before you bridle it.” I have no problem about doing that, and I have no problem about a guy that wants to have that bit and spit it out because I’ll set the bit and make sure they understand that this is how we’re going to do things.

Dawson: It sounds like you’re giving them a super-‐clear structure and consistent rules for everyone. Then what you’re able to do and how you work your magic is that all of the physical and emotional power of that team is acting coherently and going in the same straight line rather than being bits and pieces going off in different directions.

Gregg: That’s a great thing that you recognize. You have a lot of energetic people and you have a lot of people that want to please. Sometimes they don’t understand and they head off in a different direction. How do you keep them all in the same line? How do you keep them all on the same highway? How do you keep them all on the same road to success? Yes, that’s the magical part of doing that, and you have


to clearly define those things. When I go into a certain place, I’m usually pretty hard in order to snap them into it. Again, I’ve got to break them down before I build them back up.

One message that I want them to get quickly is that I don’t want any of them to say, “I’ve got to listen to this guy.” I want them to say, “I get to.” I don’t want any of them to say, “I’ve got to go work for him.” I want them to say, “I get to.”

How you go about doing that is through the tremendous reward of positive reinforcements for doing things the right way. Once you start seeing people doing things the right way, you go overboard in promoting that behavior or skillset, and laughing, joking, and having a great camaraderie about doing things the right way and hard.

That’s when the team starts to form. That’s when the X’s and O’s can start to be taught. Until the behaviors are consistent and all the same mantra, it doesn’t make any difference about any X’s and O’s.

I say this all the time, “It’s about the Jimmies and Joes inside the X’s and O’s,” and unless you understand that, there’s no scheme that a coach can use in any walk of life or in any professional sport that’s more important than getting everybody on the same page.

Dawson: One of the fascinating things physiologically in the research we’ve done is looking at the coherence of people, especially in their autonomic nervous system. The autonomic nervous system has two parts. When you are what is called in psychological terms “coherent.” Those parts are in perfect balance. What we’ve found in some of our experiments is that you can actually have people who are coherent next to a person who is not coherent, and that will bring the person who is not coherent into coherence with the person who is.

What we’ve done in some advance research is to have roomfuls of people and you can actually train them all to be coherent with each other. They all come into coherence simultaneously, and then the kind of power you get in that group is phenomenal.

We can’t hook your athletes up to heart-‐rate variability monitors to measure this, but I’d bet if we did, we’d find that coherence phenomenon happening there.

Gregg: I’m going to tell you this. We can do that, and that’s exactly one of the biggest benefits that Dr. Erin Shannon does for us. I no longer need many people in my life to tell me whether a guy can play or not. I know whether a guy has enough physical skills. What she has been able to do to help those guys from the coherent standpoint you just talked about, with attention, focus, and things outside the field, has been remarkable. They are now able to pay better attention in the classroom. They are now able to pay better attention in general.

I actually say, “Do you mean you’re going to listen to the call? Do you mean that you’re actually going to hear what’s being said instead of blocking out certain things?” Guys do have blocks and block-‐outs. Some of the things she’s been able to help with I’ve found extremely valuable. She’s got about 30 of our players that she deals with now.

Dawson: It really is powerful, and these are actually physiological changes that you can measure. They aren’t just psychological changes. We’ve been measuring things like shifts in cortisol levels, the stress hormones. We’ve been measuring things like the variability of heartbeats between one beat and another. By all of these hard scientific physiological measures, people are much more functional after those kinds of sessions than they were before.


Gregg: I’ve said this to Doc before. I’ve said this to a lot of different people. I don’t think very many people have ever been able to put themselves mentally in a place that you have to be to have a fistfight in a phone booth for three hours the way some of these guys have to in professional football.

Some people have no idea what they have to do. You probably can’t put yourself in that place, walk that walk, go down that path, and put yourself in a position to fight for your life for three hours in a confined area, and then be able to come back out of that environment and enter into their family lives and other things, recover and then do it again the next week and the next week.

There’s a reason why the average career span of an NFL player is only 3.2 years. It’s because it’s pretty tough to do what they have to do day in and day out. Erin has done a great job on that. She’s helped them train their biorhythms and work on improving their energy levels and focus. It’s been remarkable to see how they are able to balance their energies on their own, away from her. I’ve seen a much more focused person in the room, paying attention to what I’m asking them to do, and now they’re able to go out and do a much more focused job.

Dawson: They’ve got that mental focus, and that maximizes their existing physical gifts.

You mentioned two things earlier on. One was extreme focus and one was extreme work ethic. “Extreme focus” is an intriguing term to me. How do you develop that in players? How do you develop that extreme focus where they set other things aside and are fully present to do those jobs?

Gregg: I want you to go back and think on the best teacher you ever had in life because that’s basically what a coach is. Then think of a person in general who is getting ready to impart knowledge. Think about some of the best speakers you’ve ever listened to.

I believe with all my heart—and I’ve spoken a couple thousand times across the country from every level of corporation to every walk of life—that in order to get somebody to focus and listen to you, they’ve got to want to listen to you.

Do you have the skillset to be able to focus on the things that trigger your audience back into focusing when you start to lose them? We all want to talk and talk, but how do you get people to participate in the thought? I’m talking about participating in the thought that you’re trying to present to them on how they’re going to go about and perform. That participation elevates focus.

I’ve been gifted at being able to go around the room and I’m not intimidated by anybody. Sometimes that focus is initiated through participation on their part. Sometimes it’s with voice inflection. Sometimes it’s with environmental changes in the room. A lot of times, we teach visually with film and that kind of stuff.

From an educational background, I understand that the mind can only withstand what the butt can withstand when they’re sitting in a seat. How are you going to be able to have a good meeting without spending the dead time that you have to have on getting them up and getting them back in the room? It’s like herding cattle at times. You’ve got to try to maximize those things.

If you are knowledgeable and if you are somebody that they respect, then focus is not as hard as if somebody doesn’t think that you know as much as they already know as a player, because all players think they know everything anyway. I’ve coached a lot of guys that are in the NFL Hall of Fame. Two of them are coaches with me on this stuff and they played for me many years ago.

The way you go about getting them to do the right thing all time is that you’ve got to empower them. You’ve got to empower their focus that way and make sure they understand that their opinion is


important, but they cannot violate the team codes. Those are the things that we’re doing from a team atmosphere too.

One thing that Dr. Erin Shannon has helped us a lot with is that she gets them to open up. Do you think a tough guy like me is going to get a guy to be soft and tell me different kinds of things behind the scenes that can help them focus better or maybe something that’s bothering them psychologically or physically?

It’s hard for a warrior to admit to another warrior that he’s not feeling good, doesn’t get something, or show a weakness. What’s she’s been able to do is get these guys to open up. They have total trust that she is going to keep it confidential. She tells them a specific way to improve, whether it’s physically or mentally.

It’s been amazing for me to see how that has spread throughout the team. She humors them a lot. They all have unique talents. They end up loving her and they’d go through a wall for her because all of a sudden here’s another coach or person in their lives that is making things better for them.

What I started to say about Hall of Fame players is that all great players want to be taught, motivated, and inspired. They’ve been the best of the best their whole lives, but they still want to be motivated and inspired because what they do is not easy. Physically it’s not easy and mentally it’s not easy. They’ve got to do it day in and day out, and they can’t have a bad day. That’s because when they have a bad day, there’s always somebody else waiting to do their job and to take their spot from them.

Dr. Shannon gives them so many life tools outside of just the physical aspects of their performance. Those things have been fantastic for me at getting rid of distractions. Those life tools that she gives them get rid of the distractions that I’m dealing with outside the classroom, the practice field, or the game field. I’ve seen remarkable results in focus. I believe the reason why she’s been able to do that is because she grew up in a family of professional sports. Our players quickly recognize that here’s somebody who gets it. This is not somebody who thinks they get it. This is not somebody that says they understand. This is somebody that’s one of us and has grown up in the business. This is somebody who has had to live the life of a professional athlete and be involved that way. They’re able to give themselves to her and she’s been able to help them in so many ways. It helps me, and it helps our production because they’re more focused and healthy individuals.

Dawson: You mentioned getting over distractions. One of the central experiences I had in sports was doing a study at Oregon State University a few years back. We worked with the basketball team. This was a Pac-‐10 team and they were all really good. We did a randomized control trial. We gave half of the team Erin’s types of interventions just very briefly, and the other half didn’t get those. They got a placebo. We then tested their free-‐throw ability before and after.

It was powerful. They did 38% better on free throws after just a quarter of an hour of intervention. There were powerful changes in their performance after just a brief period of time.

When watching the players who could not throw 10 out 10 baskets and those who could, the distraction factor was so visible. The players that were bouncing the ball, looking around, getting distracted, being aware of the other people on the court, and clearly worrying about other things in their lives were the guys who were throwing two or three out of 10. The guys who were bouncing the ball with complete focus and tuning out all the distractions threw 10 out of 10. Both the guy throwing two out of 10 and the guy throwing 10 out of 10 had exactly the same degree of athletic ability. The only thing different was their ability to tune out distractions. That was what made the difference between the champions and those that were falling down on their free throws. What you’re saying is so on target here.


Gregg: I remember this study. I have read this study. One of my phrases is “Eyes are the key.” Anything to do with technique or fine motor skills begins with the eyes. If you look right, you’ll have a chance of doing right. If you don’t look right, you have no chance of doing right.

Two of my sons were All-‐Americans in high school and my daughter was a great basketball player. They’re grown now. One is playing as a linebacker right now at Virginia Tech and having a great year. The other one played at and graduated from Princeton. He had a great Ivy League career and now he’s a coach. My daughter is in med school.

One of the things that I’ve talked with them about is that you never ever disrespect your coach. I said, “Here’s what I want you to understand about whether a coach knows what he’s talking about. When you hear a coach, whether it’s Little League, high school, college, professional, or whatever level you’re at, and all of a sudden he’s filling your head with all of this clutter, when he or she finally takes a breath would you say, ‘I’ve got it, coach. I understand, but where do you want my eyes?’ If they can’t tell you where to put your eyes, don’t disrespect them, but understand and know that you’re right and they’re full of shit. They don’t know or understand what you’re doing and there is no feel for what you’re doing. Now you’ve got to go out and figure it out yourself or come home and ask me.”

How do the best people in the business, like Joe Montana, Peyton Manning, Tom Brady, or Drew Brees, slow down their heartbeat and not look at things that aren’t important? The best players I’ve ever coached look at what they were supposed to look at. Then their body performed.

The best coaches understand how to get rid of clutter and distractions, get people to look at the right thing, and not let them stray. That’s not an easy thing. Don’t let them stray. It is an all-‐consuming task to block out the distractions to what you’re supposed to look at to perform at the highest level.

Just think about golfers. Can they repeat the same movement and look at the right thing? Do they have enough discipline on that fine motor skill? Those are the things that keep me up at night, and I keep learning more and more. The great part about what I do is that I’ve had a skillset to understand that when very few people don’t understand it.

Dawson: Of course, that is an ability that can be taught. That’s something that a person can come in not knowing and then learn, change their behavior, and really improve. That’s where coaching can make all the difference.

Gregg: I believe that coaching can, but I also believe this. A coach can affect little of what Mom and Dad gave them in the gene pool, but the good coaches can close the cap. Everybody has a cap on intelligence, speed, height, weight, and IQ, but how you get them to butt their heads up against the cap of what they were given is what the true great coaches, leaders, and mentors can do.

Understand that it’s not the same with every person. You’ve got to be able to understand what this person needs over what the other person needs, but you’ve got to get them to butt their heads up against the cap of what the gene pool has given them. Those are the things that I love doing. Each and every person has a cap. I’m hoping I can butt their heads up there.

Dawson: The question is why stop short of the cap? Why perform to a small fraction or even a large fraction of your potential? Why not perform at full potential? Also, it’s a mutually reinforcing loop. When you perform at full potential in one part of your life, it encourages you to explore the cap in other parts of your life as well. You can then start to progress not just in one area, but also in all of them.


Gregg: That’s not easy. Some people aren’t willing to pay the price or have enough discipline to do it. If it was easy, everybody could do it. It’s not easy. Otherwise, we’d have superstars in every walk of life and industry. We wouldn’t have derelicts in prisons.

People ask me, “If you weren’t doing what you’re doing, what else would you do?” I’d probably be the warden of a penitentiary. I’ve spoken at several penitentiaries and gone in and done things with those men before too.

It’s not easy. You’re right. It’s hard for us to understand. Why wouldn’t you want to be the best you could absolutely be? I believe our society is naturally lazy and that people would like to do the least and get the most in life. They no longer want to pay the price. It’s rare to find people who want to pay the price to get every ounce out of what they’re born with. They’re few and far between.

Dawson: It’s also a shame when you meet people who have outstanding talent and ability, yet there’s one personal quality that keeps tripping them up over and over again. They succeed in so many parts of their lives and the game, but there’s one thing they just can’t master, and they often don’t even recognize it.

If you’re a counselor, coach, or therapist, you run across this often. You come across clients who are so gifted and have so much to offer the world, who could excel, but there’s one thing that cuts them off at the knees every time.

You try to help them over it, but you’re right. Many of them are not able to do it and make the cut. Others are eventually able to do it, but with difficulty.

Gregg: As I look back at my career, I’ve had several kinds of players that everybody has given up on in life. I was able to win a Super Bowl at the New Orleans Saints a few years ago. It was Super Bowl XLIV.

I have a quick story about a young man. His mother was a prostitute and high on heroin when he was born. She passed away when he was four or five years old. He lived in nine foster homes in Brooklyn and New York. He went to college. He’s a smart young man, but he got kicked out of college. He ended up going to a junior college and getting drafted to the National Football League on a particular team. At the end of the first year, he was one of those less than 10%. The first time he snorted cocaine, he was an addict. All of a sudden, he got bounced out of the National Football League for failing the drug test. He had to be suspended for a year and the whole deal.

He’s a very large man. During the time that he was off, his brother got into a fracas at a nightclub. He was trying to break it up. One thing led to another, and it took 15 policemen and 13 tasers to get him in the back of the police car. When he was in the back of the police car, he broke out of the handcuffs.

He then spent the next nine months in detention centers and substance abuse centers. Almost a year to the date that he got out of a detention center in Miami, Florida, he was standing on the sideline with me, crying his eyes out at the “National Anthem” and we won Super Bowl XLIV.

How was that young man able to conform in life for me when he couldn’t conform in life for anybody else? That’s one of my biggest success stories. He had seven checkpoints that he had to get through every single day just to get to the next day.

You say, “That’s extreme discipline.” He wanted to make every one of those seven. It didn’t make any difference to him that I had those seven checkpoints for him to get through day after day. He made the willful choice himself that that was important and that he wanted to change his life. He has gone on and changed his life. I’m very proud of him.


Once every couple of months, he calls me at midnight, 1:00 a.m., or 2:00 a.m. because he just wants to talk, because he didn’t have a dad or anybody who cared about him growing up, and someone has taken enough time to spend the right time and talk about certain things. Hopefully, he can keep his life on track.

Dawson: Having a mentor and people who care is so very important. When you learn those skills and start to have that positive influence in your life, then you start to seek it out as well. You tend to accumulate more people, friendships, and connections like that.

For people who didn’t have that early childhood conditioning, if that father figure were to show up, they might not be able to recognize him. There would be no circuitry in their brains to recognize a father figure. Once you have developed that circuitry, then you can recognize these mentors and treasure them. Sadly, many people just don’t have that picture in their minds. They grew up without that sense of somebody who cares, who is there for them, and who keeps account.

You said at the beginning of the interview that what you often have to do is make up for what Mom and Dad left out and that it’s very hard to do. If you can do it, it’s phenomenally powerful in unlocking human potential.

Gregg: Everybody wants to believe that you care about them. I do care about every single one of them. It has been fun for me to see how much they have cared about and want to do whatever Doc tells them to do too. It has been a great experience for me to see them grow in the ways that she has asked them to improve, just in their outside life, and that she has been able to help them physically a lot too. A lot of the energy medicine does make them feel better. They’re quicker to rebound and recover. There have been a lot of changes in their outside lives and family lives, as well as changes in behaviors. It has been very good for me to see those things.

Dawson: If you were to offer our listeners one piece of advice to develop these kinds of abilities right now, what’s the first concrete action they should take?

Gregg: The word “discipline” has been such a big part of my life. To be an overachiever in anything, you won’t be able to go over the hurdles or achieve at a maximum rate or level unless you’re disciplined enough to walk the walk every single day. That’s not easy. It’s not easy being the first one in the morning and the last one to leave, to be the most focused every single day or to block out all of the outside distractions.

The word that keeps coming to mind for me is “discipline.” It’s personal discipline before you get a chance to impart discipline to anybody else.

How can you ask the people you surround yourself with, the people you work with every day, or the people you are around to be disciplined if you’re not disciplined yourself?

Dawson: On those days when you wake up and you just don’t feel like it, maybe you feel bad physically, your biorhythms are down that day, you’ve had some big personal disappointment that is gnawing at you and preying on your mind, or you’ve had something really bad happen that hasn’t affected you mentally, what do you do?

Gregg: I say this a lot. The guys hear me say this over and over again. The big thing with me is mental toughness precedes physical toughness. You need to have a mentally strong attitude in every single aspect of your life. You cannot bow to anything that’s going on physically. You have to be able to keep a positive frame of mind and believe with all of your heart that you can overcome any obstacle. The way


you do that is getting up and getting started that day. Don’t allow anything that says you can’t achieve something to enter into your life.

The mental toughness precedes physical toughness. If you’re a mentally soft person, you’ll bow to all different types of things that happen throughout the day—throughout your life.

Dawson: Mental toughness is the first thing. Once you do that, you start conditioning your body and circumstances. If you can hold that mental center line, then eventually the physical parts will come around. It all starts with the beliefs, attitudes, and inner mental state that will get you there.

Gregg: If you have the power, authority, and position to surround yourself with those kinds of people, it’s an easier task because sometimes if you’re an underling and around negative people all the time, it’s hard to overcome that.

I’m blessed right now at this point in time in my life after all of these years. I try to surround myself with like-‐minded people and not have as many people who want to be a drain on everybody who is around them because they can be a drain. The quickest way I can eliminate them, I do.

Dawson: It’s difficult sometimes if you have a long-‐standing friend or someone who is dependent on you to cut the cord, yet often those unhealthy relationships pull us down and stop us from being at our full potential.

It’s painful, but when you think about the kind of energy and mental and spiritual environment you’re creating for yourself by keeping those people around versus what you would gain by not having those negative influences, it’s sometimes worth saying, “It’s time to cut the cord and surround myself with those positive people who will inspire me, motivate me, share my values, and help me move through to the next level.”

Gregg: If you’re the person who is in charge of making that decision, everybody around you is looking at you, wanting to know why you won’t do it. That’s the consistency aspect of leadership.

A long time ago, I felt like I want to be in charge. Ever since I was a little boy, I wanted to be in charge. One of the things that my father said back then and says right now is be careful what you wish for. When you are in charge, the pressures come to make sure that you can make those consistent and fair decisions all of the time.

When you have somebody who is draining you, the organization, the team, and/or the office, and you’re not able to change the opinion of that person, you have to get rid of them because people are looking at you too. You’re interviewing with them. The total production of the company or team will go down because you’re allowing this drain to happen.

Dawson: Yes, just the way that you would have to discipline those parts of yourself that would pull you off track as well.

Gregg, it has been incredibly inspiring and powerful to hear your story, insights, and perspective. I am so grateful. I know that many people are going to be incredibly inspired by what you have to say as well. You’ve definitely helped inspire many more people by what you’ve told us today. Thank you ever so much.

PP28 Gregg Williams€¦ · 11 GreggWilliams% with!Dawson!Church! Extreme!Focus!! 1...

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