Here’s Real-Life Lesson #4,180 that I’ve taught football players for 40 years and college law enforcement students for two decades: bad attitude, bad feud. Dual meaning.

First meaning: The cause of an individual’s bad attitude is the inner feud that rages inside the mind. Left unchecked, it spreads like a virus to the heart and soul. Second meaning: The effect of an individual’s bad attitude is the outer feud that will kill a team’s potential; a level of intense conflict that rips the heart and soul out of a team, leaving it for dead in dead-last.

My number one challenge I’ve had as a football coach and college professor/program coordinator has always been changing rookie bad attitudes on the field and in the classroom. Bad attitudes are a psychological phenomenon. Bad attitudes are infectious social diseases. They poison the system the same way that bad food does. Left unchecked, bad attitudes cause a team heart disease. Bad attitudes are the leading cause of team heart failure. An infected team will lose heart in every quarter, first to fourth. Bad attitude, bad heart.

Adjusting bad attitudes is my number one leadership priority. Adjusting bad attitudes is never easy because it take heavy lifting, but nothing is more important, not how pretty the uniforms are, not how shiny the gym equipment is, not how many likes our Facebook page gets, not when to schedule picture day, not how many hits your website gets. What matters is how many hits your team can take, physically and psychologically. Physical and psychological hits are connected. Every team has a limited number of psychological and physical hits it can take. No team can take limitless hits.

The worst hit any team can take is in-fighting. In-fighting will flatten any team, on any field or in any field. The secret to winning is out-fighting,,,stop in-fighting and fight the other team, not your own team.The central focus of all contact sports is fighting, physically and psychologically. Every fiber of strength in mind, body, and soul has to be invested in the fight that matters, the out-fight, the fight against the other team. In-fighting is debilitating, the worst waste of strength and energy. The cause of all conflict, of all in-fighting, is bad attitude. Developing a bad attitude is easy because it takes no effort, literally and figuratively.

Bad attitudes don’t just happen. They are the result of Negative REPS–poor conditioning resulting from repeated rewards for selfishness, self-centeredness, and self-destructiveness. Bad attitudes in college classrooms and on the football field are easy to identify. They manifest in structure patterns and order, the same way symptoms of impairment–bloodshot eyes, slurred speech, unbalanced coordination–manifest in drunk drivers. Psychological impairment resulting from a bad attitude manifests in patterns similar to a drunk. Those suffering from bad attitudes get mouthy like drunks. They talk the same language–belligerence, insolence, and truculence.

Here’s Real-Life Lesson #6,211 that I’ve taught athletes and students: if you want something bad enough, change your bad attitude. Your bad attitude makes you a threat to yourself and your team. If you’re not happy with your team, you are blessed with the exercise of free will.  Change teams or change your attitude. Leave it behind or leave it behind–leave your team behind or leave your attitude behind. Life is too short to tolerate poisonous attitudes from toxic people who are hell-bent on making your life hell. You can press ‘like’ to all the feel-good leadership quotes posted on social media and all the warm, fuzzy motivational posts on your news feed but if you are in any sort of leadership position, nothing will change for the better until you grow some and show some. Miserable people are more than pains in the ass. They are pains in the heart. Leaders are responsible for the health and growth of the entire team. Permitting the spread of toxic attitudes is one of the top five leadership-negligence offences. Being in charge means more than a title on your profile page. It means do the heavy lifting when bad attitudes are crushing the soul of your team.

Coaching is a blessing. It’s a Sacred Profession. But changing bad attitudes is draining. It drains your body, mind, and soul. It’s worse today than ever before. The good news is that there are cures. No bad attitude is incurable. All bad attitudes are the result of something that’s broken inside. Fixing what’s broken is not impossible but the heavy lifting that’s needed is exhausting. It causes a lot of soreness.

Lifting solves all bad attitudes. Lifting solves all conflict. But learning how to lift isn’t easy. It takes intense Continuity of Training. Every human has a choice to lift souls or crush them. Every human has the choice to be a blessing or a curse.

This is a copyrighted excerpt from a new book I’m writing called ‘The Mystery of Murder: Working with the Dead.’ It’s a true story about the effects of working with two kinds of dead people: the officially dead and the unofficially dead.

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Blessings & all good things

#peace

Gino Arcaro