What happens when the grit of athletic competition meets the power of leadership? In this episode, Matthew Mitchell, former head coach of the University of Kentucky Women’s Basketball team and now CEO of The Winning Tools, tackles the topic of success through preparation and the importance of always being ready to win. Matthew shares his incredible journey—from overcoming life’s unexpected challenges to redefining success both on and off the court. Discover how his principles of honesty, hard work, and discipline have shaped his leadership philosophy, and hear how he’s now transforming those lessons into strategies for businesses and leaders everywhere. Don’t miss this dynamic discussion filled with wisdom, resilience, and actionable insights to help you prepare for success in any environment.

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Matthew Mitchell – Ready To Win: How Great Leaders Succeed Through Preparation

Welcome to the People’s Strategy Forum. We’re thrilled to host Matthew Mitchell, a trailblazer in leadership whose strategies have transcended the sports arena to redefine leadership in business. As a former head coach with a great career at the University of Kentucky, Matthew became equivalent with the thought of what is success like. What is success like on the court and then also in leadership overall? He’s going to be sharing some of those leadership victories with us and those principles around honesty, hard work, and discipline.

Matthew is the CEO of The Winning Tools, and he transforms the grit of athletic competition into powerful leadership strategies. He has a new book that’s coming out. We’re going to be talking about that, but the foundation starts with The Winning Tools itself, and we’ll be talking about his new book. He’s going to be sharing insights on how to prepare for those elements when we have changed.

In the United States, we’ve had significant change. We’ve had a new change in leadership, a new president, and so the environment is different. We need to understand how we prepare and get ready to win in this new environment. Join us as we dive into this dynamic conversation with Matthew Mitchell.

Matthew, I know that your new book is Ready To Win, a sequel to Winning Tools. As we dive into this whole topic, can we back up a little bit and just take us through how you become a coach in the first place, helping young athletes become successful, and then evolve into leadership overall?

Matthew Mitchell’s Background And Journey To Coaching

Thanks so much for having me here. I’m very excited to be with you. Athletics was very important to me growing up. I grew up in rural Mississippi in the pre-internet age and pre-cable TV age. What we did to have fun was get out in the yard and play whatever sport was in season. I had a good athletic career in high school and was headed to college to play when I had an unexpected event in life.

My girlfriend, who then became my wife, and I had a baby on the way at eighteen years old. My daughter, Lacey, is now 35 years old and has been such a blessing in my life, but it derailed my athletic career collegiately and set me on a path of trying to find what success was. I attached that to money. Lacey’s mom and I gave it a go at marriage and got divorced.

I set out on this quest to find happiness by making a bunch of money as a young person. I was hustling around and trying to do a bunch of things with the goal of just making money. I found myself in my mid-20s, very frustrated and not achieving anything. One Friday night, I was with my high school basketball coach, who was also the head of the school where I attended high school. I was sharing my frustration with him one Friday night after a football game. I had just been down on that field playing a few years earlier. Now I’m picking up trash with him after the game. He was such a hard worker and a great leader.

I was lamenting the fact that I felt rudderless and had no direction. He said, “Matthew, I always thought you would make a good coach. Why don’t you come and help me this season? Assist me this season and give coaching a try.” I went back to my high school as an assistant basketball coach. The moment I stepped onto the court, the very first practice, I was hooked. I was like, “This is what I need to do.” I give my parents a tremendous amount of credit as well because I was the youngest of four boys. My three older brothers were succeeding in their careers. My oldest brother was a dentist and had great success financially. He now owns three dental clinics and has had a great career.

Preparation: Don’t measure your success by how much money you make. Instead, do something that excites you every day, makes you feel productive, and allows you to serve others.

They told me, “Don’t compare yourself to anyone. Don’t measure your success by how much money you make. Just go do something where you feel excited every day when you wake up, and you feel productive and like you’re serving people.” That’s what I found in high school coaching. I began a career as a high school coach and was trying to find whatever I could, sources of knowledge and wisdom to help me advance because coaching is a lot different than playing.

In that quest for knowledge, I coached football in high school. I coached boys’ and girls’ basketball. I drove the bus for the baseball team. I don’t think the boys listened to me a whole lot on the baseball team, but we had a lot of fun. I had a thirst for knowledge of coaching and trying to help people perform. That led me to work some camps during the summer to try to earn a little money, and also gain some knowledge.

I landed at the University of Tennessee for the great women’s basketball coach, the greatest coach maybe of all time, and I certainly think she is, the great Pat Summitt at the University of Tennessee. I worked in her summer camps. From there, she hired me as a graduate assistant, and that opened up my pathway to a 21-year career in college athletics.

I worked through that process of trying to be a great basketball coach. We had tremendous success. In my last thirteen years, I was the head women’s basketball coach at the University of Kentucky. What I found out was that my true passion is helping people elevate their performance by elevating their leadership. I fell in love with that. I fell in love with learning about leadership. Eventually, I fell in love with teaching leadership and basketball. I became more of a leadership coach who coached the sport of basketball than I was a basketball coach trying to teach leadership.

After 25 years in the athletic arena and speaking to numerous businesses along the way because they were fascinated with the team dynamic and how we were having success, I thought, “I have this calling for a new path.” For the last four years, I’ve been in the corporate world, and I’ve been able to take all of those lessons that I learned on teamwork and performance and teach them in the corporate world. It’s been so exciting and a lot of fun. I’m learning something new every day. I’m right where I’m supposed to be.

As I hear about your journey and what you’ve learned along the way, one thing I want to dig into a little bit is your books themselves. Here we have Winning Tools and Ready to Win. You spoke about how you had to pursue money early in your career, and winning in business is a little bit different than winning on the court. What does it mean to win?

The Definition Of Success And Winning

What I found in my life is that winning starts with how I feel about myself on the inside. How do I feel about myself? Do I have fulfillment at a substantive level, not a surface level? When you find out what you’re driven to do, then the way that you go about that, and the way that you navigate finding your purpose, activating your giftedness, and I believe every one of us has a unique set of gifts, and how we deploy that into the world. For me, success is helping other people and showing up to serve. Every time I do that, I’ve always found that I have enough financially.

Comparison is a real curse. I spent every moment comparing myself to other people. One of the big mentors in my life that I’ve been fortunate to develop a relationship with over the last fifteen years or so is John Maxwell who is a huge force in the world of leadership and has written a hundred books and has sold millions of copies.

When I compare myself, where I am at this stage of my life and my career, and John’s twenty-some-odd years older than I am, if I compare where I am now to where he is now, that slows me down, and that does not serve me in any way. If I think about what I can do to take the lessons that I’ve learned from John and serve someone else and do that well, I find that that’s where I get that intrinsic value of excellence, of living a life and pursuing excellence every day. That’s my definition of success and my definition of winning.

Winning Tools: 3 Leadership Principles That Build Purpose, Respect & Success

It’s all based and anchored by the principles that I call Winning Tools. That was my first book. When I got my first opportunity to be a Division One head basketball coach, it was at Morehead State University, a much smaller school than the University of Kentucky. I found myself there with an opportunity, as a young coach, to lead that program. What were we going to be about? I had this question asked to me the other day from a young person that I was mentoring. They said, “If you had to start over as a basketball coach, what would you do? What would be the first things that you would do?”

This is what I did at Morehead State. I decided on what our principles were going to be. I decided on the principles that were going to drive us toward success, anchor us to success, help us handle the good times, and help us move through the challenges. We all have those going on in life. What I landed on that I learned from my parents and from observing all the great leaders that I was able to work with before that time, were three core principles that I call the winning tools. That’s honesty, hard work, and discipline.

When I stay connected to those principles, then that can drive my process of every day trying to serve people well, every day spending time in thought on how I can bring some ideas to a person’s life that may help them move forward. It’s the principles of honesty, hard work, and discipline that have helped me get in touch with who I want to be and that’s the definition of how I’m going to navigate a life of excellence.

The Winning Tools – Honesty, Hard Work, Discipline

Let’s dig into that a little bit. The very first one that you mentioned is honesty. When you’re getting ready to go compete and you have all your athletes out on the court, how does the perception of honesty help you win in that environment? How do we dig into that?

The baseline of performance, I believe, is rooted in honesty. Honesty certainly is about telling the truth, saying true things, identifying the truth, and then making sure that you’re living that. What we taught our athletes, and what I think is so helpful for all of us who are in a high-performance atmosphere and who are trying to succeed and do a great job, is being able to be honest with yourself. That is one of the most critical skills that I think can be developed. I know it can be developed because I’ve helped people develop that.

I helped numerous players be able to tell themselves the truth because human nature can allow us to make excuses over and over and over. Those excuses block us from all chances and prevent us from unlocking our potential. When we can be honest with ourselves, and this is what we teach in The Winning Tools, one of the keys to living an honest life is humility. I was raised in the South. I don’t know if you can tell by my accent. I guess it’s pretty neutral by this point in time, but the listeners and viewers may be able to tell that I’m from the South. I’m from Mississippi.

Appropriateness, politeness, not putting yourself into the spotlight, all of those things are just ingrained in you from a family of deep faith. Christianity can tell us that we need to be humble and we need redemption. All of those things are wonderful and were wonderful for me growing up. What they did for me later in life is humility became this thing of thinking less of myself. What we teach is that true humility is an accurate view of yourself because when we are in performance and we need to perform, and we need to get a task done or close a deal or make a sale or whatever it may be that’s driving our performance in business, we need to have an accurate view of ourselves.

What do we bring to the table? We need to push that all in. We need to show up and deliver our giftedness and our talent. Whatever our part of the team’s success is, we need to present that. We also need to know very clearly what we need from others. I’m very good at many parts of our business and leading our business, and I’m good at that. My team member who was helping me this morning get everything going here, Megan, fills so many gaps for me and does things well that I don’t do well, and I need her.

When I have an accurate view of myself, I have the humility. I’m humble enough to know where I can help, and I’m humble enough to know where I need help. That is honesty. That’s honesty activated and being able to tell myself the truth, “No one else in the company can do this job. You must show up and do the job.” “This task that I have, I’m not good at this. I need to bring Megan in to help me.” That’s an accurate view. That’s me being honest with myself. That’s telling myself the truth. That’s one of the parts of how honesty can help you activate in times when you need to perform.

That leads right into the next concept you’re talking about, preparation and hard work because you’re honest with yourself. You know that you’re not going to win unless you have the right team members who have the right skill set that can help you be successful. Being real with yourself, understanding your limitations, and that preparation is what helps you be successful.

It does, and that’s the new book. Winning Tools introduced this concept of having a toolbox and having the tools to move forward and navigate life in a deep and meaningful way, and using that honesty, hard work, and discipline. Just as I was showing how we teach honesty, one of the pillar points of hard work is preparation, and that’s what Ready To Win is all about. We believe that preparation will powerfully position someone, me, a team member, a client, whoever that may be. Preparation will put us in that position in a powerful way where we can succeed and we can get the job done.

We would tell our athletes this over and over, and I tell my clients, “File it away under the ‘life is not fair’ category that this next statement is true. I can’t guarantee you a win if you prepare. I can’t guarantee you success, I can’t guarantee you that but I can guarantee you that, over time, if you are a person that lacks preparation, you will not succeed.”

We just have to get our mindset to a place where our heart and our mind connect to this thought that being a person of preparation will put us in a position, and if we’re in a position to win, over time, we will have sustained success. That’s what I try to coach people toward, not a one-off, not a good season, not a good quarter, not a good year but do you have a great company or do you have a great organization that can sustain success over a long period of time? Preparation is one of the foundational pieces of sustained success.

Preparation For New Environments

Let’s talk about preparation in this environment. We were faced in the U.S. with an election. We now have a new leader. The rules of the game have changed. Char is sitting in a new location. She’s in a house in Ohio, which is a new place for her. It’s a different environment. She’s getting used to that. When you have a team and you’re going to play on a new court, in a new location, against new competitors, with a new coach, in a new situation or environment, we have to adapt to that. When we put this in a business context, how do leaders today prepare for this new environment that’s facing them in 2025?

It is a tremendous opportunity to talk about this now because there’s a real illusion in our lives, and it’s the illusion of control. We feel like there are so many things that we want to control, that we either try hard to control and then we’re not successful, or we lose hope because we can’t control an outcome. One of the most valuable lessons I ever learned, and this is what athletics does a great job of teaching you, is that there are things that we have no control over. What are we left with? We’re left with what we can devote our energy toward and what we can allocate our energy to that we can make a direct impact on.

That gets you down to being able to focus on your attitude. That’s one thing that if you are a mentally healthy person and you have control over the way that you can adjust your mindset, you have control over your attitude. If you are physically able, then you’re in control of your effort. We get down to those two things and we get our minds off of these things that we can’t control. Many people woke up extremely happy in the US. Many people woke up profoundly disappointed, and it was because of the person who was going to be in the office of the presidency of the United States. What control do we have over that situation?

I think a better allocation of my energy is respecting the United States of America, respecting the opportunities that I have to live in this country, and thinking about my good fortune to be here. There are other places that I could be that aren’t as full of opportunity. We’re not a perfect country by any means whatsoever. I don’t know where there is that place on this earth that’s perfect.

If I can focus on my gratitude for the opportunities that I do have, that helps my attitude. That gets me to a spot where I can devote energy to my efforts toward building the best coaching company that I can build. I don’t know if it’s going to be the best or the greatest coaching company in the world, but I can make an impact on whether it’s the best that I can create. I have some space to devote energy to preparing these things that I can move the needle on.

I’ve got a good friend here in Lexington. Our kids are in the same grade. He’s our congressman here in the Sixth District of Kentucky, Andy Barr, and he’s got a tough job. I try to encourage him and thank him for serving. We’ve talked before about, “Why don’t we try to get some people together, and let’s try to build some consensus and some bipartisanship and some teamwork to move the country forward.” Right now it doesn’t seem like there’s a lot of appetite for that.

Do I sit here and fret about that? I can’t do that. No. I just offer that to Andy when I can, offer that to people when I can. If they are receptive to it, then I’ll show up and try to teach them how to work together as a team. Teamwork is so much about giving up what you personally want for yourself for the greater good of the organization so it can go forward. I’m not going to waste time or energy fretting and fuming about something that I don’t have a lot of control over. That’s hopefully helpful for people, this day after the election, where there can be so much energy that’s allocated toward things that you have a real lack of control over. I hope that’s helpful.

I’d love to talk about that a little bit more. I know that Char and you were talking before the call about how it’s had a rough week, unexpected things happened, and so forth. It’s been challenging. How do you deal with unexpected changes in your environment?

Managing Change And Organizational Culture

I think I’m the queen of change. In the HR sense and being a business leader, as you were talking, Matthew, it is a cultural matter, a cultural thing. Also, the personalities and the competencies of your employees have the competency and agility. You would need to look at the culture of the organization. Sumit likes to tease me about my story. Let me give you a quick story about this.

My partner, Bruce, is not a worrier. He doesn’t worry about anything. I worry all the time. I fret about the future, what’s going to happen, and what can I do to prepare. It’s not necessarily where you just tell employees, “You need to adapt to change. This is a VUCA environment, volatility and uncertainty and all of that.” It’s a real cultural aspect. Companies oftentimes try to put programs in place to help their employees be adaptable to change.

As a person or an individual in my own life who has succumbed to so much change in where I live and where I’m going in my career, just telling me to be comfortable with change is not going to work. Telling me, “You’re good with change, and you can sleep at night, but you need to change your mindset,” is not going to work.

In my view, it needs to be a nice sit-down conversation, that one-on-one conversation with your leader, and have that transparency from the top of the organization throughout. Explain that this is an ever-changing world, an ever-changing organization. Also, avoiding the conversation about politics is going to be important. We don’t want to talk about politics. It’s having those open conversations, supporting one another, and maintaining that mental health aspect because people who worry and are constantly stressed and have anxiety are not going to move through an organizational change with simplicity.

That’s why I think talent management strategy, cultural strategy, having that conversation with your employees, having that trust, that authenticity, and the conversation about the vision, the goals of the organization from the manager to the employee, as well as up the organization, listening to your employees, hearing what their concerns are about their job and what’s going on next is going to be extremely crucial in this very period of time with what’s going on in our society.

It’s very complex. I guess that’s my view. Matthew, what do you think about these change management programs that are not getting to the heart of talent management strategy and cultural strategy, to help your employees deal with change? Because it’s not just a change agent program. What are your thoughts about that?

Preparation: We need less training and more coaching. A coach focuses on being a transformational agent in a performer’s life, a player’s life, an employee’s life, or a team member’s life—someone dedicated to improving their experience for the better.

Transformational Coaching Vs. Transactional Leadership

I think that we need less training and more coaching. Let me explain. A coach who is focused on being a transformational agent in the performer’s life, in a player’s life, in an employee’s life, or a team member’s life is interested in transforming their experience for the better, as opposed to being a transactional person that’s just trying to extract some value from you.

Let’s put it in athletic terms. If I just had a talented player and all that mattered to me was whether she could make a bucket, get a defensive stop, steal the ball, or do some statistical function that helped me win that padded my coaching record. If I’m a business owner and I am just looking at a person and trying to extract some value that leads to the bottom line, that’s a transactional environment, a transactional situation.

I love the part that you’re talking about, Char, with the leader sitting down and getting to know what is going on with the performer. This is what I always told my team, the principles are unchanging, honesty, hard work, and discipline. The methods are modified constantly because we’re all different individuals, and so one approach, one size fits all, does not make for the best team.

You can motivate temporarily through fear, “I’m afraid I’m going to not make my numbers,” or “I’m afraid that I’m not going to get playing time,” or whatever that may be, very temporary. What’s long-lasting and enduring is when the leader connects with that person and shows that person, it goes back to honesty and allows the time for the conversation to take place to identify what that person is feeling, what their value is, encouraging them to bring the fullness of their giftedness and value to the organization, having an encouraging spirit on where their fears may be, and coaching them through that.

Coaching is a transformational change agent that requires relationship, investment, and time. I was doing some study around being a better parent, and I think it was useful for me in coaching. Telling someone to calm down, like “Calm down, everything’s going to be okay,” my wife and I learned this. We’ve been married for twenty years. We learned that for the first 10 or 15, “Just calm down.” Invariably, we never got anyone to calm down.

It makes you escalate more when you say, “Calm down.”

Leadership Rooted In Principles

Telling everybody that everything’s going to be okay without knowing what the issues are, that’s what makes leadership incredibly complex. That’s why I continue to go back and stay rooted in the principles. That’s why I continue to go back and ask, am I going to show up for my people in an honest, authentic way? Am I going to make the effort? Am I going to make the effort?

Hard work doesn’t mean hours sitting at a desk or hours being in an office. It’s about production, it’s about efficiency but am I going to make the effort to get to know my people and serve them? Am I going to have the discipline to stick with it no matter whether the success comes my way or the difficulty comes my way? Am I going to stick into the fight, stick with my people, support them, and help them?

I can remember the greatest leadership challenges of my career when I felt like I didn’t have the answers. It was so great to be able to go back to those three things and work my way through a situation. When you are rooted in those kinds of principles, it opens you up to be this kind of coach and leader and have the relationship that’s required to be transformational in someone’s life.

I can also make a comment on that because being in charge of learning and development, as you talk about, and talent management strategy and organizational effect-invest, you talk about the competency of a leader to be able to have that agility and be able to sit down with an employee, have that conversation, and listen. Maybe focus on the principles, as you say, but also have the emotional intelligence to be able to discuss the fear, the anxieties, the worries, and the change.

 My experience has been, maybe in a big health, and I always talk about my healthcare systems, but we had 100 leaders perhaps that were promoted through the ranks. They were the top nurse or they were the top what have you, and the top performer that got promoted to be a leader but did not necessarily have the coaching or the ability to have that relationship.

As a talent management strategist or an HR leader, you have to evaluate your talent in your leadership space and be able to identify whether you have the talent in your leadership team to be able to have those conversations, to be able to have the authenticity, that type of thing? As you say, it’s not a tactical process. It’s not like sitting a leader in front of a learning management system and saying, “Take an emotional intelligence class,” or whatever it is. That’s not going to fix the problem. Sumit, I love your viewpoint on this because you’re the culture guy. Sumit, what is your view? How would you take a leadership team and help a leader become better in this space? What are your thoughts?

That’s an interesting question, Char. Drawing from the sports arena, a leader has to play two roles. One, as a football manager, the leader has to watch for different patterns that are emerging and make some real-time changes to help their people adjust to conditions. It could be what the competitor is doing. It could be somebody’s just having a bad day. How do you cover up, and how do you adjust according to that?

The second thing is, after the game, you go back to the drawing board and fix some of the issues that you see emerging as patterns across games. Is there a particular issue with an individual? Is it a place where the team is not coming together? Are you not stringing the right kind of passes together? Is your quarterback not being protected enough by other players and not being able to do their role?

That’s where managers can play an important role. While a talented player would have complete visibility of their area and what they’re doing, they may not be able to see the larger picture, and that’s what a leader needs to decode. Also, stay ahead by analyzing future games and saying, “We’re up against this team. They’re really strong. This is how they played, and that’s how we will need to readjust.”

At the same time, maintaining a collaborative working style where it’s not just being a dictator and saying, “This is what my feelings are, this is what you’ve got to go there and deliver.” Instead, “What are your thoughts? Do you have any ideas on how we can make it better?” That’s how I see the role of a leader.

I did read some elements of the book as well, Matthew, so I’m completely aligned with the principles. I think that they can help leaders in delivering winning teams, which may not win all the time, but which would be, like you were saying earlier, without the preparation, you are not winning. With preparation, the chances of you winning become higher.

Matthew, let’s visualize this a little bit. I’d love to understand how you’re coaching in this environment. One thing is we all know in teams, whether it’s on the court or in business, teams are accountable. They need to be accountable to one another. Sometimes, we’re going to have a person who shows up and something’s off. They’re not performing. We know there’s something wrong. You may observe one of your coaches who are working with you go out there and scold that person and so forth. How would you advise that coach to do better, to get to the root cause?

Patience, Persistence, And Perseverance In Leadership

For me, when I encounter a difficult leadership situation, this speaks back to personal preparation of who I want to be as a leader. If leadership was easy, then everyone would rise to high levels. It goes back to a little bit about what Char was saying. Many times, we find talented people who are highly competent in a certain area. Sumit, you alluded to this as well. That doesn’t mean they can lead. That doesn’t mean they have a full grasp. Sumit said that they don’t have the scope.

If we find ourselves in a leadership position, we have to strengthen three areas that are necessary when you’re dealing with difficult people. I’ll give you a real-life example. I’ve not retired totally from coaching basketball. I’m coaching middle school basketball now. I was working with the fifth and sixth graders at our school. It was our first practice of the year.

This fifth grader had never touched a basketball before. After 30 years of being around the game and 40 years of playing it all my life, the thought of shooting a basketball is so simple. It’s almost second nature to me, and I can teach it well. It brought me back to what I’m about to tell you. I had this kid who could not initially grasp the concept of shooting the basketball.

When you’re in these difficult situations, it’s three Ps. You have to strengthen yourself on the front end and develop patience. Maybe some people are equipped with that naturally. For a lot of high achievers and high-octane leaders, patience is elusive. It’s something that we have to practice. It’s something that we have to equip ourselves with and spend some time with. You have to have patience on the front end.

That patience leads to the persistence of, “I’m going to hang in here. I’m going to keep teaching. I’m going to keep developing. I’m going to keep investing in this person.” Persistence then gives way to perseverance. Unless we get to the spot where it is untenable, those situations happen, they occur, but until I get to that spot, I’m going to show up and I’m going to stick with this no matter what timeline I think it should happen on.

How do I get what I’m trying to teach out of my brain into action from this person? That’s not going to make it any easier, but it’s going to position us as a leader. I’m sure that girl felt my patience. We kept going. My normal approach didn’t work. What was so fun about it was that I found a new way to get the kid to finally shoot the basketball. It was nothing I’d ever tried before. The patience, persistence, and perseverance allowed me to unlock something. I benefited from it as well.

Giving up on someone, scolding someone, or browbeating someone is about the easiest thing you can do, but you’re using your leadership from a position of power. That’s not accomplishing anything. When we show up in this transformation, where I’m trying to serve this person well and trying to help them because it’s going to help the team, then we open up ourselves to all neat and fun and sometimes unexpected outcomes. That just happened to me yesterday.

The Winning Toolbox For Leaders

Ready to Win: How Great Leaders Succeed through Preparation

It’s great to be speaking to a coach with such a broad set of skills that you can apply to young talent, such as what you’re motivating now, into the top leaders in history. I know that with the books that you’ve written here, the Winning Tools and the new one to be released, Ready to Win, who are these books designed for? What are the key things that we want our leaders to get from this toolbox that you’ve put together?

The people who will connect most with this are leaders who have a desire to grow. Growth-minded leaders. These are not life hacks and shortcuts or get-rich-quick schemes, like “Go make $1 million in ten days.” That’s not what these books are designed for. Where my business is driven is working with businesses. It’s directed toward a business leader, but anyone who is interested in elevating their experience in life by being principle-driven, anchored in principle, and who is interested in developing a process. Process-driven leadership is what we talk about and what we teach if you have to get it down to one subject.

People who want to grow and want to learn and understand, either if they’re on the front end of their leadership journey and not where they want to be, or if they’re in the middle of it like I am, understand that there’s probably no destination. I want to be in constant growth. I want to open myself up to learning. I love to say this, Sam. I don’t know, that I’ve created anything original in any of this, either of the two books, but I have put things in there that we all need reminders for.

That’s the interesting part of life. Intellectually, so many times, we know the answers. If you gave us a test, we could make an A on the test. Life is not academic. Life is living, breathing, and dynamic. There are ups and downs. We all can benefit from being reminded about these principles and the benefits of a life experience being deep and rich.

There are just some real benefits to that. That’s what the books, I hope, speak to. That’s why I wrote them because I’ve been such the recipient of incredible investment from the people who helped me develop and continue to help me develop. I want to give that back in the best way possible. I’m so gratified when someone comes up and says they read Winning Tools and that it reminded them of where they can step into life and live it more fully. That’s what I’m trying to accomplish with my writing.

I’ve said this for many years. I’ve given thousands of talks, whether to my teams or when I coached in college. I was in demand for people locally, statewide, and nationally. I would go to different conferences and events and speak, trying to help people. I always told them, if nothing else, I always benefit from the time of reflection and thinking and preparing for what I needed to deliver that day.

I think the writing helps me stay in touch with my mission and my goal of getting out there and helping people. I have enjoyed writing these two books and have got another one in the hopper. We’ll stay focused on this next one. It’s coming out on November 19th, and I’m excited to share Ready to Win with the world.

That’s great. Thank you so much, Matthew. There’s one thing that you’re being a little bit overly modest. When you think about the modern-day world, there’s not a whole lot of places on this planet that haven’t been explored. There have been people all over the planet, but there are new places. There still are. The one truly unique thing is everybody’s journey on this planet. You have your unique journey that has shaped how you use these tools and you’re able to apply it to the youngest athletes to the senior-most executives out there.

These are core principles that we need to remember, we need to understand the definitions of honesty, hard work, discipline, and preparation for that new environment. Those are things that you’re right. We need to be reminded of this at certain times. That’s what a coach is all about. As Sumit mentioned earlier, they can observe what’s going on. They can give you pointers. They can redirect you. They can make you aware of things that you may be overlooking.

No matter if we’re a young person starting in life and enjoying the sport or those who believe they are honed, we have something to learn from everyone. I appreciate your time, Matthew, these books, and the important pieces you’re bringing to leaders and the shaping of young minds. There’s nothing more valuable in life than that. Thank you so much for your service there.

I appreciate that. It is my pleasure to do this, and I enjoy it. It gives me some purpose every day as I get up and try to help people. It’s part of coming full circle in the basketball world, from starting out as a junior high and high school coach to rising through the ranks and getting to what most people in this country consider the pinnacle of the profession but now being back out with the young kids. It’s a real joy, and it gets you in touch with why you did it in the first place. It’s pure joy for me.

I know it’s been quite a joy to have you on this call. Thank you so much, Matthew, for your time. It’s been so valuable to me and the audience out there.

Thank you, Sam, Char, and Sumit. It’s great being with you three. I appreciate the opportunity.

Take care, everyone, and we’ll see you next week.

Important Links

• Matthew Mitchell on LinkedIn
• Coach Matthew Mitchell
• Winning Tools: 3 Leadership Principles That Build Purpose, Respect & Success
• Ready to Win: How Great Leaders Succeed through Preparation

About Matthew Mitchell

Matthew Mitchell is a Wall Street Journal best-selling author, speaker, and former head coach of the University of Kentucky women’s basketball program. During his tenure, he became the winningest coach in the program’s history and was named SEC Coach of the Year three times. Mitchell’s leadership was anchored in his “Winning Tools” philosophy, emphasizing honesty, hard work, and discipline.