Ledbetter Will Discuss, "Human Performance And What Drives Winning"
by Julia Paulus Ogilvie
After playing basketball through high school and then at the University of Idaho, Brett Ledbetter was asked by his boss, the owner of a golf course, to train his daughter to improve her basketball skills. While Ledbetter had never contemplated coaching – he was actually studying to enter the insurance field – the opportunity to coach for a career and keep the game he loved in his life grew organically.
“Others began to take notice,” he says. “I didn’t realize that I could get paid for what I love. I felt the happiest when I was pouring into another person and helping them find their success. And like many people, my college career didn’t pan out as I imagined it would. I think you embrace your destiny by accepting the past. I followed the path of coaching because the purpose was so fulfilling.”
As Ledbetter’s roster of students grew, he persuaded a teammate from the University of Idaho, Jason Rose, to move to St. Louis and build Ledbetter Academy with him. “As more interest in the academy was shown, we had to figure out how to house the students,” says Ledbetter.
With all of their focus on developing a strong curriculum for their students, it was not until the partners had been in business for five years that Ledbetter Academy was built.
Over the past decade Ledbetter and Rose have worked to perfect their skill development program, which consists of a combination of their BallStride system, mental performance and three versus three raining.
While the academy has grown through referral and reputation, it is intentionally a small part of the company’s revenue , according to Ledbetter. “We wanted the academy to be a laboratory to understand the best way to develop players and people,” says Ledbetter. “What’s really interesting is while working to develop our curriculum, we began to see that the movements (process) we were teaching wasn’t translating into the game for all of them. We realized there was something else driving the process.”
Ledbetter began to explore how the most successful coaches guide their players and the link between their character as a person and their performance as a player. “I interviewed the best 15 Hall of Fame championship coaches to figure out what they value most,” he says. “It always went back to putting the human side first. That’s how I became fascinated with human performance.”
Today Ledbetter works as a human performance coach for organizations like the University of Florida, where he works with multiple teams to teach them how to coach the person first and the player second. In doing so, he ultimately finds the desired results for the individual and organization.
Ledbetter has also founded The Filmroom Project, a nonprofit organization dedicated to teaching the intangibles and character skills necessary for success. The website TheFilmroomProject.org provides video interviews that offer these life-changing lessons for free. “The goal is to give players and coaches the answers I never had access to as a player,” Ledbetter says.
On April 8 Ledbetter will be the keynote speaker at the St. Louis Business Expo’s Top 100 Luncheon. St. Louis Small Business Monthly spoke with Ledbetter on how his exploration of human performance can be applied in business and what he’ll share with the audience on April 8.
In addition to coaching for basketball skills, the academy builds character skills for life and high performance. Why is this important to you?
We have invested a lot of time in chasing excellence. If a person wraps up their identity into basketball, it will be difficult when they have to transition out of the athlete phase. We use the forces of sport to develop a player into a stronger human being so that they can be closer to the person they want to become.
How do you hope your program helps students as they grow up and in the long term?
Upon meeting with people, I try to separate the person from their role, whether they are a basketball player, coach or business owner, and put distance between the person and their role. I do this because what they do often becomes who they are – their identity becomes attached to results. This separation helps us to get a view of how they are handling situations in their role and then we can use that. We see who they are in those moments so we can repurpose it.
In your experience, do the same lessons you impart to students at the academy apply to entrepreneurs and business owners?
I am around a lot of professionals, whether in sports or business. The ones who excel all have one thing in common: They deal with the human. I provide corporate programming and training and see the parallels between sports and business. What sports are really about is the action between the action. In basketball we’re just putting a ball in the hoop. What’s really interesting is the human expression involved.
You have a book being released on June 11, 2015. What is its focus?
The book is called “What Drives Winning” and contains a compilation of research and stories from hundreds of coaches, players and leading researchers I have interviewed. The book will be released at the What Drives Winning conference here in St. Louis, featuring high-achieving speakers like Billy Donovan from University of Florida basketball and Anson Dorrance from North Carolina soccer. Think of the book as a guide that will help give you a practical strategy on how to apply this multidimensional approach within your program. The conference is the first event I am hosting annually to benefit The Filmroom Project.
You will be the keynote speaker at the April 8 Top 100 Luncheon at the St. Louis Business Expo . What will be the focus of your speech?
It will be centered on human performance and what drives winning. I will show the audience how to peel back the layers to see step by step how to focus on developing the human to drive performance. We’ll decipher what the business is providing to help others become what they want to be, which drives results for the business.
Who do you believe can benefit from attending the luncheon?
It will have universal appeal. Everyone can relate to sports. They captivate attention.
What steps will you suggest attendees of the Top 100 Luncheon take to become better coaches to their own clients and employees?
It starts with the human being. Knowing that drives everything. Then you can shift the attention off of results or even the process. You always hear people say that you need to focus on the process, but even that can be a distraction. You need to lock into what drives a person and who they want to become; then that will drive the process and results will come. Character drives the process, which drives results.
Lastly, if there is one overarching theme to your speech, what is it?
If attendees take away one lesson, what do you hope that is? Character drives everything.
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