Learning to be an expert about yourself
Mentor known for work with Tom Brady shares tips with cadets at CGA
New London — He’s mentored star athletes such as Tom Brady, Desmond Howard and Michael Phelps.
But on Thursday, Greg Harden, executive associate athletic director at the University of Michigan, turned his focus to Coast Guard Academy cadets who are rigorously training to become leaders in the service.
“The mission is to teach people how to become the world’s greatest expert on one subject: themselves. That’s whether I’m talking to athletes or I’m talking to cadets, whether I’m talking to executives,” Harden said in an interview.
He addressed the academy at large Thursday night as part of the school’s leadership lecture series. He also spent time mentoring a small group of faculty members, including athletic coaches at the academy, earlier in the day.
Harden, a clinical therapist who does peak performance training, has mainly helped athletes. But, with
anyone he works with, the goal is to identify what’s working in their lives and what’s not. And then come up with a plan to “embellish” what’s working, and eliminate or alter the things that aren’t.
While there’s some general practices that will work for most people, individual differences “have to be factored in to how we try to motivate or push people,” and there needs to be buy-in from the individual, he said.
Harden, who is plain-spoken, has helped some of the most successful athletes to defeat their self-doubt and shape their mental toughness.
He came to the University of Michigan in 1986, at the request of Bo Schembechler, the head football coach at the time. Schembechler heard about Harden’s successful work in drug and alcohol treatment and wanted him to speak with the team.
Harden told him he wasn’t interested in “rah-rah speeches” about drugs and alcohol. Eventually, Harden pitched his idea to have “meaningful dialogue” over the course of several sessions with the team without Schembechler present.
Through his work at Michigan, Harden met Brady. Early in his time at Michigan, Brady was doubting whether he’d ever play quarterback. He told Harden the coaching staff was only giving him three practice snaps. Harden told Brady to put all he could into those three snaps, which were better than none.
“His words further jump-started my own competitiveness. They empowered me, actually — now I had a plan. I would leave Greg’s office and go to practice and do those three reps well. A week later, the coaches gave me four reps. Then five. Then six,” Brady says in his book “The TB12 Method: How to Achieve a Lifetime of Sustained Peak Performance.”
Harden urged the cadets to get in a habit of examining their weaknesses and strengths. What external or internal factors can sabotage their dreams?
“The mission is to teach people how to look inside because if the enemy within can’t hurt you, you just stacked the deck in your favor,” he said.
But they can’t do it alone, Harden says. He tells them to find a coach or a mentor. That could mean finding someone who doesn’t know they’re a mentor — study people “whose lives are working by your standard,” he said.
“You cannot do it by yourself. You cannot reach your full potential if you’re on an island thinking that it’s all on you,” he said. “And that’s a tough lesson. It’s uncomfortable for some people.”
Asked if he’s still in touch with Brady, Harden thumbed through his inbox on his phone and presented an email, on which he was copied, sent a few days ago by Michigan’s athletic director to Brady congratulating him on another Super Bowl win. To which Brady replied, in part, “Greg, I could never have done it without you. You have forever changed my life as well as so many others.”