Lessons - Why Pro Athletes Become Business Leaders | Chris Pronger, NHL All-Star

Welcome to Lessons episodes of Success Story, part of the HubSpot podcast network. These lessons episodes will be shorter conversations with past guests, valued members of the success story community, and myself. They'll be focused on teaching you actionable, insightful takeaways that you can use to upscale your personal and professional life. How can people play at such a high level pro sports? How can there so many leadership qualities that translate into business? I see all the motivational speakers I listen to are like all football coaches, and they all of these great business lessons. Why is that? It seems to be a prerequisite. Yeah, I think when you play sports, you know, there's lots of leaders, lots of followers, but even the followers are learning from their leaders, and learning, you know, as I went along in my career, I was always an assistant captain or captain or one have you a leader on the teams, and you're always learning. You're always taking pieces from, you know, early on in my heart for days, Pat Probeek was our captain and learn how he handles himself with the media, how he trains and prepares for games, you know, how professionally he is on and off the ice. I get to St. Louis, and I'm watching Al McKinnis, and how he handles the media, how he prepares for games and trains, and he's ultimately the one who introduced me to the trainer. You know, as I move along, you know, I'm learning new things and, you know, not always being the intense ra ra guy, but sitting back and kind of pulling somebody under your wing and saying, hey, you know, is everything okay? Is there something going on off the ice? What's going on with you, where you're kind of investing in them and getting an understanding as to what's going on in their life, and not necessarily just saying, hey, you need to be better, and, you know, I'm putting it all out there, you need to do, you know, a lot of times there's a lot more under the surface, and as I got a little bit older, I learned that side of being a leader and that side of being a captain, and so I think it's inherent in sports that, you know, leadership matters, whether, you know, you look at all the different team sports, the teams that have great leadership from management to coaching to players, they're able to create an accountability scale, and able to really push players to play at their best, and they're also walking the walk, they're doing their part, and leading by example, but they're also the first guys in the gym, they're also the hardest workers in practice, they're leading by example, and then they're also going out and producing and performing on the ice, on the field, on the court, whatever it is, and that example then exudes into the rest of the team, like, well, this guy played 30 minutes last night, he's in the gym this morning, well, I need to get to the gym more, and those little things after a while, they rub off on players, and then you get four guys in the gym, and you've got six guys in the gym, and next thing, you know, you've got 12 guys in the gym, all training together, all kind of preparing, and now you've got this mindset of excellence, and this mindset that nothing's going to stop us, and it's all from repetition, and it's all from pushing yourselves, and you hear legacy, and you hear these buzzwords talked about all the time, but how good do you want to be? What does your legacy look like? How much are you willing to sacrifice in your finite amount of time in your sport to be the best? To be the best that you can be in, and it's a matter of kind of, you know, looking at it in a disciplined manner and going, okay, well, I don't need to do that. I want to do that, but what am I sacrificing to do that? And kind of extrapolating backwards, and, you know, when I first met my trainer, we looked at my summer calendar, and he's like, all right, I only want you to drink. I'm drinking once a week, and I'm like, okay, well, I got to go to a wedding here, and I got to do this, and I'm going fishing, and I mean, I literally, you know, axed out those days that, okay, those are the days I'm going to have my fun, and the other days I was tight on my diet, I was training, I was, you know, doing everything that I needed to do, and, you know, sometimes I was sitting on my dock looking at everybody going by, having a good time, but, you know, that's the sacrifice and the discipline that it takes to be the best in your sport. What makes somebody great? What made, you know, I'll say, what made you great? What made you win that upper echelon? Well, I, first of all, you've got to have talent. You have to have an innate ability to play your respective sport, and then it's, again, I think it's discipline, and it's aware with all the, to harness that ability and continue to get better every summer when I went into my summer program, and, you know, you work on things in the off season, and whatnot, getting prepared for training camp. If I was staying status quo, I was falling behind, you know, neutral is not good, you need to keep going up, and improving whether it's your fitness, whether it's working on your weaknesses, and we all have them, and turning those into a positive, and just getting everything incrementally better, you know, and it was just a process of every single summer working on something, whether it was my skating, whether it was, you know, my body, whether it was injuries, you know, all those different things that, as, as the seasons over, you evaluate how your season went, what you need to improve on, you know, how does your body feel, what can and can't you do at this particular juncture and summer, and then build out, okay, these are things that I need to do, and then you go to work. I mean, it's that simple. It's putting in the time and the effort, having a work ethic and understanding, you know, some people think they're working hard until they start working next to somebody who is working hard. And a lot of it is your mindset, a lot of it is up top, you know, I can't, there's lots of times where you're riding a bike, you know, like, I feel like I'm going hard, and then you like, you know, I, you know, kind of like Jordan did, I'd use little slides and just to piss me off when I'm riding the bike and push myself harder and, you know, use those things, and the days where you maybe don't feel your best or you don't feel like working out, oh, this guy said this about me, oh, he doesn't, he thinks I'm over ready. All right, well, I'll show you. All right. And you, you know, you use anything you can to kind of get you up to motivate you to work harder, you know, finish your workout stronger and push yourself at the end and, you know, as you get in better shape, you can push yourself harder and harder and, you know, it, you need a trainer, but you also need to be your own worst critic. And I think that also helped me was, I was my own worst critic. I didn't, I didn't keep backpatters around me and have the honor of around you giving me a, you're good, you're good, you're good. You know, I, I wanted to, to be the best that I could be and harness my skill and talent. It took me a number of years early on in my career to kind of figure out how I needed to do that and what steps I needed to take to, to start, you know, taking those next steps to being a great player and, and being consistent, you know, I think you see a lot of young players coming to these leagues and they're really good and, but they show flashes and the hallmark of a good pro is showing up and being consistent each and every night. And that starts with practice, that starts with training, that starts and that builds the base for the games, the games are the easy part. It's all the hard work and all the training and all the preparation before the game that actually makes the game easy. And so if you're, if you're a half-asset in practice or you're kind of not working out very hard, at some point it's going to show up in the games and, and all these seasons are so long that, you know, you're playing 82 games or baseball, 162 games, like that's a long grind of a season and if you're not prepared and disciplined over that long span plus the playoffs, two months of a long grind of playing potentially 28 games, there, there's a lot that you're leaving out there for chance if you're not preparing yourself for what may be at the end of the year.