What Wrestling Taught Me About Leadership And Life

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When two opponents square off on a wrestling mat, they’re upholding a tradition that dates back to ancient times.

I picked up the torch at eight years old. More than any other experience — school, military service, business — wrestling made me who I am today.

Wrestling is training for leadership, whether in politics, business or other theaters. How do you block out distractions? How do you develop accountability? How do you come out on top in the face of adversity — and deal with defeat? I learned those things on the mat and carry them with me today.??

The power of incremental improvement

Wrestling found me early — and one of its first lessons was the value of constantly raising my game. Inspired by my older cousin, Greg, who competed in high school, I joined the Warwick PAL wrestling club in third grade and stuck with the sport through West Point.

A wrestling match lasts just six minutes, but being ready for that intense standoff requires countless hours of training. Practices with my high school team were brutal. In those three-hour ordeals, you could lose five pounds of sweat. As captain senior year, I tried to prepare the team for matches by ratcheting up the difficulty every time, seeking ways for us to push the limits of physical and mental endurance.

Think you can win all your matches just because you’re a natural athlete? Forget it. In wrestling, no one triumphs by showing up at practice and giving 75%.?

Winning is the long-term culmination of rehearsing the same handful of moves — the chicken wing, the half-nelson or my signature low-ankle takedown — thousands of times. As you seek out minute advantages against an opponent, that knowledge and muscle memory accumulate over time.

Cultivating a mindset of continuous improvement helped me get through West Point and Ranger School, and countless situations where I started with rudimentary skills and knowledge and steadily grew. It’s also been invaluable for navigating tough challenges as a business leader.

Legendary wrestler and coach Dan Gable can relate. “Gold medals aren’t really made of gold,” said Gable, who won his own at the Olympics. “They’re made of sweat, determination and a hard-to-find alloy called guts.”

Radical accountability in a team setting

Wrestling is different from basketball, football and other team sports. Once you’re on the mat, there’s nothing your coach and teammates can do to influence the outcome.?

That inculcates a deep sense of personal accountability. You have nowhere to hide, no excuses for failure. In other words, there’s no one to blame but yourself.

I took that to heart in my junior year, after a disappointing fourth-place finish in the state championships. It would have been easy to pin my defeat on the referee, or on cutting too much weight, or on the fact that my opponent was stronger and had more reach.??

Instead, I adapted. What were the things under my control that I could influence? I started training again the day after my loss — a regime that included nutrition, weight management, cardio and strength training, as well as technique. The next year, I won the title.

But there’s an important nuance here: You can’t get anywhere without a team. This is a life skill that’s so crucial to master, especially in the corporate world. As a young wrestler, I learned that my performance impacted the team, with points for our all matches accumulating toward a final tally.

Conversely, without my teammates, I couldn’t improve between matches. In training, it was their job to test me by being the best possible sparring partners. And the coach was there to observe what I was doing right or wrong.

It’s no different in business. Teams make better decisions than individuals two-thirds of the time. And a study of 1,250 companies found a correlation between business performance leaders — those that beat their rivals in revenue growth, profitability and shareholder return — and highly effective executive teams.

Mastering focus — both micro and macro?

Before a match, I was in my own zone — and I wasn’t thinking about my homework assignment or my girlfriend in the stands. In my mind’s eye, I visualized moving through each technique. On the mat, I could tune out everything but the coach’s voice. The world constricted to the diameter of the wrestling circle.??

Success as a wrestler requires being completely in the moment: focused on your body in relation to your opponent’s, and on the tiny movements and shifts of momentum that forecast what they’ll do next.?

That micro focus I developed through wrestling has been a lifelong asset for me as a leader, in a variety of contexts. In the middle of a firefight as an infantry officer or in day-to-day life as an executive, I’ve relied on it time and time again.?

But there’s also a critical macro focus that goes with wrestling — identifying and striving toward goals that may be a long way off. Thanks to the sport, I learned that it’s better to set high, audacious goals and fall short than to set modest ones and achieve them.?

For example, I made it my personal mission to become an All-American wrestler, one of the top eight in the country in my weight class. Spoiler alert: I didn’t make the cut. And, in what felt like a stunning blow at the time, I also failed to walk on to the wrestling team at West Point. But having that larger goal as my North Star still paid dividends. It made me a far better wrestler. It motivated me to train harder and be a better teammate. It sharpened my focus and resilience, and ultimately, it opened up other opportunities, including a stint on West Point’s sport parachute team.?

In any career, a similar mentality will serve you well. Top executives are almost 65% more likely than the rest of the pack to set difficult or audacious goals, and people with such goals are a third more likely to love their jobs.

Wrestling taught me one more thing. Unlike in other sports, where the outcome is often a bygone conclusion, with wrestling you never know if you’ve won or lost until the final seconds of the match. There’s always that chance to pin or be pinned — right until the end. Ultimately, wrestling has a bracing fairness that holds true in much of larger life.?

Whenever I lose today — a lost customer, a missed opportunity, a parenting fail — my instinct isn’t to feel sorry for myself or blame someone else. It’s time to reflect, assess, improve — and get back on the mat.

Thanks for reading! I'd love to hear your perspective in the comments below. For more insights on taking your leadership and career to the next level, be sure to subscribe to Connected Leadership to have this delivered each month to your inbox.