Valorie Kondos Field, UCLA Gymnastics Head Coach

Valorie Kondos Field (0:00)

I remember reading the little saying that life is a journey. I'm like, life is not a journey.

SPEAKER_2 (0:06)

A journey is a walk through the park.

Valorie Kondos Field (0:08)

Life is scary, and there are boulders that hit you all the time. And what are you gonna do? You're gonna go down on your knees and cover your head and hope it goes away, the big scary thing goes away? Are you gonna stand up, take a deep breath, and figure out how to plow through it or go around it or something?

And that's what makes life so much fun.

Michael Gervais (0:32)

All right, welcome back or welcome to the Finding Mastery Podcast. I'm Michael Gervais. And the idea behind these conversations is to learn from people who are on the path of mastery. We want to better understand what they're searching for, their psychological framework, how they see the world, how they make sense of events and people. And we also want to understand the mental skills that they've used to build and refine their craft.

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This week's conversation is with Valorie Kondos Field. And oftentimes people refer to her as Miss Val. She's the head coach of the six-time NCAA Championship for UCLA Women's Gymnastics.

That's a phenomenal effort. So one of the quotes that I've heard John Wooden talk about, and John Wooden is another one of the legendary coaches that came from UCLA. He was one of the winningest coaches in NCAA basketball. Coach Wooden had said, as I wish all of my best friends a national title, and I wish for all of my enemies, I don't know if you use that exact word, two championships, because it's really hard. His thought was once you win one, it's wonderful, but then after a second, a third and a fourth, it's really hard. The whole universe that you live in changes because expectations change, and it's really hard to continue winning. So winning after winning is an incredibly difficult thing to do. And so not only has she won six times, she also has won the regional championships 21 times, and her and her team are 17-time Pac 12 champion as well. So that's a lot of winning. I mean, she really does understand it. And to take it even further, Valorie was recently named the Pac 12 Coach of the Century, and in 2010 she became one of the only two active coaches to be inducted into the UCLA Athletic Hall of Fame. Phenomenal. And she credits, she considers the late John Wooden, the head coach John Wooden, again, one of the most legendary and successful collegiate basketball coaches of all time as being one of her inspirations and a close mentor. So we end up getting some of the good stuff from the legendary John Wooden through this conversation with Ms. Val. And her insights are rich. And she's coached and mentored so many top-level athletes. Some of the names you've definitely heard, but these are Olympian champions like Simone Biles, Jordan Wieber, Kyla Ross, Madison Kocian, Laurie Hernandez and Nastia Liukin. I mean, these are folks, you've probably heard their names and if you're in the gymnastics world, you definitely know them. They're legendary. And she's been part of their experience, their life experience, their sport experience. And she's just got away about having relationships where she really works to understand people.