Move my doubleheader up early enough so that I can be in the stands the next day watching the team we play next week, and by Monday I’ve got a scouting report drafted that tells my guys exactly what to expect. Give me a week with a new kid on my roster, and I’ll have his weaknesses mapped out and a development plan built before he ever steps in the box at his next practice. During tryouts, I can watch a kid field a couple of grounders, take a few swings, and know within five minutes whether he’s got what it takes to make our squad. Scouting weakness is second nature to every coach I know. It’s half the job.
Here’s the question that’s been sitting with me. When’s the last time I ran that same report on myself?
When I stepped into our Student Academic Support role, a coworker showed me a tool she uses with her own students called the Executive Skills Questionnaire, built by two psychologists, Peg Dawson and Richard Guare, for identifying where kids struggle with the mental skills that let them actually function: things like starting a task, controlling their emotions, staying organized, adjusting when a plan falls apart. It was built for classrooms and therapists’ offices, for helping a scattered ten-year-old figure out why he can never find his homework.
I read through it and realized it wasn’t describing ten-year-olds. It was describing me on a bad night in the third base coach’s box.
The List Doesn’t Care How Old You Are
The questionnaire scores you across twelve executive skills. Response inhibition. Working memory. Emotional control. Task initiation. Sustained attention. Planning and prioritization. Organization. Time management. Flexibility. Metacognition. Goal-directed persistence. Stress tolerance.
Read that list again, slower this time, and tell me it doesn’t describe leadership. Not childhood. Leadership. Every one of those is a skill a head coach uses forty times a game, whether he’s ever heard the clinical term for it or not.
That’s the part that stopped me. We treat self-control, emotional regulation, and flexibility like character traits you either have or you don’t. Dawson and Guare treat them like skills, measurable, nameable, and (this is the important part) trainable. A kid who’s weak at task initiation isn’t lazy. He’s underdeveloped in one specific, identifiable skill. A coach who unravels when a call goes against him isn’t a bad leader. He’s underdeveloped in one specific, identifiable skill too. Naming it that precisely changes what you can actually do about it.
Where I Score Low, and What It Costs
I don’t need the full thirty-six questions to know where my own weak spots live. I’ve lived them.
Response inhibition is the capacity to think before you act, to resist the urge to say or do something before you’ve evaluated it. I’ve told the story before about the game I lost my composure over an obstruction call I still believe was wrong, and how fast that unraveled my whole dugout behind me. That wasn’t a one-time lapse in judgment. That was a specific skill running on empty at the exact moment I needed it most. My assistant still asks me if I quoted the chapter and section numbers from the white book. It’s a joke now. It wasn’t funny that night.
Emotional control is the ability to manage your feelings well enough that they don’t run your behavior. This is the whole Red Dirt Tax, named after a clinical term rather than a baseball one. I used to walk in the door after a loss, and my wife could read the scoreboard off my face before I said a word. That’s not intensity. That’s a weak executive skill with a real bill attached to it, usually paid by the person closest to you.
Flexibility is the ability to revise a plan when it stops working, without getting rattled by the change. I’ve been the guy who rides out a bad practice period because the schedule said twenty minutes and, by God, we were doing twenty minutes, even after it was obvious the rep quality had cratered ten minutes in. The plan serves the players. When you can’t let go of the plan once it’s stopped working, that’s not discipline. That’s a flexibility deficit, same as a kid who melts down when his classroom seating chart changes.
Three skills. Three specific moments I could point to without even trying. That’s not a coincidence. That’s what happens when you actually go looking instead of assuming you already know yourself as well as you know your roster.
Why This Is the Whole Transactional-vs-Transformational Question
I’ve talked a lot about the shift from transactional to transformational leadership, from a coach driven by outcomes to one driven by the people behind the outcomes. What I hadn’t connected until I read this list is that the drift toward transactional coaching almost never happens as a philosophy. It happens as a skill failure, in a specific moment, under specific pressure.
You don’t wake up one morning and decide to lead in a transactional way. You get gassed on stress tolerance in the fourth inning of a one-run game and revert to whatever’s easiest: control, blame, and outcome. Transformational leadership isn’t just a mindset you choose once and keep forever. It’s a set of executive skills you have to actually build, the same way a hitter builds a swing: reps before the moment that tests it, not during.
Proverbs puts words to this that are older than any psychology textbook:
“A man without self-control is like a city broken into and left without walls.” (Proverbs 25:28, ESV)
No walls means everything gets in. Every bad call, every parent email, every rough loss walks straight through an undefended city and does whatever it wants once it’s inside. Self-control (response inhibition, emotional control, whatever term you want to use) is the wall. You don’t get to skip building it just because you’re the one wearing the whistle.
The Full List, for Your Own Scouting Report
Here are all twelve, in plain language, so you can start scanning your own game the way you’d scan a scouting report:
Response inhibition — thinking before you act.
Working memory — holding what matters in mind long enough to use it.
Emotional control — managing what you feel so it doesn’t manage your behavior.
Task initiation — starting the hard thing instead of circling it.
Sustained attention — staying locked in past the point it stops being fun.
Planning and prioritization — building a real roadmap instead of winging it.
Organization — systems that hold up under pressure, not just on a good day.
Time management — knowing what things actually cost you in hours, not just intentions. Flexibility — adjusting the plan without losing your composure over the adjustment.
Metacognition — the ability to step outside yourself and honestly evaluate what just happened.
Goal-directed persistence — staying on a target through the parts that aren’t fun anymore.
Stress tolerance — performing, not just surviving, when the pressure’s real.
Read through that list slowly, the same way you’d read a scouting report on somebody you’re about to compete against. Except this time, you are the somebody.
The Application
This week, don’t run this on your team. Run it on yourself.
Pick the three skills on that list that made you wince a little when you read them. Not the ones you’re strong in- the strategy every coach defaults to when self-evaluation starts feeling uncomfortable. The ones that stung.
For each one, write down a specific moment from this past season, not a vague sense that you “struggle with patience” or “get too wound up,” but an actual date, an actual game, an actual thing you said or did. Specificity is what turns a character flaw you feel guilty about into a skill gap you can actually train. You already know how to do this. It’s the exact same discipline you use on a kid’s swing: not “he’s a bad hitter,” but “he’s collapsing his back side on breaking balls away.” Name it that precisely about yourself and you’ll know exactly what to work on.
I’m still building this out further. This fall I’ll be speaking on transactional versus transformational coaching at the Southeast Christian Schools Convention, and this list is becoming a real piece of that talk. Consider this the early scouting report before the full breakdown.
We spend our whole careers getting better at reading everybody else. Take one week and read yourself with the same honesty. The city with no walls doesn’t know it’s undefended until something gets through. Don’t wait for the something.
One more thing. I built a short, anonymous survey out of this same list – a few minutes, no name required unless you want to leave one. Every answer feeds directly into the talk I’m giving in Myrtle Beach this September on moving from transactional to transformational coaching. If you want your voice in that room even though you won’t be in it, take the survey here.
Greater Together, Coach O
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