Podcast Script: Why Business Leaders Should Be Coaches, Not Captains

Intro Music Fades In

Host: Welcome to BusinessIsGood, the podcast where we explore the ideas and practices that help entrepreneurs grow their businesses and create lasting success. I’m your host, Chris Cooper. Today, we’re tackling a big question: should you lead your business as a “captain” or as a “coach”?

To illustrate this, I want to start with a story from hockey. Bobby Hull, nicknamed “The Golden Jet,” was one of the greatest players to ever lace up skates. Known for his blazing speed and powerful slap shot, he dominated as a player in both the NHL and WHA.

But Hull also took on a rare challenge: he tried to be both a player and a coach at the same time while leading the Winnipeg Jets in the WHA during the early 1970s. He had incredible success as a player and later achieved even greater success as a coach, but his tenure as both didn’t work out the way he—or the Jets—had hoped.

Segment 1: The Player-Coach Dilemma

Bobby Hull’s time as a player-coach highlights an important leadership lesson: you can’t do both jobs effectively at the same time. As a player, your focus is on performance—executing plays, scoring goals, and being in the action. But as a coach, your role is to oversee the big picture, strategize, and make tough decisions to guide the team to success.

Even some of the most celebrated names in hockey, like Larry Robinson, achieved greatness as both players and coaches—but never at the same time. Why? Because these are two fundamentally different roles that require completely different mindsets and skill sets.

Segment 2: The Captain vs. Coach Paradigm in Business

This same distinction applies in business. Many entrepreneurs try to lead as captains when they really need to be coaches.

Let’s break this down:

1. Limited Perspective on the Ice:
2. When you’re in the trenches with your team, you can only see what’s directly in front of you. You don’t have the big-picture context that a coach has from the bench. In business, this means getting too caught up in day-to-day operations and losing sight of long-term strategy.
3. Emotional Proximity:
4. As a captain, you’re shoulder-to-shoulder with your team. This camaraderie can make it hard to make tough decisions—like moving someone to a different role or cutting an underperformer. A coach, however, has the necessary distance to prioritize what’s best for the organization as a whole.
5. Distraction by Small Tasks:
6. Captains are busy tying their skates, taping their sticks, and focusing on their personal performance. Coaches are busy drawing up game plans, scouting opponents, and thinking about how to improve the team. In business, staying stuck in “captain mode” means you spend too much time on the wrong things—handling tasks that someone else could do instead of focusing on growth and vision.

Segment 3: Why Being a Coach Wins in Business

Here’s the truth: real leadership isn’t about scoring the most goals. It’s about enabling your team to win.

As a coach, your job is to:

• Make hard decisions that benefit the whole organization.
• Delegate tasks and trust others to execute them.
• Hold your team accountable and provide constructive feedback.
• Focus on strategy, vision, and the next big opportunity.

Many entrepreneurs default to being captains because it’s what they know—it’s comfortable. They’re great at doing the work, but they shy away from the harder, more abstract job of coaching. But this mindset limits growth. Your business can’t scale if you’re always on the ice.

Think about it: players are replaceable. You can hire someone else to score goals. What you...

You're buried in work. Who has time to work out?

Being a good entrepreneur doesn't just mean making money. It doesn't mean out-grinding the competition, or even loving your work every day. But it does mean:

Selling your service

Negotiating

Leading others

Focusing

Thinking with a clear head

Overcoming procrastination

...and more.

These are all entrepreneurial skills. No one is good at all of these when they start their business; they must develop their skills with practice. But there's a reason almost every successful entrepreneur has a workout routine: exercise can make you instantly better at all of these skills.

Immediately after a workout, it's easier to focus.

Medium-term, a workout can calm you down and help you make objective decisions.

Long-term, working out builds your confidence.

But what workout should you do?

Your workout prescription will change over time. But here's a solid starting point.

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2. Get yourself a heart rate monitor. Chest strap is best, watches are better than nothing. This is the watch I use. Yours doesn't have to be that fancy.
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8. Calculate your max heart rate. Here's a video from my gym on how to do it.
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14. Three days per week, exercise in heart rate Zone 2: about 65-76% of your max heart rate. Here's a video from my gym explaining why Zone 2 is so important.
15. For entrepreneurs, Zone 2 is great for helping you calm down; work through problems in your mind; and regulate your blood sugar. If your blood sugar is under control, you'll have fewer mood swings, and make decisions with a clearer head. You won't get "Hangry"--which is just a side effect of riding a carbohydrate roller-coaster. If you can metabolize fat for fuel more easily, you won't get "hangry" anymore.
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21. Once or twice per week, go as hard as possible. This is heart rate Zone 5. Here's a video from my gym explaining what Zone 5 is, and why it's important.
22. For entrepreneurs, Zone 5 is a mental break. It's so hard that you literally can't think about anything else. It's important for longevity, but I have to be honest here - I use Zone 5 workouts to "clear the decks". When I'm stressed out or feeling overwhelmed, a really hard workout gives you a mental break. It also triggers all of those calming endorphins you read about. And, long-term, I swear it gives you perspective on what 'hard' actually means.
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28. As often as possible, go for a walk. This is heart rate Zone 1, and it's really the entrepreneur's secret weapon. This is really easy exercise - just enough to distract your body and let your mind float. Many experts would call this "flow state", but you might call it "being in the zone".
29. You know how your best ideas come while driving, or cutting the grass, or in the shower? That's zone 1 exercise....

How To Calm Down

Every entrepreneur gets triggered sometimes.

The reasons might be obvious: a late employee, a missed detail, a poor customer experience.

Or they might not be: we could show up to work escalated; we could be carrying dread or guilt around; we could have a fight with our spouse before we left for work.

Many days, our emotional meter is already cranked up to 9 before we start our day, and one little thing pushes us up to MAX 10. Then we have an over-the-top response to some little thing; our staff thinks we fly off the handle; and we feel guilty about it later; and then we overcompensate. That makes us feel even worse, and we keep escalating.

We need to calm down.

I’m not going to tell you to start meditating or get into shape – those won’t help you TODAY, and you already know that you *should* be doing both.

Here’s how to do it in the short-term, long-term and medium term.

Short-term (the quick deescalation):

1. Box breathing. Breathe in through your mouth, as deeply as you can, for 4 seconds. Hold your breath. Breathe out through your nose, trying to empty your lungs, for 4 seconds. Hold your breath. That’s 1 round. Repeat for 10 rounds. Watch this:

2. Imagine the worst-case scenario. can you live with that? Put yourself in the scenario for a few seconds. Then come out of it. This is a Stoic process of acceptance. It doesn’t calm your unconscious right away, but it will calm your conscious mind quickly.

3. Tell yourself that you’re excited instead of nervous or angry. Your body can’t tell the difference.

4. Break the rumination cycle. Go have a conversation about something else, or distract yourself with a story. Rumination just escalates you. Here’s a quick meditation that will break the rumination cycle for a few seconds.

5. Think of the next step instead of what might happen later. Break the problem down into “what will I do in the next minute?” instead of “what might happen if/then?” See the ‘domino’ analogy later.

6. Go outside, eat a banana and have a walk. This is my wife’s advice whenever I’m stressed.

Medium-Term

1. Adopt a meditative practice. I start the day by writing 750 words. That’s a ‘brain dump’. You can do this forever, but you’ll start to see the benefits within a week.
2. Slow down your thoughts. One reason we stress is because our thoughts line up like dominoes, and we quickly amplify the worst-case scenario.
3. “If I say this, she’ll say that. And I’ll respond with this other thing. She’ll get mad, but I can’t back down. So she’ll walk away and not speak to me for a day. I’ll have to address that. It’s not acceptable in a workplace. I’ll deal with it Monday.” Then you spend all weekend ruminating, imagining Monday’s confrontation.
4. Imagine each of these thoughts as a separate domino. Space the dominoes out, so that each doesn’t automatically push the next one over.
5. “I will say this.” – full stop. You can’t predict how people will react, and trying to do so just escalates your stress.
6. My life has been full of terrible misfortunes, most of which never happened. ~ Michel de Montaigne

Long-Term

1. Watch your thoughts. In “Drive”, Daniel Pink says that most people never have a single positive thought all day. It’s a constant cycle of judgment, guilt and resentment. “That guy shouldn’t have made a turn without signalling!” – and then the domino effect happens: “He must be a jerk! Since he’s a jerk, he probably treats everyone disrespectfully! I bet he did that on purpose! He clearly doesn’t care about other people!”
2. When this happens, don’t judge yourself: just shift your thoughts to something you like.
3. Stop keeping score. We tend to remember the bad things...