Coach John Wooden's Thoughts on Mentoring

As many of you probably know, Coach John Wooden is the legendary and most successful basketball coach in NCAA history, having led the UCLA Bruins to 665 victories and 10 championships in the years before 1975. Coach Wooden was/is a mentor to countless people, including Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Bill Walton. Read the opinion editorial below from legendary basketball coach, mentor and mentoring advocate Coach John Wooden.

My View of Mentoring: “The Cornerstone of Civilization”
By Coach John Wooden

My father gave me many bits of wisdom, but as a teen he said something so profound that it has stayed with me to this day: “There is nothing you know that you haven't learned from someone else.”

He was right then and is still right today. We need to learn from — and teach — others constantly. Thanks to my father’s words, I have lived every day of my 99 years seeking to be mentored and to be a mentor with every opportunity, be it a formal community-based mentoring program, or something as small as a smile to a harried young mother. Any action we take that another might see and seek to emulate is a form of mentoring.

As we celebrate National Mentoring Month, let's commit ourselves to continuing this most important pay-it-forward process and remember that the whole of humanity is built upon the sharing of wisdom.  Mentoring, in short, is the cornerstone of civilization.

Many people look at mentoring as some kind of assignment, something you sign up to do at a local school. And while that type of mentoring is important, that is only one form of it. Mentoring can be any relationship that offers guidance, support or encouragement aimed at developing someone’s competence and character.  Every time we watch someone and make a mental note about that individual’s character or conduct, we’re being mentored. Every time you greet the grocery store checker with a smile or pick up a piece of litter or pat someone on the back, someone may very well be watching you. It’s really about the choices we make — decisions about how we observe the world and decisions we make about the way we act in it. Mentoring can happen at any time or place. It is something we receive and something we give.

When I reflect on my life, I find that the people who stand out are the ones who challenged me with words and inspired me with actions. They taught and they showed and they modeled and they lived and they shared. And even after almost a century of learning, I still find myself seeking out mentors each day — looking for men and women whose lives and examples can teach me how to be a little kinder, a little more understanding, and a little wiser. After all, the day you stop learning, you stop truly living.

It’s not enough to set about finding a mentor; it’s every bit as important to concentrate on becoming one yourself. I always viewed myself as a teacher, not a coach. I wasn’t just calling plays and shaping games, I was instructing young men on how to handle the ball, on how to dominate the court with all the speed they could, how to pass to teammates to make sure that the team worked as a unit. And just as important, I was teaching them how to share the glory, how to win and lose graciously. I sought to teach these boys about more than basketball. I wanted to teach them how to live.

Over the course of my career, I had hundreds of athletes on my teams, but I’ve endeavored to have many more students than that. I know that my life has been blessed with incredible opportunities, and as a result, I have a responsibility to reach out to others in order to share the insights, experiences, heartbreaks, exhilaration—all of the lessons that I’ve managed to accrue through the nearly one hundred years that God has given me on this planet.