Tony Dungy Quotes

Things will go wrong at times. You can't always control your attitude, approach, and response. You options are to complain or to look ahead and figure out how to make the situation better

It's about the journey--mine and yours--and the lives we can touch, the legacy we can leave, and the world we can change for the better.

Remember that mentor leadership is all about serving. Jesus said, “For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve others and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45).

You can't always control circumstances. However, you can always control your attitude, approach, and response. Your options are to complain or to look ahead and figure out how to make the situation better.

The first step toward creating an improved future is developing the ability to envision it. VISION will ignite the fire of passion that fuels our commitment to do WHATEVER IT TAKES to achieve excellence. Only VISION allows us to transform dreams of greatness into the reality of achievement through human action. VISION has no boundaries and knows no limits. Our VISION is what we become in life.

No excuses. No explanations.

I need to treat everybody fairly, but fair doesn't always mean equal.

We often can't see what God is doing in our lives, but God sees the whole picture and His plan for us clearly.

I am a firm believer that the Lord sometimes has to short-circuit even our best plans for our benefit.

Be a pro. • Act like a champion. • Respond to adversity; don’t react. • Be on time. Being late means either it’s not important to you or you can’t be relied upon. • Execute. Do what you’re supposed to do when you’re supposed to do it. Not almost. All the way. Not most of the time. All of the time. • Take ownership. Whatever it takes. No excuses, no explanations.

Engage, educate, equip, encourage, empower, energize, and elevate. Those are the methods for maximizing the potential of any individual, team, organization, or institution for ultimate success and significance. Those are the methods of a mentor leader.

I have yet to hear God's audible voice, although I have often felt led by God in more subtle ways.

It's okay to wander.

even though we can’t always choose our circumstances, we can always choose our attitude in the circumstances.

You’ve got to do your own growing, no matter how tall your grandfather was. Old Irish proverb

Everyone, everywhere, needs encouragement on a regular basis. Start with people you know and add to your list.

Speaking to five thousand people is no more important than quietly teaching one.

Coach Noll had always told me, “Being stubborn is a virtue when you’re right; it’s only a character flaw when you’re wrong.

Talent is God-given; be thankful. Praise is man-given; be humble. Conceit is self-given; be careful. Dave Driscoll

Avoidance doesn’t solve anything; it merely serves as a temporary salve.

Champions don't do extraordinary things, They do ordinary things, but they do them without thinking, too fast for the other team to react. They follow the habits they've learned.

Life is challenging. I wish I could tell you that you’ll always be on top of the mountain, but the reality is that there are days when nothing will go right, when not only will you not be on top, you may not even be able to figure out which way is up. Do yourself a favor, and don’t make it any harder than it has to be. In those moments,      be careful how you speak to yourself;      be careful how you think of yourself;      be careful how you conduct yourself;      be careful how you develop yourself.

I love coaching football, and winning a Super Bowl was a goal I’ve had for a long time. But it has never been my purpose in life. My purpose in life is simply to glorify God. We have to be careful that we don’t let the pursuit of our life’s goals, no matter how important they seem, cause us to lose sight of our purpose. I coach football. But the good I can do to glorify God along the way is my real purpose.

If you start making excuses to cut out the things that are important because of urgent circumstances, it will become a habit, and you’ll start cutting them out regularly.

Seek the Kingdom of God above all else, and live righteously, and he will give you everything you need. Matthew 6:33

Look for opportunities to share a word of comfort and grace with someone today—perhaps through a story of what God has done in your life.

God’s Kingdom is being held in check by any church that is quick to criticize and disrespect others.

It’s sometimes easier to do the wrong thing, but it’s always better to do the right thing.

Don’t worry that children never listen to you; worry that they are always watching you. ROBERT FULGHUM

When society pummels you with messages that make you feel defeated and worthless, listen to the Person who loves you more than anyone else, and receive His gift of grace. Thank Him for it right now.

Moving from desire to actually doing better is only achieved with self-discipline, and self-discipline only works effectively when you trust in Him to help. Amp up your self-discipline in the areas you need it most.

When things happen to us that aren’t exactly what we had hoped for, there are a number of ways we can respond. But there’s only one response that will help us to move on toward the promise of a new day full of opportunities. Get over it, get up, and try it again. Olympian Eric Liddell once said, “In the dust of defeat as well as the laurels of victory there is a glory to be found if one has done his best.” Get over it, get up, and try it again.

So, when it comes to effective leadership, it’s not about you and what makes you comfortable or helps you get ahead. It’s about other people. It’s about serving God by serving others. That’s the mind-set of the mentor leader.

Our parents encouraged us to follow our dreams and told us that if we wanted to do something, we could do it. And, they said, if we did it the Lord's way, for the right reasons, we would be successful. Not that we would win every game or be wealthy, but that we would be successful in God's eyes if we did the things that glorify Him.

Respect isn’t a right. We aren’t entitled to it, and we can never earn it by demanding it. It’s something we earn because of our character—and by giving it to others. If we want to be respected, we have to show ourselves to be worthy of it, not by our status, possessions, or accomplishments, but by honesty, integrity, and responsibility.

The great thing about integrity is that it is truly no respecter of position or wealth or race or gender. It is not determined by shifting circumstances, cultural dynamics, or what you’ve previously achieved. From the moment you are born, you—and you alone—determine whether you will be a person of integrity. Integrity does not come in degrees—low, medium, or high. You either have integrity or you do not. In

To be effective mentor leaders, we must do what Jesus taught us to do: We must reach beyond the boundaries that separate us and connect with people who are different from us.

George Washington is reported to have said, “Associate yourself with men of good quality if you esteem your own reputation; for ’tis better to be alone than in bad company.

The light which experience gives is a lantern on the stern, which shines only on the waves behind us.

Keep the faith that God’s plan is always best. When we walk with Him, we’re walking with someone who knows where He is going.

I will show you my faith by my good deeds.” James 2:17-18

Being disciplined in your approach to each day of your life and accomplishing the things you dream of starts by disciplining your thoughts.” TONY DUNGY, Super Bowl Champion football coach

The only ones among you who will be really happy are those who will have sought and found how to serve. ALBERT SCHWEITZER

Be intentional and choose to envision a life of significance, possibility, and impact.

I know the plans I have for you,” says the LORD. “They are plans for good and not for disaster, to give you a future and a hope.” Jeremiah 29:11

I couldn’t control whether I would be hired for those positions. When you do your part to prepare, you can trust God for the results. In His timing, He’s the one who enlarges your territory. Your job is to make yourself ready for it.

This book is divided into three parts. The first section focuses on how habits emerge within individual lives. It explores the neurology of habit formation, how to build new habits and change old ones, and the methods, for instance, that one ad man used to push toothbrushing from an obscure practice into a national obsession. It shows how Procter & Gamble turned a spray named Febreze into a billion-dollar business by taking advantage of consumers’ habitual urges, how Alcoholics Anonymous reforms lives by attacking habits at the core of addiction, and how coach Tony Dungy reversed the fortunes of the worst team in the National Football League by focusing on his players’ automatic reactions to subtle on-field cues.

It is impossible to please God without faith. Anyone who wants to come to him must believe that God exists and that he rewards those who sincerely seek him. Hebrews 11:6

Dungy sees something that no one else does. He sees proof that his plan is starting to work. Tony Dungy had waited an eternity for this job. For seventeen years, he prowled the sidelines as an assistant coach, first at the University of Minnesota, then with the Pittsburgh Steelers, then the Kansas City Chiefs, and then back to Minnesota with the Vikings. Four times in the past decade, he had been invited to interview for head coaching positions with NFL teams. All four times, the interviews hadn’t gone well. Part of the problem was Dungy’s coaching philosophy. In his job interviews, he would patiently explain his belief that the key to winning was changing players’ habits. He wanted to get players to stop making so many decisions during a game, he said. He wanted them to react automatically, habitually. If he could instill the right habits, his team would win. Period. “Champions don’t do extraordinary things,” Dungy would explain. “They do ordinary things, but they do them without thinking, too fast for the other team to react. They follow the habits they’ve learned.” How, the owners would ask, are you going to create those new habits? Oh, no, he wasn’t going to create new habits, Dungy would answer. Players spent their lives building the habits that got them to the NFL. No athlete is going to abandon those patterns simply because some new coach says to. So rather than creating new habits, Dungy was going to change players’ old ones. And the secret to changing old habits was using what was already inside players’ heads. Habits are a three-step loop—the cue, the routine, and the reward—but Dungy only wanted to attack the middle step, the routine. He knew from experience that it was easier to convince someone to adopt a new behavior if there was something familiar at the beginning and end.3.5 His coaching strategy embodied an axiom, a Golden Rule of habit change that study after study has shown is among the most powerful tools for creating change. Dungy recognized that you can never truly extinguish bad habits. Rather, to change a habit, you must keep the old cue, and deliver the old reward, but insert a new routine. That’s the rule: If you use the same cue, and provide the same reward, you can shift the routine and change the habit. Almost any behavior can be transformed if the cue and reward stay the same.

Three days before Christmas, Tony Dungy’s phone rang in the middle of the night. His wife answered and handed him the receiver, thinking it was one of his players. There was a nurse on the line. Dungy’s son Jamie had been brought into the hospital earlier in the evening, she said, with compression injuries on his throat. His girlfriend had found him hanging in his apartment, a belt around his neck. Paramedics had rushed him to the hospital, but efforts at revival were unsuccessful.3.34 He was gone. A chaplain flew to spend Christmas with the family. “Life will never be the same again,” the chaplain told them, “but you won’t always feel like you do right now.” A few days after the funeral, Dungy returned to the sidelines. He needed something to distract himself, and his wife and team encouraged him to go back to work. “I was overwhelmed by their love and support,” he later wrote. “As a group, we had always leaned on each other in difficult times; I needed them now more than ever.” The team lost their first play-off game, concluding their season. But in the aftermath of watching Dungy during this tragedy, “something changed,” one of his players from that period told me. “We had seen Coach through this terrible thing and all of us wanted to help him somehow.” It is simplistic, even cavalier, to suggest that a young man’s death can have an impact on football games. Dungy has always said that nothing is more important to him than his family. But in the wake of Jamie’s passing, as the Colts started preparing for the next season, something shifted, his players say. The team gave in to Dungy’s vision of how football should be played in a way they hadn’t before. They started to believe.

To bring myself back to a perspective of all that I am in Christ—not according to the world. I need it to remind myself that the world doesn’t define me. I am defined by my relationship with Jesus Christ.

God’s loving plan to save sinners started with Jesus’ death and resurrection. The influence God calls you to have for His Kingdom is very simple: just tell the world what He did for you.

It’s always disappointing when you have a good team but you don’t win it all. But as disappointed as I was, this past season was a good reminder of just how special the 2006 season had been. Most teams don’t end up winning that final game with that perfect ending—just like life. We are thankful for the one time that we did. Those “perfect ending” moments in life need to be savored, as well as the journey itself, whether it ends at the Super Bowl or not.

I was gratified by the way our players had approached each game throughout the season. They had remained focused on the task at hand, playing hard and smart week after week. We didn’t have any turmoil or distractions. We went about our business as usual. To do that in a setting that often was anything but usual is a testament to the character of our players and coaches. Our process worked; we simply picked a bad year to only be very good.

Other people were looking at my decision in terms of “retirement.” I guess that’s the right term—retirement—from the NFL, anyway, the only professional career I have ever known. However, I don’t think that God ever wants us to retire from relevance or significance. We faced a twofold question: what is the best setting for me to continue to do God’s work and how did this fit in with what was best for my family?

This was the fourth time Lauren and I had seriously contemplated whether being a head coach in the National Football League was where the Lord wanted me to be. I was certain after I had been fired by the Bucs in 2001 that God was moving me and my family into a different role, but He had other plans. We evaluated our options again after the 2005 and 2006 seasons with the Colts, each time concluding that coaching the Colts was God’s will for me.

After twelve years as an NFL head coach—six with the Indianapolis Colts—I know that God has provided me with a significant platform that cannot be measured in sheer numbers alone. We are all role models to someone. Speaking to five thousand people is no more important than quietly teaching one. And as long as our hearts are right, God will honor both endeavors, accomplishing what He will in each setting.

I am thankful that in my current role I can mentor other coaches. I interact directly with seventeen coaches on my staff but I’m also trying to be an example to others outside the organization. I want to prove that it’s possible to win or lose while maintaining a calm dignity and respect toward your players, officials, and the opposition. My hope is that my profession can have an impact on countless youth who are looking to their coaches for guidance on sportsmanship, how effort pays off, and the other life lessons that come from competing.

When people criticize you, it’s not always for your actions but for what you represent. If they’re really criticizing you for your faith, it’s important to maintain your focus and continue on the pathway that God has set before you, even in the midst of criticism.

Building a life of significance, and creating a legacy of real value, means being willing to get your hands dirty. It means being willing to step out in your life and onto the platforms of influence you’ve been given and touch the lives of people in need. Whether it’s in your business, your school, your community, or your family, if you want to make a difference in the lives of the people you lead, you must be willing to walk alongside them, to lift and encourage them, to share moments of understanding with them, and to spend time with them, not just shout down at them from on high. Mentors build mentors. Leaders build leaders. When you look at it closely, it’s really one and the same thing.

Without Peyton, there would be no Lucas Oil Stadium. This team would be playing in L.A. right now. I don't understand Jim saying this.

But when Christ said, “It is finished” and breathed His last breath on the cross, the curtain covering the “Holy of Holies” was immediately torn in half, signifying that we now had—through Christ’s death—direct access to God the Father. It’s still hard to fathom. But the picture of Him standing with open arms waiting for me, rather than being unapproachable behind a curtain, is a welcoming vision.

I needed to do my current job well, keep preparing, and wait on God’s timing. I needed to trust His leadership rather than try to force an outcome I wanted.

Tony Dungy, the new head coach of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers—one of the worst teams in the National Football League,

For people will love only themselves and their money. They will be boastful and proud, scoffing at God, disobedient to their parents, and ungrateful. They will consider nothing sacred. 2 Timothy 3:2

You’ll not find the life God intended for you in relationships seeking immediate and personal gratification—even the

I love coaching football, and winning a Super Bowl was a goal I’ve had for a long time. But it has never been my purpose in life. My purpose in life is simply to glorify God.

Albert Camus once said, “Integrity has no need of rules.” I tend to agree.

also made it abundantly clear that no one was indispensable. We knew that if one of our star players was injured, we could still play well and still win. So even though we had many Hall of Fame players, our games were never about individual accomplishments. Teamwork was valued above all. It was not about “I” or “me” but about “us” and “we.” This was the primary reason that Coach Noll brought in assistant coaches from the college ranks. Similarly, when he traded players away (like me!), he always looked to get draft picks in return, not players from other teams. He wanted people who would buy into the “Steeler Way” and not try to bring other ideas into play. Other teams may have good ideas that work well for them, but we would win the Steeler Way. And every Steeler believed that, which is one of the reasons we were so successful.

Transformation doesn’t happen overnight, and yet incremental changes in diet and exercise can make dramatic differences when done consistently over a period of time. Health and satisfaction result. And hope.

I am convinced that nothing can ever separate us from God’s love. Neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither our fears for today nor our worries about tomorrow—not even the powers of hell . . . nothing in all creation will ever be able to separate us from the love of God that is revealed in Christ Jesus our Lord. ROMANS 8:38-39

The little things we fail to do or fail to see—and the result is less than we planned. The little things we fail to do can make us come up short of where we wanted to be. How many victories in our lives are we missing because we fail to do the little things or we pull up just a couple of yards short? How many victories in our lives are just around the next corner, but we stop walking and never get to that corner?

But more and more, people will say things and then later claim they were misunderstood or were simply joking. I think the real misunderstanding was their lack of understanding of how their words would be received.

If we can’t separate what we do from who we are, we’ll be defined by the words of people who really aren’t qualified to shape our identities. And if their words are negative, our perception of ourselves takes a huge blow.

Determine where you are and make adjustments. Stay close to God, and let His wisdom and leading guide you.

UNCOMMON KEY > It is by grace, not works, that you are saved. However, your works may shed significant light on whether you ever had the moment of life-changing salvation that Christ offers.

Perception doesn’t accomplish goals; substance does. Know who you really are and where you are going, and then pursue your goals.

on what God can do through us—and on His promise that if we delight in Him, He will give us the desires of our hearts—we become confident and able to achieve whatever we were designed to achieve.

It’s true that this kind of living feels like a sacrifice, which is the term Paul used in Romans 12:1. But I’m telling you from firsthand experience that once you decide to live by God’s plan, you’ll save yourself from lots of pain and grief. Think of it: you don’t have to cover up a sin you never committed. You don’t have to perpetuate a lie you never told. You don’t have to hide a habit you never picked up. Righteousness may require sacrifice initially, but over time? Right living is a relief.

Personal relationships are the fertile soil from which all advancement, all success, all achievement in real life grows. BEN STEIN

God was very intentional about your design, your opportunities, and your purpose. Thank Him and look for ways to use what He has given you in the best way possible.

UNCOMMON KEY > Be a gracious and authentic person for Christ—He can do wonders through your interactions with others for His Kingdom. Be ready to learn and possibly share your own knowledge.

You only go around once in this life. You can spend it looking for the negative, or like Buck O’Neil, you can use God’s gift of life as an opportunity for joy and grace.

Wise people treasure knowledge, but the babbling of a fool invites disaster. PROVERBS 10:14

God has given you one life to live—make it count for Him. Carpe diem—seize the day! Today and tomorrow and the next day . . . as long as He determines.

Gather ye rosebuds while you may, Old time is still a-flying; And this same flower that smiles today Tomorrow will be dying.

young

For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve others and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45).