Notre Dame's Manti Te'o: The 5 Steps to Authentic Leadership

Notre Dame's Manti Te'o: The 5 Steps to Authentic Leadership: My mother was rabidly Irish and my father rabidly Catholic so it was perhaps inevitable that as a boy I would rabidly root for Notre Dame. Over the years I've lost most of my taste for football, but Notre Dame’s remarkable success this year triggered some left over nostalgia that I didn't know I had. In fact, I recently found myself rooting around the web just trying to find out how Notre Dame first got its sobriquet the Fighting Irish. I never did find out, but I stumbled instead on this interview with Notre Dame’s star defense-man  Manti Te’o. Anything but a typical “jock piece,” Te’o movingly describes the prayer that eventually sent a young Mormon man with a lifelong dream of playing for Southern Cal to Catholic Notre Dame instead. But more impressive still, is his description of the mid-season death of the young woman he loved and the wisdom he learned from her. Before every game, for example, his girlfriend would write a note from her hospital bed urging him to always be “humble.” And if the tone of his interview is any indication, then this remarkable young man has taken her lessons to heart.