Andrew Whitworth
Leadership is a position where you want to create the opportunity to inspire people to walk along beside you, not listen to what you say.Collection: Leadership
If you're a true warrior, competition doesn't scare you. It makes you better.
I don't ever think a day is a perfect day. There's always something.
I've always been known for speeding up the tempo. To me, that's just the way you play the game - aggressive. There's no time to rest. You rest on the sidelines.
As I say, 'Every tackle's nightmare is third and long.'
At the end of the day, who you are as a man is more important than who you are as a football player.
As long as I'm here living and breathing, I'm going to be moving.
No matter what job you have, you're in control of your attitude. That, to me, is my biggest focus every day - being on the energy bus.
You learn the most by listening and so, to me, always just listening, always just paying attention and finding out what it is that people see in somebody like them. You find those things, and you try to figure out how to fit them into who you are, who you want to be, and how you want to lead.
The bottom line is the best way to lead is to play well.
As an older lineman, if you start to sit around, you get stiff. You get tired. Things start to set in.
I love Cincinnati, and I want to be there.
You see some of these guys that lead in sacks every year, but they only play on third down or only play in certain situations.
Every team, in some sense, plays dirty. The game of football is dirty.
I want the young guys to say, 'How old is this guy that's blocking me every play?'
Being a mentor and a leader, I've always urged guys, if you're ever allowed to be a free agent, to take advantage of that opportunity.
I love opportunities to do something I'm not supposed to be able to do. Hell, that's my career.
If you went and found my draft bio, I wasn't supposed to play left tackle, and I sure as hell wasn't supposed to play it for 12 years.
Joey Porter is not one of the people I have respect for. His unprofessionalism is ridiculous.
I feel like what's made me the player I am is always being willing to take the challenge.
There's a lot of veteran players that, honestly, being comfortable where they play is more important. And that's just not me.
Most tall golfers don't have a lot of success. You have trouble getting steep on the ball too much. Stance, posture, all those things can be bad.
I'm a technician. It's like that in football and the same way in golf. I want to try to find a way that I can swing the club properly. Over the years, it's getting better and better.
It's our country. I have a lot of pride in it and the flag and what that's about and all the people who fought for it.
Freedom is a part of protest as well.
People fought hard for freedoms; they didn't fight hard for one mentality. If you really talk about what the country was founded on and what those people are protecting who went to war and fought these wars and give us our freedoms and are fighting for our freedoms, I think you have to really ask yourself what is involved in freedom.
I think the way to maximize not just your leadership but your ability to influence your team is whatever you can do that helps the team perform at a really high level.
When you get into these NFL rushers - the power, the speed, the bull rush, and all those kind of things - it's just different than college football.
Leadership, to me, is about the ability to have people want to hear what you have to say. People want to be around you, people want to believe in what you tell them, and they feel good when they walk away from you about who they are and what they're doing.
My mentality is always to seek perfection, and you'll find that if you can get somewhere close to it or in the vicinity of that, that's good.
You see guys that have been in the league for a long time and have taken that opportunity to not only make their game better but to make the people around them better. And to help them know things that maybe you wish you had known.
It's cool when the O-line gets the chance to get some notoriety.
I've got two contracts in my life. One, with my wife because we're married. And, two, I've got a contract to protect Andy Dalton. I'll do both of those to the best of my ability.
To me, it's about always trying to make decisions that reflect my leadership and who I am.
Mess up and draft somebody at my position, because you are going to sit around and watch him sit the bench. That's always been my mentality. I see it as a challenge.
I don't think it's a coincidence this happened. God does things for a reason ... It's a good message for back home.Collection: Home
I've got two contracts in my life: One with my wife and the other to protect Andy Dalton.Collection: Two
Part of my job being a leader and captain of the team is not just to play well and lead well but find a way to make everybody around me better.Collection: Jobs
A yoga session is harder than a football practice easily for me. Probably in some ways just as intense, not from a physical standpoint of hitting ,but from a game, the intensity is the same.Collection: Football
I think yoga is like anything else, it's a workout in the sense you are going to get what you put into it.Collection: Workout