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If you’re like most coaches, I’m sure you think you can’t be bothered with worrying about how happy your players are…after all, it sometimes seems as if they’re unhappy no matter what you do! Don’t worry, this isn’t a post about how to handle grumpy players, but rather how to empower them to take ownership of their feelings.
According to this TEDtalk by Shawn Achor called, The Happy Secret To Better Work, we tend to think the external world is responsible for our happiness, when in reality, scientists can predict happiness based on the way our brains process the world.
That means if we choose to take a positive outlook on things, we’ll feel happiness…and vice versa. Therefore, we can accurately tell our athletes that happiness is a choice rather than a feeling. Taking it a step further, we can challenge them to choose happiness over grumpiness, over complaining, over moping about their station on the team.
What happy people do
- They earn starting positions on our teams,
- They keep those starting spots,
- They produce at a higher level in practices and games,
- They’re more resilient in the face of adversity,
- They’re still fired up about the sport at the end of the season…they’re not burned out,
- They stay…happy players don’t transfer or quit.
That sounds great, right? But how do we foster this in our athletes?
How to become positive
Achor had five exercises that he used with schools and companies to encourage folks to become happy with their present and I think they’d be easy for us coaches to institute with our teams. He says that if we do this for two minutes a day for twenty-one days, we can affect our happiness.
- 3 gratitudes. Asking our players to write down three things they’re happy about everyday can help them shift their focus from the negative to the positive. I’m trying to remember a time when I asked an athlete how their classes were going and they said three positive things…I can’t recall a time that actually happened.
- Journaling. I’ve heard of coaches using journals with their teams and this could be a good addition to that. Through his studies, Achor found that people started looking for positive things in life rather than looking for the bad stuff…which increased their happiness.
- Exercise. This one is easy for us!
- Meditation. I hadn’t heard this term until I saw this video and I instantly loved it: cultural ADD. That’s what he calls our obsession with multitasking and trying to do a million things at once. Praying, meditating, or just being still are ways to counter that desire and really think about something that’s been positive in our day.
- Random acts of kindness. Not like the Oprah random acts (which sometimes cost money), this could be just sending an unsolicited positive email to someone in our social circle. Imagine if we challenged our teams to send out nice emails every day for twenty-one days…they’d feel awesome and their friends and family would wonder what happened to them!
So there you have it. We all think we’ll be happy after we’ve been successful, but in actuality, our brains don’t work that way. Let’s work on creating a team of players with positive brains.
For more on happiness and Positive Psychology, check out these posts: The Secrets Of Happy Teams, Why Having Less Options Will Make Your Team Happier, and The Evolution Of Happy Teams.
