I’m fascinated about the ins and outs of creating successful teams. And I think, whether you’re interested in sustaining a streak your team is on or you’re trying to create a new norm of success, we should all try to use whatever means that are available to us to reach that end.
Storytelling should be one of the tools in our toolbox.
One of the things I always say to my team is that my job is to get the ideas I have about volleyball out of my head and into theirs, because after all, I’m finished playing…what use are they to me now? If I can get them thinking strategically about our sport the way I do, we’re going somewhere! I think it’s the same with motivation.
As Nancy Duarte says in her TEDtalk titled, The Secret Structure of Great Talks, ideas are the single most powerful tool known to man…but they’re powerless if they stay inside of us. I believe using stories can motivate our teams to move from where they are now to where we, as coaches, see them going in the future.
But how do we tell a story that resonates with our players?
Duarte talks about the simple structure of a story and I’ve related it to coaching:
- First, you have the likeable hero. For us, that’s our team. If our season were a movie, we’d hope that the watchers would be pulling for our team to pull out the big win.
- Second, our hero (the team) encounters road blocks. Those road blocks could be an arch rival they haven’t beaten in years, it could be a long losing streak, or it could be a crisis of confidence in their star player.
- Third, our team emerges transformed. They’ve faced the beastly road block and conquered it.
We can all imagine telling our team this story, right? We’d sit them down and talk about how hard they’ve worked and how much potential we see in them. And that the road ahead is going to be difficult and not for the faint of heart…but we believe in them and believe they’ll come out the other side a more united and prepared team than they were before the crisis. It’s a great and, I believe, motivating story.
The secret is to be genuinely excited about the team and the possibilities of their greatness…we can’t fake the funk. Also, we have to be honest about the challenges the team will face, our players can sniff out dishonesty in about .02 seconds. If our story can juxtapose the challenge against the joy they’ll feel once they’ve reached their goals, then we’ve successfully motivated our team to keep fighting and plugging away in practice.
I get excited just writing about this, because I believe we have the power to frame our seasons for our players and give them the motivation they desire to keep pushing on.
Want to hear more about using storytelling as a motivational tool? Check out How To Use Storytelling To Motivate Your Team.
