Monthly Archives: July 2014

Follow These 8 Principles To Reach Success

Coaching philosophy

Success1source

In a TEDtalk titled, Success is a Continuous Journey, Richard St. John talked about being on top of the heap…and then getting complacent, overconfident, and cocky. Which led him losing all of his clients and the aforementioned success. He realized success is a journey and not a destination. The talk is less than four minutes long, so he didn’t elaborate on his steps to success, but I will put my coach spin on things!

8 things we shouldn’t stop doing…especially once we’re successful

  1. Passion. I haven’t met a coach who isn’t passionate about their sport. I think it’s safe to say that enthusiasm for our sport is a necessity in order to reach any measure of success.
  2. Work. A few years ago, there was a popular book which said that good things would just come to you if you thought they would. I’m all for positive thinking and visualizing and all of that good stuff…I think a positive mindset is critical in whatever field you’re in. I’ve not met a coach who said, “we had the best season of my career and I didn’t do anything!” Combining that positive frame of mind with a whole lot of hard work will yield results.
  3. Focus. If each of us focused on learning something new about our sport or about coaching in general everyday, success would surely follow.
  4. Push. There will be tough times, there always are, but we can’t give up. You can’t lose a couple of games and decide that maybe coaching isn’t for you. You can’t make a coaching mistake and decide that you’re a bad coach. Push through the bad times to the good that are surely waiting for you.
  5. Ideas. Whether you’ve got a player who isn’t performing up to their potential or an opponent you’ve never beaten before, fresh ideas are a necessity in coaching. It seems like players (and their problems) are like snowflakes…no two are the same! We’ve got to be able to tackle on and off-court issues with an arsenal of innovative ideas.
  6. Improve. We’ve got to be willing to get better. I was talking to a “big time” coach a few months ago and he said there were days he felt like he knew nothing about our sport. I’m sure that was his way of putting pressure on himself to keep getting better and pushing himself to keep learning.
  7. Serve. Successful people serve others. Whenever you read interviews of wealthy people, they generally talk about donating a considerable portion of their income to charity. And most sports teams do some form of community service work or volunteering. The teams may do it out of a sense of humanity/morality/trying to be decent, but teams can also learn what they can achieve together. Beyond that, community service events are great team bonding experiences.
  8. Persist. Jimmy V. said, “Don’t give up, don’t ever give up!” I agree.



With the fall season right around the corner, we can all use a few reminders to keep pressing on toward the goal.

 

Great Coaching Advice…From A Coach Smarter Than Me

Coaching career

damngoodadvicesource

The first year I started coaching, I went to my first major coaching convention. A week-long affair, I learned so much about the profession that I thought my head would explode. As a young coach, fresh out of college, I was living in a parallel universe of reliving my past glory as an athlete and trying to gain respect as a coach.

While at this convention, one of the speakers (unfortunately, I can’t remember her name) gave me two nuggets that I still remember to this day…this is the aforementioned great coaching advice:

  • You can’t be a great coach until you stop trying to be a great player.
  • No Sh*t Coaching (N.S.C.)…more on that later.



Great player
I received an email from a reader recently and she’s been doing the camp circuit over the summer and felt that her fellow camp coaches didn’t respect her because she didn’t play in college. I told her, like I’d tell anyone, that we all have to learn to be coaches…playing doesn’t prepare you for the profession. How many of us know folks who were all-Americans in college, but can’t figure out how to teach a movement or skill? Coaching isn’t about playing, it’s about teaching, leading, motivating, prodding, believing, and guiding a group of people. Coaching is a learned profession and you don’t learn it from playing. You learn it by doing and by studying those who’ve gone before you.

Captain Obvioussource

N.S.C.
“Get the serve over the net!”-volleyball coach
“Make this shot!”-basketball coach
“Run fast!”-track coach

No Sh*t Coaching is stating the obvious. Using the examples above: Of course volleyball players should serve the ball over the net, does a coach really need to say that? Will a basketball player become better if his coach tells him he should make a shot immediately after he’s missed it? Does the sprinter really not know that she’s supposed to run fast? It is track after all.

When the speaker said this, it was the beginning of my desire to really delve deeply into my sport, to learn the hows and whys of each movement and every assumption that I had about volleyball. I’d advise every coach to go beyond the surface level coaching and give your athletes critiques and corrections that they will be able to use to become better versions of themselves.

Hopefully you find the speaker’s advice as great as I did!

How To Motivate Our Teams

Mental game, Team chemistry, TEDtalk

motivationsource

Daniel Pink focuses on how we’re motivated in a TEDtalk called, “The Puzzle of Motivation“. He spends a lot of time going into why we’re going at motivation all wrong and in an outdated way. In example after example, he shows us that offering up rewards (or delivering the promise of punishment) doesn’t work in today’s world. The talk is about eighteen minutes long…check it out!

His talk is coming from a business point of view, so certainly a lot different than the world of athletics. The athletic “business model” allows for some behaviors that would be outside of the norm for an office setting, but I think we can learn from a lot of what Pink says. Our athletes are growing up in this world where they want to be internally motivated and I think most of us can agree that a motivated athlete is an engaged athlete.

Pink says that traditional ideas of management (you get more money if you perform a task quicker, etc.) are great if you want compliance, but if you want engagement, self-direction works better. And this is where I see the athletic world as being a bit different…because sometimes coaches do just want compliance. If we see a weakness in our opponent that our team can take advantage of, we just want to players to do exactly what we say and not ask questions.

On the other side of the coin, we need our athletes to be able to identify trends within a game without us telling them every second. Most sports don’t have tons of timeouts where we can relay information, so we rely on our players to understand what they’re seeing, remember the scouting report, and react to those things in an appropriate manner.

So how do we create this engaged (passionate, hard-working, accountable), yet compliant, player? If I knew, I’d be a gazillionaire! But I have some ideas.

  • Create trust. And not just that the coaches know what you’re talking about, but that you care about your players and want the best for them.
  • Build in autonomy when possible. We’ve done 30-day challenges in the off-season where each player was responsible for their own work. As coaches, we focused on why this was important and how each person’s contribution was vital to our success. Pink says we all have an urge to direct our own lives. I think this is a great way to give them autonomy, but within a team construct.
  • Have amazing team chemistry. Huge! If you don’t got it, go get it. If you got it, fight like heck to keep it.
  • Empower leaders. Pink talked about self-direction within the business world and I think a great way to bring that to athletics is a captain-led practice. It teaches your captains how to lead, plus you’ll find out what drills the team likes and what things they think they need to work on…a win-win.



There you have it! Let’s all get out there and motivate our teams.

Non-Verbal Communication

Coaching strategy, Mental game, TEDtalk

power posesource

“Our bodies change our minds
And our minds change our behavior
And our behavior changes our outcomes.“

In a TEDtalk called Your Body Language Shapes Who You Are by Amy Cuddy, I learned that how we present ourselves is amazingly powerful. And not in the way that you think. It’s how you present yourself to yourself…not necessarily to others. The findings of assuming powerful positions, like my man Frank Underwood up above, are pretty astounding. I’d suggest you watch the talk, it’s about twenty minutes long and well worth your time.

It turns out that folks in studies who assumed high power poses for two minutes and then were put through an intense interview situation were seen as:

  • Passionate
  • Enthusiastic
  • Captivating
  • Comfortable
  • Authentic
  • Confident



Which all sound like the qualities we’re looking for in our athletes! Apparently, powerful people are more assertive, confident, and optimistic than their less powerful peers. They think more abstractly and take more risks, as well. It turns out that power isn’t only about dominance, but how you react to stress. The high-power pose people in the studies had hormonal changes from just two minutes of assuming their powerful positions.

Here are some examples of high power vs. low power poses:

power pose2source

I’ll add as a side note that checking your phone is also a low-power pose, because you’re making yourself smaller. The high power poses are all about making yourself bigger and taking up space.

What if we had our teams take on high power poses before each competition? The studies seem to show that their bodies will physiologically react to the pose with a more powerful view of themselves. I’m willing to try it…are you?

Advice For New Coaches

Coaching philosophy, Mistakes

failuresource

I was watching the local news last night and my favorite station was debuting a new meteorologist. Just for background, I live in a smallish city, so we seem to be the testing ground for all new and untested TV personalities.

This poor guy was so bad, tripped over his words so often, and had so many awkward pauses that I turned the channel. Not because I was upset that I couldn’t figure out what the weather was supposed to be…but because I was terribly uncomfortable for the guy. Then I forced myself to turn back, because we’ve all been there. We’ve all been new. We’ve all been driving the struggle bus. We’ve all failed.

It’s not that he didn’t know his weather-man stuff, I’m sure he does! His trouble wasn’t with knowledge, it was with speaking actual words. But lest you think I’m making fun of his failure, I most certainly am not. I’ve got a story of epic failure, too…as I’m sure most coaches worth their salt do.

Dawn’s story of new-coach failure

My first coaching gig was with a club team. I was super organized. The team was well-prepared. I’d done all the appropriate teaching, motivating, and leading. We were ready! As the team did our warmup (that I’d stolen from some of the best and most successful teams), the official came over and handed me a lineup sheet.

I’d never seen one before. So I wrote down the six numbers of the people who were going to be starting.

When he did the obligatory check at the beginning of the game, he came over and said everyone was in the wrong place. I had to use, like, six substitutions just to be able to start the game with the correct lineup. The team was looking at me like, “what’s going on?” and I’m sure I had some stupid look on my face.

Whoops!

I couldn’t even think about coaching the team, because I was mortified at my mistake and my lack of knowledge. But I did keep coaching that team and many teams after it. That horrific mess of coaching was seventeen years ago.

Moral of the story

You’re going to screw up. It’s pretty much guaranteed. The only thing you don’t know is how that failure will present itself. It could be like my poor meteorologist who couldn’t do the basics of human communication or like myself, who thought I had all of my I’s dotted and T’s crossed…only to get tripped up by a simple lineup sheet.

Sometimes failure is the only way to learn. I can assure you that even to this day, I triple check my lineup sheet to make sure it’s correct. Beyond that, we learn that we’ll live through the embarrassment of failure. We learn that failure isn’t the worst thing in the world.

Michael Jordan said, “I’ve failed over and over again in my life, and that’s why I succeed”…wise words.

Play Like A Girl

Female athletes

Little Girl Holding Basketballsource

I don’t know if you’ve seen this #LikeAGirl youtube video, but you should check it out. The throw/run/play/etc. “like a girl” phrase is still a thing on athletic fields and PE classes all over the country. Watch this video, share it, and show it to the young people you coach

Like A Girl