Monthly Archives: January 2015

4 Lessons Our Athletes Need In Order To Measure Their Success

Goal setting, Mental game

measure-successsource

“Bloom where you’re planted” and lots of other clichés (“when life hands you lemons, make lemonade”) are created to help people deal with the fact they’re not where they want to be in life.

Now I’m not naïve enough to think that every student-athlete that I coach has dreamed of attending my institution since they were little tykes. I know that most, if not all, of them would love to play at Big Time State University if they could. They’d get all sorts of gear, they’d be on television every weekend, they’d be big-timers.

You might be in another situation. Maybe a player thought they’d make Varsity and only made JV, or they thought they’d make the “1” team and ended up on the “2”…whatever it is, we’ve got to get them fired up about moving forward rather than looking back.

4 tips we can give our athletes to refocus their goals and have measurable success

  1. Don’t make general plans. Saying, “I want to start” or “I want our team to win conference” isn’t a specific goal. Instead of vague, “I just want to help the team” type goals, let’s focus them on figuring out how they can get better every day. I know of some coaches who have their athletes fill out a goal sheet at the end of each practice. They set a mini goal and then write down whether or not they accomplished that goal.
  2. Award incremental positives. Goals are hard enough to accomplish without waiting until you’re standing on the championship podium! If the player has been able to string a bunch of great games together, be sure to give her a pat on the back. If she wins a smaller award, like all-tournament team, be sure to make it a big deal. Being good is hard, being good over a long period of time is a lot harder…celebrate small victories.
  3. Read. So many times, our athletes are only focused on reading for classwork…it’s rare for them to read for fun during the school year. That’s why I read a book with my team each year. Reading it as a team helps each person to carry the load of the book, because they sign up for chapters and are then responsible for teaching their teammates the content. Picking books that will make them better leaders, players, or help them overcome a mental barrier has been critical to helping my athletes be successful.
  4. Don’t wait for something to happen to you. A few years ago, there was a book that made the “Law of Attraction” popular. The Law said that if you thought about something enough and had enough positive thoughts about it…whatever the thing was that you really wanted would come to fruition. Those of us who live in the real world understand that good things don’t just happen, we’ve got to hustle for them. It’s a great lesson to teach our athletes. If they want amazing things to happen in their lives, hard work and success have a reciprocal relationship.

The idea for this post came to me after reading A Checklist for Measuring Your Success on Huffington Post. As the clichés have a fun way of telling us, we have the ability to take life’s disappointments and turn them into opportunities.

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Why I Love When My Team Makes Mistakes

Mistakes

eraser and word mistakessource

You will become clever through your mistakes.—German proverb

I’m old enough to have accumulated a long list of mistakes. Small ones like locking my key in the car to big ones. I’d like to tell you a little story of a big one I made during my freshman year of college.

Dawn’s doozy of a mistake

I went to a big time school to play volleyball. I walked on and earned a full scholarship by the second semester of my freshman year. We were pretty good, nationally ranked, so I wasn’t seeing much playing time early on. I tell you this to help you understand why I thought I’d be able to get away with my doozy.

We were all excited to play another big time team on our schedule. On the bus, as we were driving to play this game (against the team that would ultimately win the national championship that season), I made a realization. A gut-wrenching, sweat-inducing, stomach-turning realization. I didn’t pack my uniforms.

I didn’t tell anyone. We warmed up in our warmup shirts, so still, no one was the wiser. When we went out to play, I kept my jacket on…so no one knew. I thought I could get away with it.

But then it happened.

My coach looked down the bench, as coaches do when the players on the court aren’t doing what they should be doing, and motioned for me to come sit next to him. I knew what that meant and in my head I’m screaming “No! No! No!” because I thought I’d get away without anyone knowing I’d forgotten my uniform.

As I slinked over to whisper to an assistant coach (I certainly wasn’t telling the head coach!) that I didn’t have my uniform, I realized from her very annoyed look (and the very ticked look I got from the head coach when it was whispered to him) that I was in loads and loads of trouble.

Why mistakes are important

Quite simply, mistakes are important because we learn from them. As is said in an article I found over at Psychology Today, What’s Your Favorite Mistake, big mistakes that leave “you feeling hot-faced with shame” lead to innovation. After my doozy of a mistake, I came up with a buddy system for checking teammate’s bags before we left for a trip. I even created a checklist (because someone was always forgetting socks, hair ties, etc.) of must-haves for every travel bag.

So, while I ran what surely added up to a marathon in sprints that season, I never forgot anything again. And neither did anyone I played with…nor have any of the players I’ve coached.

The same thing happens with sport skills. When we challenge our players to take a risk, they sometimes make that big, huge, mistake that is just embarrassing when you come right down to it. When that embarrassment seeps over them, “like hot acid” according to the PT author, that’s a feeling they don’t want to replicate. And it’s that feeling that propels them to figure out ways to solve that problem. That feeling forces our athletes to be more thoughtful, more creative, and more focused on problem solving.

Odd as it may seem, we’ve got to teach our players to embrace failing and be okay with making mistakes. Only then will they truly feel the impetus to get better.

If you liked this post, I’ll bet you’d enjoy 3 Reasons Why Making Mistakes Is Vital To Your Team’s Success, The Secrets To Greatness Are Within Your Control, and M Is For Mistakes: The Value Of Taking Risks.