Monthly Archives: May 2017

Rediscovering The Value Of Sleep

The coaching world is notorious for bad habits. In season, we don’t eat healthy enough, exercise properly enough, or get nearly enough sleep. Unfortunately, some coaches wear all of these things as a badge of honor, being sure to let everyone know that they were in the office until midnight and back in at six in the morning. In a short TEDtalk (a little over four minutes) called How To Succeed? Get More Sleep, Arianna Huffington talked about three reasons why sleep is important for us.

3 reasons why getting enough sleep will make us better professionals

Helps us see the big picture. Whether you’ve got a couple of players battling it out for a position, or an opponent who presents a significant challenge, or just an athlete with poor technique…sometimes sleeping on it really does work. As much as we hate to admit it, sometimes we’re too close to the problem and need to take a step back. I like to chat with my assistant coaches and then all of us come up with an idea that we think will work to solve the problem. We all bring it back to the group and come up with the best option.
Releases the great ideas within us. I’m a dreamer. Not in the I-never-actually-get-anything-done way, but the I-wanna-change-the-world way. All of our teams and seasons start with a dream. We call them goals so that they sound a little more tangible than dreams. I’ve woken up with great ideas about offensive and defensive systems, how to handle team “problems”, and even off the wall motivation techniques.
Shows us that what’s good for us can be good for our greater community. This is my plea: coaches really do need to sleep. We’ve got to be at our best so that we can be the best for our athletes, for our families, for our departments, and of course, for ourselves. We’re not being selfish, we’re not being bad coaches, and we can still be successful if we get good sleep.

Changing the culture of athletics will require a paradigm shift, for sure. But sleep deprivation isn’t the way to show we’re dedicated, creative, living healthily. Neither should it be some sort of badge of honor we wear to show what hard workers we are. Our team’s success and satisfaction with our program should be how we show our level of hard work…not when we clock in and out.

Want to hear more about sleep deprivation? Check out my post, What’s The 1 Thing You Need To Be Exceptional?

The Coach As GPS: Step by Step Directions to Goal Setting

Goal settingSuccess

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There is always a huge gap between the birth of a dream and the achievement of that dream.
–Put Your Dream To The Test

Every team starts out the year with high goals…things they’d like to have accomplished by season’s end. What every team does not have is the desire, tenacity, and motivation to keep pursuing the goal when (cliché alert!) the going gets tough. Let’s discuss how to keep our teams and our athletes on track in this third of a three-part series (click here to read parts one and two) while examining the last five questions from the book, Put Your Dream To The Test by John Maxwell. I believe that guiding them through this goal setting process can help them to accomplish individual and team goals put them on the path to having a successful season.

The People Question: Have I Included the People I Need to Realize My Dream?
“Convincing others of the significance of your dream can happen only if you are convinced of the significance of your dream.” This question is for people who need to build a team around them in order to be successful, but our athletes come with a ready-made team! Now all you’ve got to do is remind them that the goal can only be accomplished through daily work. Everyone’s fired up at the beginning of the season, but what about when you’ve suffered a heartbreaking loss, or midterms are kicking their butts, or it’s just harder than they thought? That’s when we can remind them that they’re not alone and that they’re in it together.

The Cost Question: Am I Willing to Pay the Price for My Dream?
“All dreams are outside our comfort zone. Leaving that zone is a price we must pay to achieve them.” What’s the price, you ask? Criticism: what if one of your players thinks that she can be in the WNBA and has decided to make that one of her goals? When she tells people, they may try to dissuade her from pursuing that goal…not to be mean or negative, but in protecting her feelings. Fear: using our same example, that’s a big out-of-her-comfort-zone goal…and it’s scary. If she’s not willing to work through being afraid that she’s bitten off more than she can chew, then she should get a smaller goal. Hard work: athletics is hard work on its own. Adding a big, huge goal heaps a whole lot more work to their plate…are they willing to pay that price?

The Tenacity Question: Am I Moving Closer to My Dream?
“The only guarantee for failure is to stop trying.” Your athletes have to be finishers, not just starters. It’s really that simple. As Dory from Finding Nemo says, “just keep swimming.” Don’t quit, don’t give up. As long as they keep putting in work everyday, their goals are getting closer and more real.

The Fulfillment Question: Does Working Toward My Dream Bring Satisfaction?
“If you want the pursuit of your dream to be sustainable, it needs to bring you satisfaction.” Maxwell says that there’s a gap between stating the goal and achieving the goal…and it only gets bigger with a larger goal. If your athletes appreciate the process of working toward a goal, they will discover how tough they are. And that toughness will serve them well and keep them from wavering.

The Significance Question: Does My Dream Benefit Others?
“Start doing what is necessary; then do what is possible; and suddenly, you are doing the impossible.” I think the answer to this question is two-fold. For the individual, the team will benefit from their goals. For the team, future teams will benefit from the current team’s goals. And I just love this quotation! If our athletes and teams just do what is necessary…at least they’re working toward the goal. What is necessary? Coming to practice and working hard, supporting their teammates, and giving their all in each and every drill at each and every practice. And if they do what is possible, then they’ll challenge themselves…because how do they know what they’re capable of or what is possible for them if they don’t try new things? If they do what is possible everyday, all of a sudden those things that they thought were impossible are possible. And they just keep pushing the envelope and keep getting better and those goals are getting closer and closer.

That’s the end of our goal setting series and I hope you found at least one thing that you can put into action with your team right away. Every team and every person will have different goals, but we coaches can have one plan to guide them along that goal setting process.

4 Secrets Of Productive Coaches

Coaching careerProductivity

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I read a lot of business blogs and magazines, because I believe there’s a strong connection between coaching and the business world. Teamwork, leadership, excelling within a group construct…I think we coaches can learn a lot from the CEO’s and presidents of the world. This article on Inc.com, Secrets of the Most Productive People I Know, is one of those that I think is valuable to coaches. Here’s my take on that post:

4 keys to being the best coach you can be

They have a life. I know we coaches take pride in “getting after it” and working ‘til all hours of the night, so much so, it almost seems like we wear not taking days off as a badge of honor. But what if doing something of value outside of our jobs made us better at our jobs? Maybe you teach a Sunday School class at church, or take guitar lessons, or landscape your yard nicely. Whatever it is, having an outlet to take our minds off of the grind keeps us refreshed and excited for work when we get back to it.

They take breaks. Like assembling a thousand piece puzzle of the sky, our teams can present us with challenges. When we’re working on that puzzle and staring and ten pieces that look like they should fit, but don’t, sometimes we get up from the table, push our chair in, and come back to the puzzle later. In the same manner, when our team is experiencing a problem, sometimes we need to step away from racking our brains trying to find the elusive solution.

They’ve often worked in different industries. Whether it’s coaching at multiple levels or even different sports, it’s helpful to have a different perspective of what “normal” is. It seems that a lot of coaches come from the playing ranks (like me) and don’t necessarily have experience with different ways to skin a cat. Early on in my career, I would watch other sport coaches with their teams. I’d take notes about how the coach set up their practice, how they interacted with their team, how their drills flowed into the next, how they opened practice, how they closed practice, everything. Even for established coaches, challenging our norms is a good thing.

They have great outside collaborators. I’ve got a coaching friend that I can text with my random questions about our sport. I’ll ask her if it’s crazy to do whatever it is I’m thinking about and she asks the appropriate questions and we can work it out. I’ve got coworkers whose offices I can pop in when I’ve got a coaching dilemma and they help me work through whatever it is I’m contemplating. Our team won our conference tournament a few years ago, but I remember slumping into a chair in another coach’s office after the very first game of that season and telling him that I knew we had a problem. And we did. He and I talked and he gave me great ideas about the situation. With his help, I was able to solve the problem early on which made the championship possible.

While each of these points is different, the common thread is connectedness. Whether it’s being connected to something significant outside of work or having great coaching friends that we can count on…we can all be more productive if we use these tips.

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3 Lessons Your Team Can Learn From The Movie Hoosiers

MoviesTeam culture

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In Effective Use of Films For Goal Setting, I talked about the movie Hoosiers and how it can be used to challenge your team to blow past preconceived notions of how good they can be. I haven’t used the movie as a rah-rah “let’s beat the dominant team” motivator, because I don’t want them to be that fired up about one team. I talked about it in the post linked above…you should check it out. It’s such a good movie that I’ve come up with more topics that you can use with your team during the season. Here are three ways that you can discuss Hoosiers if you decide to watch it with your team.

3 amazing lessons from Hoosiers

It takes teamwork to make the dream work
Ideally, your team is highly motivated and focused on what they want to accomplish personally as well as corporately. It’s our jobs as their coach to push them along the way…reminding them that accomplishing goals and dreams shouldn’t be easy. It will require hard work and perseverance. Most times, the dreams that keep your team up at night will be bigger than their britches…accomplished only through the power of the group. After all, is it really a dream if you can do it all by yourself?

You gotta play the game
To me, this is the major lesson of this movie. You’ve got to lace up the shoes and give yourself a shot. If you learn anything from Hoosiers, it’s got to be: the court is the same size, the hoop is the same height, and the rules are the same for both teams. Sure, one team is favored over the other…but nothing matters until you play the game. If your team can get to a place where they believe they have a chance to win (even when no one else shares that belief), then guess what? They’ve got a chance to win!

Sometimes things work out just how you want them to
Every now and then, you’ll have a magical season. Your seniors will step up, your freshmen will play over their heads…all culminating with winning the big game. Sometimes it’s nice to let your team open up their brains to feeling good about the team and the season…to the possibility of everything working out. It may not, but I think it’s more likely to happen if they’ve got a vision of what it’d look and feel like in their heads and hearts.

This is a great movie to get your team fired up about working hard. Hoosiers is exciting, dramatic, and emotional…sounds a lot like the sports season, right?