Coach Dawn Writes

source

“You must have confidence.  You must believe in yourself if you expect others to believe in you.”
—John Wooden

Confidence is the result of preparation.  Don’t believe me?  Go into a meeting with your boss without knowing what the topic will be and see how you feel.  I’ll bet you’d feel a lot less than confident.  But if you know the topic ahead of time and you’re able to get some info together so that you can speak intelligently…then you’ll feel confident.  So we agree…preparation is key.  But how do we prepare our athletes?  I think confidence has got to be on three different planes: they’ve got to be confident in themselves, in their teammates, and in their team goals.  If one of those three is missing, then success may be just out of your reach.  Read on to see how you can properly prepare your athletes to be confident.

3 reasons why confidence is essential for your athletes

In themselves. As Wooden says in that opening quotation, you’ve got to believe in you…because if you don’t, why should I?  The beauty of confidence is in the preparation.  Your athlete feels confident at the free throw line when the game is on the line because you’ve put her in that situation a million times in practice. Even when she makes a mistake in the game, that athlete understands that she will have more successes than failures during any given competition, so she’s not too high when things are flowing and she’s not too low when nothing is working right.  She’s confident that things will work out for her because she’s done everything within her power to be prepared.

In their teammates. According to dictionary.com, confidence in your teammates would look like “belief in the powers, trustworthiness, or reliability of a person.”  That sounds like preparation to me!  Your passers have confidence that they will each do their jobs, because they’ve done it time and time again.  In practice, in games, in stressful situations…they’ve watched their teammates be tested and be successful.  Therefore, they have confidence that they’ll be successful in the future.

In their vision. If your team isn’t confident in their goals and vision for the future, then it likely won’t come to pass.  Why?  Because sometimes your team will not play well, sometimes they’ll lose, sometimes they won’t live up to their own hype.  But quality preparation for their goals will help them to stay focused.  Coaches can talk to their teams about the pressure of being picked to win it all, or the pressure of winning back to back, or the pressure of “must win” games.  Coaches should talk about how athletes can manage their emotions, their classwork, and their expectations through it all.  All of that qualifies as preparation.

As the Boy Scouts motto says: Be prepared.  I firmly believe that proper preparation leads to successful performances.  If we invest in our athletes through preparation, our teams will benefit in the form of winning teams.

Join me in a series discussing John Wooden’s Pyramid of Success.  I believe his Pyramid can be applied to our teams, our recruiting efforts, how we behave as professionals, and to our lives in general.  This series will cover Self-Control, Alertness, Initiative, Intentness, Condition, Skill, Team Spirit, Poise, and Confidence.

source

“My definition of poise is very simple: being yourself.  You’re not acting.  You’re not pretending or trying to be something you’re not.  You are being who you are and are totally comfortable with that.”
—John Wooden

Poise is near the top of Wooden’s Pyramid of Success…which means that the blocks under it have to be accomplished before poise can even be a thought in our minds.  I love Wooden’s definition of poise because it says a lot in a few words.  If you’ve got a team of individuals who are self-confident enough, self-aware enough, and comfortable enough in their own skin that they can truly be themselves with each other…that’s when the door to becoming the best opens up wide.

I’m going to break with form a bit and list a few quotations of what other folks had to say about poise.  Enjoy!

• “The key to winning is poise under stress.”—Paul Brown
• “To me, it was never about what I accomplished on the football field. It was about the way I played the game. I played the game with a lot of determination, a lot of poise, a lot of pride and I think what you saw out there…was an individual who really just loved the game.”—Jerry Rice
• “For poise, walk with the knowledge you’ll never walk alone.”—Sam Levenson
• “To bear defeat with dignity, to accept criticism with poise, to receive honors with humility–these are marks of maturity and graciousness.”—William Arthur Ward
• “The qualities of man comes thus, not only he is able to survive in any kind of situation but he also maintains his poise in trying times.”—Sam Veda

I believe this all applies to coaches as well.  I wrote before that once I became a more authentic coach, I became much more successful.  Know who we are as coaches, and being comfortable with it, will help us lead our teams with poise.

Join me in a series discussing John Wooden’s Pyramid of Success.  I believe his Pyramid can be applied to our teams, our recruiting efforts, how we behave as professionals, and to our lives in general.  This series will cover Self-Control, Alertness, Initiative, Intentness, Condition, Skill, Team Spirit, Poise, and Confidence.

source

“Team spirit means losing oneself in the group for the good of the group.  It means being not just willing but eager to sacrifice personal interest or glory for the welfare of all.”—John Wooden

Team spirit.  It’s a tough one to define, but as has been said about other things…I know it when I see it.  Here are three different ways that we can teach team spirit within our teams.

3 different ways to define team spirit

1.      Willingness to cooperate as part of a team. I’m sure we all know the coach who is willing to turn the other way when she sees poor behavior from one of her players.  She looks the other way because that player is really good and the team would lose without her.  I’d caution that coach to reevaluate her personal coaching goals, because I’d hope that having the respect of her team is high on that list.  Players can smell BS and hypocrisy a mile away, that’s why I believe that we’ve got to be team first coaches.  Team first, you second, me third.  If each person on the team has that kind of attitude, success is sure to follow!

2.      The essence of a group that makes the members want the group to succeed. This definition implies a collective belief that the whole is better and will be more successful than the parts.  It’s also an acknowledgement that there are different levels of skill within each player.  In addition, this definition recognizes that those with higher level skills will represent the group in competition…but that those with lesser skills have a well-defined role within the team.  Though a smaller group will represent the whole…there will be no success without each team member having a legitimate role on the team that is valued.

3.      Willingness to sacrifice personal considerations for the welfare of all. I often sit down with my teams to make sure they understand what happens on game day, because everyone sacrifices.  I want my non-starters to understand that the starters will make infinitely more mistakes in front of their friends, families, and professors by virtue of their being on the court more.  I want those same non-starters to understand that there is a burden to be borne by those starters: wins and losses are perceived to be squarely on their backs.  The starters’ challenge is to represent our team.

On the flip side, I want my starters to understand that their non-starting teammates put just as much time, sweat, and energy into the team…without the “glory” of getting to put on a show.  Starters need to appreciate the non-starters’ willingness to get them ready for competition behind the scenes.  If both sides can respect each other’s sacrifices, then the team spirit of our team will undoubtedly be great.

We all want team players on our teams, but it’s tough to define.  Hopefully this has given you a more solid idea of what it means.

P.S.  I’m hoping you got my wordsmithery (yes, I made up that word) in the title.  Fabulous song, check out the video for some old school goodness.

Join me in a series discussing John Wooden’s Pyramid of Success.  I believe his Pyramid can be applied to our teams, our recruiting efforts, how we behave as professionals, and to our lives in general.  This series will cover Self-Control, Alertness, Initiative, Intentness, Condition, Skill, Team Spirit, Poise, and Confidence.