Coaching 101
(A
work in progress)
On these pages I will be writing my thoughts and experiences regarding Teaching and Coaching. I learned most of this from mentors I've had in the field of golf, though coaching applies to any arena, of course. Learning and Coaching and Self Coaching and Coachability are all related.
The structure of what you will be teaching or coaching will change, from offense to defense, individual skills to team skills. But it is in the HOW you teach and coach where I hope I may be of assistance.
Teaching vs. Coaching
By "Teaching," I mean the environment where information flows from the Coach (or Teacher) to the students with little, if any, feedback back to the Coach. This is based on information and demonstrations, and then the students are supposed to go and do (learn) what's been said or taught.
"Coaching" is teaching with feedback, where the Coach values the experiences that students are having during the learning. This is much more powerful than just "teaching," as it engages the students, and ultimately makes them responsible for their own learning.
This Coaching stuff takes more time, so sometimes there just isn't time for feedback. In those situations, you do the best you can in how you say things and then have to leave it up to the students to make it work. It is helpful, I'm sure, to talk about this whole process with students and how, when there isn't time, you invite them to be their own coaches. By that you mean that they have to observe and report (to themselves, or to a teammate) what's happening and then hang out with the process of learning.
I'll say more later about the three pillars of experience: Learning, Enjoyment and Experience. And how they all need to be present for healthy, long team growth and development.
RANDOM THOUGHTS
(I'll keep adding to these over time)
What I suggest doesn't work in a coaching situation:
"You did it again!"
This latter one, "You did it again," is a classic, telling someone that s/he did something "again," implying criticism, failure, etc. The player is probably not even feeling what she or he did, but gets from you that the un-wanted action is still happening. It most likely leads to a lot of frustration and guilt.
"Effort" is a similar word to "trying," and let's define that to be the natural, intuitive action that our incredible bodies can exert to learn something. We can push harder, or pay attention to a follow through motion more carefully. We can act to be more aware and more intentional. These descriptions, to me, come from our wonderful body/brain/nervous system and are effective, helpful, from our definition. But trying is when the "mind" influences things, the extra effort to control the flight of a ball, the strain of excess effort, not naturally directed but directed to influence outcomes. In Tim Gallwey's terms, it's like a 10¢ computer (our ego minds) telling our $ billion computer (the body/brain/nervous system) how to do things. (And then judging it when things don't go so well.)
I hope you can see what I'm getting at. If someone says, "Try to pick up that fork," it will probably lead to more thinking and tension and muscle action than required. If someone says, "Pick up the fork," you'll probably exert only the needed physical motion to reach over and pick it up. It's as though "try" doesn't work. Yoda in Star Wars taught Luke Skywalker about that, how trying isn't doing. I think he said something like, "Do or do not. There is no Try!"
So, beware of your words. If the player sees you excited and pleased by shots that go in the basket, he'll attach her- or him-self to that success and try to repeat it.
Failure: the other side of the Success/Failure coin:
If a coach gets excited (pleased) by a successful action (a made shot, for example), the coach will probably be unexcited (disappointed) by the other possibility, failure (a miss). A miss may be responded to by the coach with more coaching of what to do, what not to do. If a miss is met with silence, then the student gets the message (or makes one up) that it's "bad" and tries to NOT miss the next time. "Trying" is the end result of that message. Either way, the problem is that awareness is sacrificed in this process. The student ends up trying to repeat good performance or avoid bad performance, instead of just being present (working on awareness). Thus learning is sacrificed in order to look good or not look bad.
ANOTHER OPTION AS A COACH: BE NEUTRAL
My suggestion in this little coaching lesson is to be as neutral as possible. Avoid the emotional "ups" and "downs" of performance coaching, and help the student just to SEE and FEEL what actually happened. If you can keep students focused on what happened, what really happened, learning will be greatly enhanced. When s/he experiences what actually happened, you will see learning occur. It will be joyful, sometimes awesome, and you may never go back to Good/Bad feedback.
An example, if you want to just pay attention to where the shots are landing, the student(s) will see themselves self-correct closer and closer and then into the basket. The key is to "just see" where the ball lands, with no judgment, no emotion. Once the student sees the ball landed a foot to the right, an internal process will occur to move the ball to the left, about a foot. Then observing again will lead to more self correction until the ball goes dead straight. If your mind gets engaged, through judgment of a miss being bad, etc., then the corrections are perverted by the "mind" interfering with the natural learning process, and the learning gets diluted. Try it sometime. Work with a player having her or him just notice exactly where it lands direction-wise and see how the learning occurs. Then add judgment ("That was no good, it was too far left, etc.") and see how long it takes for a straight shot to occur over and over.
Tim Gallwey put it this way, one time: He said you can distill this way of coaching with two questions and a statement. It will apply to almost any coaching situation:
1) What do you want?
2) What happened?
3) Don't "fix" it!
Then repeat the process, over and over, until the learning and
development stop.
The first question is paramount to any coaching situation. What does the student want to achieve or learn? Without this clarification up front, a lesson is less effective and may be a waste of time.
The second question is the perfect awareness coaching instruction: What actually happened? What did you feel, where did the ball go, what did the defender to, etc. etc.?
The final line is the tricky one and surprises everyone! What do you mean, "Don't 'fix' it!"? Of course we want to correct our behavior, fix it! That's what your mind will say. But if you believe what I said above, you'll believe that "fixing" things doesn't work that well. Awareness will lead to corrections and growth much more effectively than will trying or fixing. So by telling your student to not "fix" it, you're telling her or him to trust the remarkable body system to learn from the experience. When that is done, learning happens. It can't fail but work if you're awake and present. The tricky part is getting your wanting to look good (as a coach) and the student's wanting to look good out of the picture. It's tricky but very enlightening and valuable to you as a coach, and to the student as a self coach learner.
What I suggest does work:
I remember seeing a video of me playing tennis one time at a tennis camp. I had never seen myself on a tennis court. It was enlightening! I could see that I didn't look anything like the tennis player I thought I was. I looked like a lumbering basketball player (or jock) hitting tennis balls. It wasn't the graceful tennis body motion and backswing and forward swing I thought I exhibited. It was athletic and strong, but it wasn't how top tennis players look!
After seeing it, I observed myself through awareness much differently. It opened my eyes to the areas I needed to look at to become more graceful and tennis-full. So it served only that purpose. If I had made myself wrong by how I looked, I might have then tried "hard" to fix it, tried hard to look better, and maybe even given up the game. Instead, I used it to see and know where to focus my attention.
Too big, too fast!
In my coaching, I spend a lot of time having the kids learn how to shoot from in close, from only 3', 4', or 5' from the basket, depending on their strength, learning their "pure" Release. (For big, strong college players and professionals, it might be 8', 10' or more.) We learn much more effectively by slowing things down and keeping them small at first. If we move back to far and add too much speed and pressure, we will almost surely revert to old habits, revert to what is comfortable, known. And that is usually the ineffective habits we've formed over so many years.
To learn something new, we have to shine the light of awareness in many areas as we learn this motion and that motion. Slowing it down, even to "slow motion," can make it much easier to experience and learn. Once something is learned to the point of some degree of trust, then we can "up" the distance and speed and it will probably not fall apart. If it does start to fail, that only means you raised the bar too quickly, and a return to the smaller, slower motion will allow you to recover it, re-discover it.
Old habits die hard. It's like we get in a deep groove or rut that is hard to get out of. One way of thinking is that a new habit is like a new, potential rut running along side the old one. We have to keep pulling ourselves out of the old, deeper rut to make an impression in the new rut. With time, the new becomes deeper and more learned and eventually we'll forget the old rut and it will disappear.
Learning more about "Positive" Coaching:
I'm aware of a group based out of Stanford University that is making great strides in helping coaches learn how to be more effective coaches. It's called "The Positive Coaching Alliance." Their motto is: "Transformng Youth Sports so Sports can Transform Youth!" They have books and CD's they've created that will get you started to learn and apply their beautiful ideas. One of their major spokesmen is Phil Jackson, coach of the Lakers. I went to one of their programs and was most impressed by their vision and their enthusiasm.
Please go to their website to learn more about them. It's at: http://www.positivecoach.org."
MORE LATER...