Brain in the Game | Sport Mind Coaching Podcast
Dave Diggle
Episode Four – Values, Beliefs, Motivators – We are not the same
Hello and welcome back to Brain in the Game, the podcast specifically designed for athletes, coaches and parents who want to do it smarter. Brain in the Game is a practical look inside the mental jungle that is elite sport and I’m your host, Dave Diggle.
In this episode we’re going to take a look at just how different all our athletes are, how getting results from one athlete can be a different process to getting results from another and really one size doesn’t fit all. Also at the end of this episode, I’m going to play you a short excerpt from an interview I did with two really talented elite athletes, who just so happen to be a brother and sister, and the different way that they approached their training and their competition.
So as a coach how well do you know your athletes? Do you know what triggers them into action, into confident emotion or into motivated state? What drives them and what scares them? And if so, how did you work it out? Was it something that was just innate, or do you actually have a process that enables you to better understand your athletes?
As a Mind Coach I have a very specific set of criteria and processes I go through with each client before I work with them, and the whole concept is to understand that client as much as I possibly can before I step foot inside their mind. So what I’m looking for is a way to unlock their mind and get inside and do what I do. So as a coach, a traditional coach working with athletes, what do you do? Do you know your athletes and do you know what specific needs they have in order to get the best out of them time after time after time?
So if you think about just one of your athletes right now:
• Do you know if they are visual, audio, or emotional processors?
• Are they results-driven or are they just social athletes?
• Do they use away-from or towards motivation?
• Do they have a goal?
• Are they internally or externally referenced?
• Are they emotionally sensitive or are they closed off?
Understanding your athletes before you start working with them will enable you to manage and manipulate and get the best results from them by working with them, not against them. Do they have an active network around them or are they loners? These are really important questions that you need to ask yourself when you start working with them, because if they’re socially-driven and then you try and do something that’s really an intimate thing with them, then they’re going to struggle with that.
Or if you ask them to join a group exercise and they are loners, then again they’re going to have that resistance, they’re going to have that area that they’re going to shut off and not feel comfortable and step inside.
So you need to be able to, again manage and manipulate. You need to have a mechanism so you understand each and every athlete. If you don’t then you’re just setting yourself up for a really long rocky road with that athlete and you’re not going to get the best for them, you’re not going to get the best for you, and it’s probably going to impact negatively on your team or your club’s dynamics.
Most coaches have a preferred coaching style, myself included.
• Some play the numbers and statistics game, these are like the pinball machine coaches who spit out different statistics to you and results to you and expect you to go away and respond or react to that.
• Some are the nurturers, they’re the easy going, the ‘ease you along with a hug and a smile’ kind of coaches and they make you feel good; they’re talking to the emotions of that athlete.
Some are the technicians, they give specific, precise, clinical information and expect that athlete to go away and apply that.
• Some are the bad arse coaches who rant and rave and try to get a reaction based on your emotions.
• And some appear the inactive and disconnected, choosing to coach more mysteriously through some mental telepathy and expect the athlete just to kind of understand and get where they’re coming from.
The thing to understand is each one of these styles, each one of these approaches by these coaches works for some people on some level. So, one size really doesn’t fit all.
For me, I was one of those kids who really responded well to the technical. I needed to know the why. If I was doing something as an athlete I wanted the technical aspect of that, I needed to unpack that, understand that and apply that. When I think about my three children and the sports they’re in, each one of them are very, very different. Each one of them has a different driver, a different mechanism to get the best out of them and your athletes are no different. When I’m asked to help build an effective coaching programme, be it for a coach with an individual athlete or a team or a club, I value that extra time I spend with that coach building a profiling system and mechanism so they can understand their athletes.
So before they start working with them, they go through a whole process of getting to know that athlete. The same way when you go for a job interview, they profile you for the right role that you’re being interviewed for; with a coach, taking that little extra time to interview and understand and have specific questions, that not only allow you to understand the athlete, but allow you and the athlete to build a rapport, to build a bond. It is going to be vital when you’re working or you’re pushing that athlete, when you get that athlete to a point where you’ve got to be the hard coach and you’ve got to push them and they may be having some emotional fears, they may be having some confidence issues and you’ve got to get behind them and nudge them in the right direction. Understanding where and when and how to apply that pressure will enable a coach to move forward without it becoming a conflict.
So we’re not asking you to have biometric testing for your athletes and assess them, although some organisations do. I know that when I competed and we travelled to Russia, one of the things that I noticed was the way that they selected their athletes was a very systematised and mechanical process, something that I certainly hadn’t seen as an athlete myself.
In reality, coaches normally allow for a “learn on the job” approach. Not only is this inefficient for the coach, it is distracting for everybody involved and it also can be very disheartening for the athlete who often just won’t feel heard or won’t feel understood. If you have an athlete who comes to you from another club or from another organisation, who signs up to come and work with you, they’re already coming into your environment tainted by the old coach’s methodology, the old coaching system, the old communication style that they’ve got used to. If you want to instantly get the best out of them, if they’re been brought into work with you and they’re competing within a very short period of time, then you want to make sure they fit in, they adjust and they go out there to perform almost instantly. If you’re waiting for this adjustment period to apply then you’re wasting time and you’re wasting budget and energy that you could be better spending both with that athlete and other athletes.
So how do we do this? How do we build this structure of understanding the athletes before we start working with them? But how do we know which is the best style? Do I need to be the statistician? Do I need to be the nurturer or the technician? Which one do I need to be? When I’m working with a specific athlete, which one? How do I step into that role as the coach? And if I’ve got a team, does that mean I need to have this multiple personality disorder in order to be an efficient, effective coach? Well, sometimes it might help but of course not, you don’t have to wear so many different hats, you just need to know enough about each athlete to be able to deliver the information in a really precise and targeted way.
So what I utilised as an elite coach and now as a professional Mind Coach, is a three-prong approach, but before we get into those three different techniques that I use, make sure that you have a folder for each athlete. So as you learn about that athlete and you keep a journal or put the results into their folder, you get a better picture, a much more in-depth understanding about that athlete. And especially when you’re working with juniors or young athletes, they’re going to change. As their social environment changes, as they grow up, as they mature, their processing and their form of receiving information is also going to mature. So if you can see that pattern, you can see that progression and you can look back over a period of time and say “When I did this, I got the best response for them” you can change your coaching styles, you can be far more efficient and effective. Rather than shooting fish in a barrel, you can actually turn round and say “Right, I know specifically how I’m going to approach this and I can see the change in them and the progression in them, so I know where we’re going”.
So the three phases that I go through today, as a performance Mind Coach, before I work with any athlete is number one, the pre-coaching questionnaire.
Now, this is like your traditional, handwritten test format. It’s a very specific set of questions that’s designed to get certain information out of them, both for them and for me. It enables them to question what specifically they are looking for, what direction they’re going for, and it also allows me to ask very overt and covert questions to look for commonalities, to look for beliefs. So when they sit down and they go through this questionnaire - and it takes them no more than five minutes - it’s a rapid, just put down the first thing that comes to mind.
So the first thing I’m looking for is their core values, things they value, things they hold important: honesty; winning; team spirit; medals; whatever it be, whatever’s really of value to them, something that they just hold on to as important. I want to know that, so when I’m working with them and I’m trying to build both the visualisation programme, the motivation programme, and I need to speak to their emotions, I know what core values they have. It’s pointless me talking to an athlete about medals and something that’s really tangible if they’re emotionally-driven, if their core value is to feel important, to feel valued. So I need to understand the language that I’m using needs to fit very neatly and very precisely with their core values.
Along with that goes their core beliefs, so these are things that they hold to be true: the sky is blue; the grass is green; that I’m a talented athlete; that I’m a champion; or flip side of that too is that maybe I’m not talented and maybe I’m not the best person to become a champion. All these core beliefs are going to either enable them or inhibit them. So if they have a belief that they’re not good enough, then it really wouldn’t matter if I just tried to blanket sell to them that “You’re going to be a champion”, I would always be buffing up against their core belief.
When we look at these two aspects of values and the beliefs, that makes their attitude. So if I have an athlete that comes to me and their coach or their manager’s saying to me “This athlete has a really bad attitude” I don’t try and fix the attitude. It’s like taking an aspirin for a headache. I’d look at what the core cause was and if the attitude was an attitude of not turning up to training, blasé, couldn’t give a stuff, wasn’t interested in what the coach was saying, I’d look at the core beliefs. Do they believe they should be involved in that programme? Do they believe they’re good enough to be in that programme? Or do they believe they’re too good for that programme? Then I’d look at what their values are: what do they value most? Is it they value playing each week and winning when the coach has a bigger plan to not necessarily win every week, but to build foundation? Those two core values are not in synergy, are they? They’re not going to work together, they will bounce off each other and cause friction.
So understanding what an athlete’s value is and what their core beliefs are will enable you to manage their attitude far more efficiently. You’re not selling out and changing what the club’s direction is or the club’s beliefs are, what you just need to do is maybe bring that athlete into the fold a little bit more and understand what’s important to them and make them see what’s important to you as the club and as the coach or as a team. And this is something that I witness incredibly frequently when a high profile player gets brought into an existing team dynamic and they would come in probably with different core beliefs and certainly different values. If the team had been built over a period of time and they’re working in a synergy going towards a certain direction and then this higher profile player gets plonked right in the middle and they’re about winning every week “Come on, I need to get more money, I need to get more sponsorship” then that dynamic isn’t going to be one that’s conducive of working together.
The other thing we need to look at then is their drivers and their motivators. What drives them to train? What drives them to perform? What motivates them and what demotivates them? So again, if you as a coach are saying “What motivates me is seeing progress in my team and having a big community around us, we’re like a big happy family” and your import athlete is there and what motivates them is the dollar, then again you’re going to have this conflict. You’re going to have an opportunity where it wouldn’t really matter what you said to that athlete, they’re going to see it differently, they’re going to have a different outcome, a different desire than what you do. If you know what motivates someone is money, then you can start talking to them about “Okay, when we get this outcome then we might be able to start looking at increasing your salary”. Or if it’s about getting results, if you turn around and said to them “Okay cool, what we need to do is work together here. We’ve brought you in for your specific talent. If you help us as a team grow and get to the next level, then we’ll be able to give you what you want”. So understanding the values, understanding the beliefs and the attitudes, and then understanding what drives them and motivates them, enables you to create the environment for them, it enables you to feed that emotional monster that we talk so frequently about and what speaks specifically to that athlete.
The other thing we need to understand is, do they talk in pictures, in expressive dialect, or in emotions? Because I’m a picture-driven person, so when somebody comes to me with an issue and they’re explaining it to me, they may be dialect-driven, they talk in very specific language to me, and what I’m doing is processing what they’re saying to me and creating this picture in my mind. So I see as three-dimensional imagery as I possibly can to give me a better understanding of that whole scenario. However, some coaches who, and again a lot of coaches are very dialect-driven, they will spit out information to an athlete and the athlete might be visually-driven or visually processing and if they’re not taught how to understand the coach then that’s going to be like speaking a completely different language. And vice versa too. If you’re asking your athletes “What’s going on in your head?” when you go out to perform and it goes to crap, you’re going out there completely and 100% ready to compete and then you get out there in front of the audience, in front of hundreds of thousands of spectators and fans and you can’t perform, if you ask them “What’s going on in your mind, what are you telling yourself, what are you seeing?” and you’re waiting for a dialect-driven response then you’re not going to understand how to solve that issue for that athlete.
So, the other thing we need to look at and understand, the big picture thing here is, are they talking in “Is” or are they talking in “wes”? When we look at that, when you ask them a question and they turn around and say to you “I’m doing this and when I perform I see this, and when I think about my future I’m doing that” then they’re obviously internally referenced.
Again, we spoke in the last episode about internal and external referencing. If they’re talking about “we”, “When we go out we do this and when we go out we need to work together as a team and coach, we need to communicate better” then they’re obviously externally referenced. So what we need to do with that, when we understand how they’re referencing is “Okay, if you’re internally referenced what I want you to do is for you to think about this and when you’re out there make sure what’s going on in your mind is this”. If they’re externally referenced it’s “Okay, what we need to do is, as a team, go out there and when you are all together, when you look around at your team and the group around you, we’re going to all do this play”. So we’re selling the same outcome, the same objective, but in a very tailored way. We’re selling it in a way that speaks directly to that athlete, they’re going to understand it, they’re going to process it and they’re going to see to the relevance to that instantly.
Are they big picture or are they detail? Now, when I see things, I see the big picture. My wife and I run our business together and when I set up a new programme, when I think about a new training, when I think about a new concept or a new design, I see the end result, I see the big picture. My objective is to own the world and have this massive empire that everybody in the world gets touched by. My wife sees the details, she sees the steps in-between, she sees the first step, the second step. She is consumed by the details, whereas that just would drive me insane. If I couldn’t get the end picture in my mind, if I couldn’t get that big picture in my mind, then I would get diverted very, very quickly, I would become consumed by something else very quickly. Whereas when my wife and I sit down and we future pace our business, when we sit down and talk about where we’re going to go, how we’re going to plan for the future, we work together because I can turn around and say “In 12 months’ time I want us to be here, I want us to own this, do this and see that” and she’ll go “Okay cool, let me build a system to reach that. I now see what you’re big picture is, let me build the stepping stones to reach that”.
We understand how we work as a group and as a dynamic of setting it all up, looking at venues, talking about getting tickets, talking about producing emails, all those things that for me just would slow down the progress of the big picture, yet if Linda didn’t know what my big picture was she wouldn’t know what stepping stone to come next, so we work together and we understand now. When you’re talking about athletes, if you’re athlete is seeing they want to be an Olympian, that’s their driver, that’s their goal, they watched the 2012 Olympics in London and have gone “Right, I’ve got four years to get to Rio. I can see the big picture” if they don’t know what steps to take over the next four years then that needs to be brought in, otherwise they’re just going to be spending their career having big dreams and going nowhere.
Vice versa to that is if they just see “Wow, they did really well at the Olympics, my next step is to get better at what I’m doing” but doesn’t have an objective, doesn’t have a big end goal, they’re going to lose motivation very, very quickly, it’s going to seem like forever. And so the language we use is vital to understanding our athletes. It’s the second phase of what I go through when I’m interviewing a potential client because it’s not a given when a manager or an organisation, or even an athlete, contacts me and says “I’d like you to work with me”, it’s not a given that I’m going to rock up and just perform my magic because I need to know that they’re the right person that I can work with, my style, my approach just may not fit with them. And vice versa, I may not be able to work them if they’re not open to looking outside what they’ve traditionally done, because if they just do what they’ve done before they’re going to get the same results as they’ve got before and hence then there’s no need for me to be there.
So the third stage, the third phase that I go through is, I ask them, “How do you like to be coached? How do you like to be communicated with?”, because this has a dual effect. Not only am I getting their interpretation, I’m getting their views, their perception of how they like to be coached. It’s giving me an insight into what’s important to them, but also what they’re doing, what they’re getting from that is they’re feeling heard. They’re feeling like “Well you know what, this guy’s actually interested in what works for me. He’s asking me how I like to be coached so he’s obviously open to what’s important to me”. This enables us to build this rapport, to build this level of respect so that he understands that I have a job to do and I understand that there’s certain things that maybe they just don’t like. So again, for me, I’m very black and white, if someone is feeling something, I’d prefer them just come out and say it. Other people are a little bit more emotionally-driven or emotionally protected and that would possibly offend them. So I don’t want to go out and offend anybody, I don’t want to just rock up and start ranting and raving and saying “You’re going to do it this way or it’s the highway”. I want to work with them to get the best results for them, so I need to understand what works for them, they need to feel like they’re being heard, we need to work as a team.
So those three phases, the pre-coaching questionnaire, the language and just specifically asking them, are the three phases I go through before I work with a client. That gives me enough information to kick start our coaching. So as a coach of traditional athletes, when you get a new athlete come into your programme - and we’re not talking necessarily recreational here, we’re not talking low-level competition, we’re talking elite, we’re talking professional - do you go through that kind of process? Do you have a system, a standard operating procedure where, before they step into your environment, you’re getting to understand them, you’re getting to know that athlete and come up with a plan, come up with a strategy to better communicate with that athlete? I frequently talk about becoming a verbal sniper, rather than a machine gunnest. Some coaches are very prone to becoming that machine gunnest, they will throw out a squillion different coaching techniques or information or styles, hoping that something is going to hit the target. I would much rather be a sniper in the respect that I know my target, I know what I want to say to them, I know that what I want to give them will give them the best result, it’s just about at what point do I pull the trigger? At what point do I deliver my information is going to be so incredibly precise and on target that that athlete is going to accept it, use it and own it? Because that’s going to get the best result for them, it’s going to be far more efficient for me as a coach, and it’s going to get the result that’s going to be far more accepting for them to move forward and take on the next process.
So that’s how I do it as a Mind Coach and, to be really honest with you, that’s not a lot different to how I used to do it as an elite performance coach. When I was working one-on-one with athletes or I was working with a team, I had the file for each athlete. I had them completing journals, I had them writing goals, and I would keep a copy of all those things so I could see what was important to them. When you’re working with youth athletes or younger athletes, quite often they’ll tell you what they think you want to hear. Especially if they’re new to the team dynamic, they will look around them, they’ll try to assimilate into the team, they’ll be listening to what the team is saying or what other key athletes and peers are saying and try and deliver the same so they conform. That might not necessarily be what’s the best thing for them. Getting them to write stuff down, getting them to complete journals in their own time outside of the training venue, enables you to get a step inside in their mind; to get a step inside their emotions; what’s important to them; their values; their beliefs; and obviously their attitudes; looking at what drives them; what motivates them. Are they big picture? Are they expressive dialect? Are they emotionally-driven? Are they loners or are they team players? Because again, I’ve worked with a number of athletes who work in a team dynamic, in a team-driven sport, who are individuals, who are loners who don’t necessarily work well in a team, they’re just exceptionally talented athletes who have chosen to perform in a team environment. So when I’m working with them I talk about very much about “you” what’s your goal, what’s your outcome that you want and then how does that fit into the dynamic of the team environment? How can we bring those two into dovetail together so that the team benefits and you benefit, there’s a win-win scenario? Understanding these athletes, understanding what works specifically for them will enable you as a coach to be far more efficient and effective at delivering your message. No coach - and I don’t care how long you’ve been coaching - wants to stand up session after session saying the same thing time after time after time and going nowhere, being stagnant, going around like a duck in a duck pond, just keep circling and circling. You want to progress, you want to go forward. In order for you to do that, in order for you to progress and go forward, you need to continually build on what went before, so what do you need to do now?
So if you’re a coach and you’re listening to this and you think “That’s exactly what I need to do, I don’t have that so I need to build that”. What specifically do you need to now? Well, I think the first thing I would be asking you to do is to sit down and write down what’s important to you? What information do you need to get from that athlete that would make you feel comfortable? What is your coaching style? What’s your preference?
So if you are a technician and you do like to deliver information about mechanical coaching processes, how much information would you want from your athlete to enable you to give it in the best format that you can because obviously if you’re technically-driven, you want to be able to give it in a way that you feel comfortable and expressive. It’s great to be bilingual and delivering in different formats, if you can get your athletes to buy in to your way of coaching and them to understand it, to process it and see the relevance to it, then you’re both going to be far more comfortable. If however there’s no way they’re going to understand that technical approach, they’re too emotionally-driven, they need to see the big picture, they need to feel nurtured and comforted, then it’s up to you traverse the different coaching styles and be able to deliver that in a way that you feel comfortable that you’re giving the right information and it sits well with that athlete.
So step one is to sit down and understand you as a coach and what information you want from your athletes.
Then step two, I’d build a process where you can create profiles for your athletes, you have a folder where you get specific information, you’ll get competition results; you’ll get statistics; you’ll get them to fill out their journals; their goals; their aspirations; and obviously you’d want to create profile sheets, so they can fill out that and they can answer those specific questions that you’re looking for. Get creative with them. The questions you don’t want them all to be over questions that they’re going to know what you’re looking for. Ask the same question in multiple different formats so that you know that if they give one very obvious answer that they think you’re looking for, hide the next question a little bit so they give one that’s a little bit more unprotected and then start to look for the commonalities and the patterns in their responses. As I say, my profiling goes for about five minutes, but it’s really asking probably four or five questions just in multiple different formats. And often I’ll see the first obvious answer isn’t the answer that I’m looking for, isn’t what I want to see or want to hear from that athlete.
And then the next thing, I’d be sitting down with my coaching staff and saying “Right, what I’m trying to do here is create more of an understanding of our athletes so we can be far more productive and efficient in our delivery” and then get them to understand and start looking too. So if you’ve got junior staff working with you, or if you’ve got strength conditioning staff, or you’ve got physiotherapy staff who would hear a different delivery or a different emotional state in that athlete than probably you would, if everybody’s listening for those and they all feed back into you and you say “Actually, when they’re getting stretched they’re talking about Olympics. When I’m working with them they’re talking about the nationals at the end of the year”. Understanding that and working with that enables you to better plan and plot and build the structure for that athlete.
So, I hope this has given you an opportunity to see what you can do as a coach to build the bigger picture, to understand your athletes a little bit more efficiently so that you can deliver that technical information that you have far more efficiently, far more direct and precise, because nobody knows your industry better than you do. If you are a technical coach in an organisation that employed you because of your talent, it’s important for you to share that talent, to share that information. And if you are selling that information but no-one’s buying then you’re not efficient, so it doesn’t really matter how talented you are as a coach, it doesn’t really matter what information you have, if no-one’s hearing it, if no-one’s accepting it, then it’s not worth the paper it’s written on. So work out the best form of delivery that you possibly can.
What I want to do now is to play you a short excerpt of an interview I did with Abby and Ben Pugh. Abby and Ben are iron men and iron women here in Australia, they’re both junior, they’re very talented. Abby’s just been accepted into the high performance programme. I’ve worked with both these athletes, they’re very talented, they’re very good at what they do. The interesting thing, and the thing I want to share with you guys today, is they’re brother and sister. There’s only a couple of years between them, they both come from the same family, they have the same parents, they’ve grown up in the same environment, but they are incredibly different. When we did the initial profiling system with these two what came back was really interesting. Abby was exceptionally results-driven, she saw her success only as good as her last outing. So if she did really well, she thought she was great at what she did. If the last time that she competed she didn’t compete to the level that she thought was acceptable, then her confidence plummeted. Whereas Ben was far more emotionally-driven, he was all about feeling comfortable, he was all about the social aspect of his sport. Both these athletes were getting results. Both these athletes are leading in their field. What’s interesting is they both have completely different drivers, and this interview will give you a little insight into what was important to them and, once they understood what their styles were, what was important to them; what triggered them; what motivated them; it changed the way they approached their training and certainly changed the way they approached their competitions.
So enjoy this interview. Try and listen for some of the things that we’ve discussed in today’s episode and think about how that would apply to you in your sport, in your environment. And also just be aware that we did record this interview at the beach in between their training sessions, so the sound quality isn’t as clear as I’d like it to be.
Dave: Hi guys welcome and welcome to the Brain in the Game podcast. Both Abby and Ben, when we first started working with you guys we did a behavioural profile and that came up with some really interesting information about the way you guys learned. What did you guys get from that, Ben?
Ben: I probably learnt that I wasn’t exactly the same as my sister in the way that I learnt, it was different. She was more for the whole results side of thing and I wasn’t. So yeah, that was the main thing, I just learnt that what I was doing in the sport, the whole training side wasn’t the only thing, there was a lot more to it, basically.
Dave: What about you Abby, what did you learn? Because when we found out that you were predominantly results-driven and that you needed those results to feel like your training was progressing, was that something that you realised before?
Abby: Well, I knew the results were going to drive me, but I didn’t know what else could drive me instead of results, to put in place, when I wasn’t getting results.
Dave: Okay. So also, when we looked at the results in the profiling, we noticed that you were both fairly visually orientated but also, Ben, you were very emotionally-driven, you had to feel good for it to work for you?
Ben: Yeah.
Dave: And how does that play out in your sport, when you’re training?
Ben: Because of the long hours of the training and getting up every morning and swimming, going to school and training in the afternoon, I had to enjoy it to be able to do it successfully. So if I wasn’t enjoying it, I couldn’t get in and train and I’d just be all down and I’d try and go to a session and just didn’t really want to be there.
Dave: And what about you Abby because you were, as I say, far more visually-driven and far more results-driven, how did that transcribe into your training?
Abby: Well, if I got results then I found I trained harder because I knew that that was the standard that I was at and I wanted to be better than I was before, so I tried harder to get better results.
Dave: Yeah. And what if you didn’t? What if your training wasn’t going the way it was supposed to go? How did that make you feel? Did it drive you more or did it become something that was making it very difficult for you?
Abby: It drove me more, but it didn’t make me feel good about myself while I was training. So when I was training I wasn’t enjoying it as much, I was more just try and do it because I wanted to get up to the level that I thought I should be at.
Dave: Okay. And it’s been several months since we’ve worked together, is that still the case for you guys or have you changed at all?
Ben: Well, everything you’ve said I’ve taken on board and I still do it all, I still think that way. It’s changed the way I looked at everything so, yeah, it’s definitely a change for the better.
Dave: What about you, Abby?
Abby: Yeah, it’s changed the way that I prepare for races and training and different perspectives that I do towards sport.
Ben: You see a lot of coaches, like last minute just before they’re about to start racing and just having a different thousand things to think about and then 10 seconds later they’re on the race. Whereas it was really good for me and Abby that you’ve worked with Mark as well and he wasn’t anything like that. He knew that if you put all the pressure on us last minute, you’re on that start line and you’re thinking about a million things that you don’t need to be thinking about, you just want to think about that first bit and then go from there.
Dave: So Ben, you coach yourself now?
Ben: Yeah.
Dave: You coach young athletes?
Ben: Yeah.
Dave: Do you think differently about how you coach those?
Ben: Oh definitely, yeah definitely.
Dave: Okay. What kind of things do you look for now that you think you’d probably wouldn’t have looked for?
Ben: Oh, probably more just how they’re feeling about things. I can more look at them now and if they’re a bit down you know that I’ve been in their shoes as well and they’re not going to be able to train like we want them to train. And when we get surf or whatever and a few of them are a bit nervous I just found it a lot easier to talk them now, but after doing the training I’ve done with them.
Dave: Okay. And Abby, you’re obviously doing exceptionally well both in the pool, what’s the most recent result that you’ve got?
Abby: I made the Sydney inter-branch team and the New South Wales high performance squad.
Dave: Okay. That’s fantastic, so that’s a really good result?
Abby: Uh-huh.
Dave: Yeah. What do you think helped you with the way that you prepared for that?
Abby: I just saw it one session at a time, just doing more quality than quantity and just getting through the sessions and I knew what I had to do and I had the goal. And every now and again I’d just stop and have a think and think what I have to do now and as it got closer to the trials, I think “Well, I’ve done what I’ve needed to do and I’ve just now got to give it my all and go for it”.
Dave: Because that’s a really interesting point, because you used to suffer a lot with nerves, didn’t you?
Abby: Yeah.
Dave: Pre-competition nerves, so there were two things I think that were very difficult for you for competition, one was nerves and one was setting yourself up as the benchmark with your other competitors, not necessarily you?
Abby: Yeah, I find now that before my races, if I have more fun with my friends it makes me more relaxed and then when we go on to marshalling and stuff then I start to really focus on what I have to do, I feel like I can go onto the race better and feeling better, so I’m not so nervous beforehand.
Dave: That’s great, and that gives you better results?
Abby: Yeah, I think so, it has so far.
So, as I’m sure you can tell there, both Abby and Ben had a very different outlook and approach to their sport, to their training and to their competition. Both Abby and Ben, although in the same competitive environment, both doing the same sport, from the same family and not too different in age bracket, had a different thing that ticked their boxes, that drove them forward, that gave them the motivation. When we heard Abby talking about that if she didn’t perform the way she wanted to that drove her on, that spurred her on, but she didn’t feel comfortable or happy doing that, she didn’t enjoy the process. And when Ben was doing his training, he had to feel comfortable, he had to feel relaxed, he needed to be in an environment that was just speaking to his emotions. And both of these athletes have now understood that, they build that into their programme and so they get the best out of themselves.
So in your environment, how do you create that environment for you or your athletes to get the best out of them? Would you know whether your athlete is emotionally-driven or is results-driven, like Abby and Ben? Would you know the best way to communicate to them? Would you know the best way to get them to buy in to what you’re trying to teach?
If you don’t, then this is the time for you to go forward and say “Right, what I need to do is create an environment and I do that by creating a system”.
If you do do this already, if you do have a system that enables you to better understand and work with your athletes, is it the most efficient use of that system? Is there something you could tweak in there or is there something that you do that we don’t do, you could send to us and say “Look, this is what we do, I’d love you to know how it works and I’d love you to know about the results that we’re getting”? And if you do want to send anything to us, you can always go directly to our website which is www.braininthegame.com.au and send us your feedback, send us your ideas, send us what’s working for you and what’s not working for you.
And so that brings us to the end of another episode of Brain in the Game. I hope you’ve enjoyed this one and I hope you can get a lot out of listening to the two athletes and the way that they’re processing their training and their competition, and got a lot of different ideas about building that operating system, so you can assess and apply all this information to you, your club and your athletes and until the next training session, train smart and enjoy the ride.
My name’s Dave Diggle and I am the Mind Coach.
Copyright 2012-2022 Dave Diggle
https://www.smartmind.com
