Hello, and welcome back to Brain in the Game. Brain in the Game is a podcast that's been specifically designed for athletes, coaches, and parents who are looking to do their sport just that little bit smarter. Brain in the Game is the real intelligence versus artificial intelligence. And I'm your host, Dave Diggle.
In this episode 100, we're going to be focusing on...
Well look, before I tell you what we're going to focus on, I've got a bit of a confession. This is the third time that I've recorded episode 100. But there's a reason. My initial ideas for the 100th Brain in a Game episode was I wanted to interview all the athletes I worked with for the Paris Olympics. Well, that's been a bit of a difficult challenge getting them all together post the games. Some have gone into hibernation, some of them have taken some time off, some have gone into preseason. So that's a bit of a work in progress. And I'm going to get the Australian athletes, the British athletes, and the Irish athletes that I worked with, we're going to all come together and we're going to talk about what we learned during the preparation and the performance at the Paris 2024 Olympics.
My second idea, and my second recording was, visualisation is such a critical component to all coaches and athletes learning capacity. And over the years, I've been innovating some new strategies just to help athletes better get the most out of this key component, which is visualisation. So I recorded that, and instead of it being a 20-25 minute recording, it was almost 2 hours. Now, as much as I'm sure you love listening to me for 2 hours, that's a bit heavy for a podcast. So what I've done is I've given that to our Main Arena coaches who are in our programme already as a bit of a bonus.
So I thought, okay, what do I do? How do I make Brain in the Game 100 a little bit special? During my coaching programme over the last few weeks, we've been focusing on athletes and coaches looking for patterns. And most of my athletes and most of my coaches will tell you, I can get a little obsessed with looking for patterns, looking for processes that are replicable and consistent, be that good or not so good. So one of my clients said, Hey, Dave, as we're now in November, what have you noticed about 2024? What have you seen that's a pattern? Because I love it when my clients use my own words back on me. And that was an interesting question. So I thought, okay, what is it I have seen that has been really prevalent in 2024, maybe more so than other years? And I think having the Olympics has certainly highlighted that we're not optimising our relationships with our coaches, with our athletes, with our support crew. It's become a little bit insular. Now, that might be a little bit of a hangover from COVID. It might be as a reflection of building up for an Olympics. Whatever that is, I think the ability to collaborate and work with people to optimise performance is such a critical component to success, particularly when we're talking about high performance.
So what I wanted to do today in episode 100.3, we're going to be looking at that ability to collaborate, get the most out of your team. Okay, so before we get into that and before I start talking about these two exercises, I really do want to amalgamate to get the most out of collaboration. I do want to let you know that as we are coming close to the end of 2024, we're building and planning for 2025.
And in February 2025, we're going to be running our Main Arena Coach programme again. Now, that coach programme is a 12-week, intense programme designed for coaches to get the most out of themselves, their team, and their athletes. We're also going to be running our normal three times a year, our Mental Gladiator, which is our four-week Intense programme for athletes. So if you are interested in either the Main Arena Coach programme, that 12-week programme, or the Mental Gladiator four-week Intense programme for the athletes, private message me or put in the comments below, either ATHLETE or COACH, depending on what information you're after, and we'll get back to you and let you know. Okay, so all of that to the side, let's focus on Brain in the Game 100: Collaborating Our Relationships. So why is this important? When we think about what we're trying to achieve, we're trying to achieve that high performance, that consistency, that replicability that is really important for the athlete and for the coach. And in order to do that, what we've got to do is maximise and optimise all the people in our entourage. So with every client, be that an athlete, a coach, or in a corporate world where I spend a lot of time working with sprint teams, we initially start looking at our entourage process.
This entourage process is designed specifically to work out what is it I get and what do I need from those in my team. If you look at this process, what you'll see is in the centre is you. And then we've got these concentric circles that are going out from the centre. These circles represent the impact they have on you. So they might be a real important part of the process, somebody like a coach or an athlete. Or the further out they go, that might mean they have less of an impact on you as an athlete or you as a coach. But no less important to be part of the entourage team. So we know that people have different impact levels at different stages. So if it's preseason, competition season, postseason, recovery, injury, all of those people that are normally in your entourage may have a different role to play at different stages of your career or your season. So recognising that we can actually move them from being really intense, frequent, important people in your world to maybe not so necessarily relevant right now. And that can come off the back of if you're recovering and you're an athlete, you might not need that coach in your world while you're doing recovery.
So being able to to recognise who you need, what you need, when you need it is a really important component when we're talking about high performance, and we're talking about sustainability throughout the whole season and in the whole year, and maybe even your whole career. When you look at this, you'll also see high and low frequency. So that person might be really, really important to you, but you might only see them once a week. A good example of that is the role I play with most athletes. We'll catch up maybe once or twice a week, so you wouldn't call that high frequency. Nonetheless, it's a really important component to their development. Or there might be somebody who they see every single day, like their training peers, but they might not necessarily be that critical to their performance. So there'll be high frequency, but further out in the circles. So this process is initially working out:
1. Who are in my entourage - is that a coach, peers, parents, support crew, might be physio, might be chiro, psych. All of those people are important to you as an athlete. If you're a coach, that could be parents, that could be the organisation, your boss, it could be financial consultant, whoever they are in your world, even your team of coaches around you. Working out, one, what role do they play?
2. Frequency.
And then we get to the most important part. Once we've identified who they are, where they fit in our circles, we then have to ask the question, right, what is it I need from you and what do you need from me? Because this will dictate the language we choose to use or not use with them if we're looking to optimise. So if everybody is in your melting pot, everybody is just as important, just as frequent, then the reality is we're not getting what we need from them. What we're getting is a real generic approach to coaching, and a little bit like that machine gunner. What they're doing is just giving you all the information you're hoping it's going to hit. What we want to do is be able to teach these people, 'This is what I need from you. This is how we measure it, and this is when I need it. Also, what do you need from me?' So we have that real good working dynamic, that collaborative dynamic. It's not being done to you or for you, but it's certainly being done with you.
That's important, both from the athlete and the coach and the parents' perspective. So the entourage circle is the ingredients for creating collaboration. We've talked in the past about the DNA. What's your performance DNA? They're also parts of that ingredient. So you can work out what you can give the athlete if you're a coach, or what you can give the performance and your coach if you're an athlete. So recognising that the entourage process is such a critical component to optimising collaboration. If you don't know who's important, their frequency, what you need from them and what they need from you, the likelihood is you're not performing at high performance.
I said to you when we started this episode that there's two exercises. Well, actually, the second exercise is more information than process. When we work, if we're a coach and we're working with an athlete, our relationship, our dynamic, our collaboration capacity is dictated by what we bring to the table. So if we're a coach, we have to help own what we can give that athlete. If we're an athlete, we have to own what we give the performance, our development. So we have to have a good relationship, a collaborative relationship when it comes to working with our coach or working with our athlete.
And sometimes, particularly if we've been working with them for a long time, this can It's going to be an incredibly difficult process to go through. And often it can be quite combative for the coaches and the athletes when they don't really understand what we bring to the table. So if we look at this graph that's on the screen, now, if you're listening to this on any one of our streaming services and you're not seeing the visual, you might want to head over to either our website, smartmind.com, head to the podcast, and you'll see the video version of this, or go to our YouTube channel and watch it there too. This graph that you'll see on the screen is talking about control. So that's a level of impact in information that we have control over and the athlete's age. Obviously, when the athlete is really young, as a coach, we have to take ownership and responsibility for actively correcting the training sessions, the skill acquisition, the performance, and the growth of that athlete. Purely and simply, because the athlete doesn't know. At that age, we don't know what we don't know, and we have no way of correcting that.
As we get older as an athlete, our relationship needs to shift and change with our coach. As we get into our late teens and early twenties, if that coach still has complete control over what we do as an athlete, how we do what we do, then we'll have no ownership as an athlete. So when we get put under pressure, we'll never know how to perform. So that's an important component for us as an athlete to recognise; we have to have a collaboration. We have to grow our ownership. We have to grow our contribution into the coaching dynamic. By the time we tip through into what I call professional sport, we as an athlete should have the lion's share of input. And the coach at this stage should be more of a consultant than the driver. This way we know that as an athlete, we get put under pressure. We can always rely on ourselves. We have that self-belief that we can do this. So these two exercises are critical for optimising our relationship, our dynamics, our efficiency, and our effectiveness, be that as a coach or be that as an athlete. If we're not recognising what we contribute, if we're not owning our role in the process, the likelihood is we're very rarely going to hit that consistent, high performance relationship and dynamic.
So that wasn't the first or the second version of this Brain in the Game episode. However, I hope it's been really, really important for you. And as we come to the end of 2024, I want you to assess how effective has your relationship, your processes, and your collaboration with your team been this year. If it's been hit and miss, if it's been hope, then the reality is you've not built a high performance, collaborative dynamic. And these two exercises should highlight to you what's working, what's not working, and what you can do differently in 2025.
And don't forget, if you're interested in our high performance coach programme, Main Arena, put COACH in the comments or message us COACH. If you're an athlete and you want to do our Mental Gladiator four-week sprint, intensive programme, put ATHLETE in the bottom and we'll send you some information for you to check out.
Hope you got a lot of information, a shift in your perspective, on your team, your dynamics. And I look forward to seeing you in our next episode of Brain in the Game. But before we go, how beautiful is this? Start of summer in a beautiful part of the world.
Until the next episode of Brain in the Game. Train smart and enjoy the ride. My name's Dave Diggle.
