Coaching and the Conditions of Quality
In my job as a high performance coach I am often asked why coaches and athletes need me.
I often feel a little funny answering this question. This is because I have to talk about myself and what I do to a very external or bullying type coach, or an athlete who by all intent and purpose is scared and rather insecure about what I am going to say. It often doesn’t take long before the athletes or the coaches are running for the hills because of how I do what I do. Getting both the athlete and the coach to start paying attention to how they do what they do, and how effective both are under pressure is not easy.
Well, what does all this mean? Well, first of all I am fighting a very deep conditioning in the brain that for the past ten thousand or so years has been heading in an ineffective direction. How do I know this? You only have to watch your own family and friends and you will see how indifferent human beings are to each other when they are undertaking any task together. It isn’t long before the relationship breaks down under pressure and a so-called team goes into an “every man for himself” mode.
When I talk to athletes, and I do this in my travels around the world, the top problem that gets in the way of people succeeding is the thinking process itself.
Thinking has done some marvelous things in the world. It has accomplished many technological feats. It’s put man on the moon, found a vaccine for polio, and created gradation to turn waste land into farmland. Thinking is also responsible for all the wars, past and present, all the horrors done in the name of religion, politics and many more belief systems that have set man against man.
When under pressure in sport, it is important that one is able to think clearly and purposefully, to adapt to any situation and produce quality. It is this quality that has become the focus of my life for the past ten years. People in sport at any given moment may produce quality in order to win. The person or team that wins is most often the team that produces more quality than their competitor for a longer period of time.
In the world, when I ask what prevents coaches and athletes from succeeding, most often athletes will have an answer themselves. When I press them on this they will say their self talk, their lack of believing in themselves, or not being able to execute under pressure because they aren’t thinking the right thoughts or over thinking with worry. The biggest one is fearing, which again is the product of thought.
What people are really saying is that under pressure they weren’t able to produce enough quality needed to win. If you better your time by a tenth of a second, that’s quality. However, it may not be enough quality to win, and you may have needed to beat you best time by 1.1 seconds to win. People feel more successful if they produce quality and win than they do just producing quality. But the common mistake made by coaches and athletes is not understanding the production of quality. It must be the focus of every training session. And it must be understood and built into very competitive opportunity.
Even in business, the cornerstone of any product and service is to produce quality at the lowest possible price to build and maintain customer loyalty. If your service or product is quality to the people using it, they are even willing to pay a higher price for it.
Athletes are just the same. Coaches have to provide some basic truths, yes truths, that set in motion the conditions for quality to flourish in.
This is where I part company with most coaches. Coaches often have in place the exact opposite to the conditions for quality and have in motion this old conditioning of what I call external control psychology. This is the psychology that ego is built on and unfortunately runs the world and is at the source of all our problems in sports, offices, schools, marriages and homes. Whether we want to accept it or not, our life has become about battling with egos. We live in conflict with our self and with others. And this can be seen everywhere if you can look at the heart of all our misery where you see this external control ego-based psychology.
This external control psychology that man fell into now becomes our greatest challenge. Going to the moon is easy compared to solving this. It all started in our evolution when we began to give thought this great and supreme importance. Just think of it: everywhere in your life where you have a problem with a person, is it not because you are miles apart in your thinking? People that think alike argue a lot less. That is why we have sought out people who reaffirm to us the way we think about our life. We even think we need a philosophy of life to live. Then when they don’t, we fight.
You can see this with great athletes who commit the same blunder as they identify who they are by their sport and their accomplishments. Most of these athletes are very shallow people who at the end of their career live in the past and can’t get over their unmet need of their ego, ultimately living a very unfulfilled life.
This process of identification starts with the very structure of self. It is amazing to ask this question to yourself: Who am I? You will see what your quick response will be. You will start by identifying yourself with your country, saying I’m a Canadian. Or you will base it on your culture. Then you may add ‘I’m a Christian or an Atheist’, then you will say a son or daughter of such and such family name, you then will identify yourself with what you do or the knowledge you have gathered. You think you are the car you drive or the money in your bank account. You may notice this identification is the result of gathering knowledge that has come from the outside. Yes, outside of you, built by someone else and the pressure is on you to conform to this way of thinking. If you don’t, you don’t fit in and then have to face not being accepted and the pain of being out of the group or rejected by parents or friends – you know it all so well.
The whole of your psyche is put together this way and in sport you have the opportunity to see through your conditioning and transform your life.
Very few athletes and coaches are interested in all this because it means they have to learn the art of self evaluation and the language of quality. Then it will effect the direction of their life.
Everything they have put into you is the make up of your psyche and that is the tragedy of not being fully human but rather just an external control mechanism.
The psychology of external control in sport has now given rise to younger talented athletes who can’t handle the money they are paid, and the adoration they are shown because they have a talent for sport. I have worked with many athletes who have big salaries and many have gotten into trouble with drugs and supporting their habit has cost them thousands of dollars a day to maintain. Drugs rarely work because they are applied with the same psychology that brought about the problem in the first place. If teams are really going to help these athletes they must change their culture to one that focuses on quality and the conditions that bring it about.
These conditions for quality must apply to all levels of the organization so that a strong infrastructure can be put in place to support the purpose and collective responsibilities of the organization.
The conditions for quality must become the practice of the organization from the top dog to the locker room and be on the mind of every interaction within the organization.
The first condition for quality is a warm, supportive, caring environment built on trust. Here the organizational intent is to help players, managers and coaches in any way they can to improve the performance of the team. In this culture the owner builds an environment for the manager and coach to secure their jobs and build trust between them. So often in pro sport coaches are the scapegoat for athlete’s poor performance.
The manager and the coach build a trusting relationship with the players to be supportive and caring, to secure his job and meet the needs of their significant other and children.
The athletes, coaches, and managers are always asked to give an honest evaluation of how well things are going and to come up with any ideas as how they can improve the quality of service towards need satisfaction. In this style of internal management, suggestions and ideas are always recruited and given serious evaluation and feedback is given. This empowers athletes, coaches and managers to directly affect the process and take responsibly far beyond the classical boss management or external control environment. The environment here is free from fear and coercion, as well as adversarial relationship. In some teams that I have helped, I took them away on retreat for four days and taught them a new way to understand themselves, team dynamics, and motivation.
The next condition for quality is often overlooked when the first condition hasn’t been built and that condition is best effort: everyone is always asked to give their best effort. Most people assume people are, but when relationships are strained most people put a lot of energy in just trying to get through the day and practice avoidance techniques. A good day is a day not related to quality, but not getting reported, yelled at or worse, threatened.
The third condition for quality is meaningful, purposeful work. Here everyone in the organization is asked to question and do work that is meaningful and purposeful to their job. Here coaches must spend time helping athletes to understand how and why they are doing what they are doing. In this framework, coaches and managers sort out what is purposeful to the organization in both roles and responsibility. So often athletes are doing work that is pointless to them but once they discover the purpose and meaning of how it fits into the big picture, they buy in.
The next and one of the most important conditions of quality is everyone within the culture is asked to self evaluate as a means of solving problems. This really goes against our external conditioning. We are so used to finding fault, blaming, and making excuses that it has been something we think works. Often I have heard a high level manager ask why an athlete made the mistake, as if that is going to help. When I pipe up and ask how are we going to fix it, and ensure it won’t happen again, who cares who did it? People are often shocked.
Self evaluation is the hardest of our conditions to bring about because now athletes, coaches, and managers stop evaluating each other and are asked to evaluate themselves and only themselves. I feel that this really empowers people to move toward quality as they define it and redefine it. What is quality at one part of a season I’d see as different from another part and the more I can keep people evaluating their own process, through and beyond change, the better they become at adapting and producing quality at will. Ineffective people evaluate others, effective people self evaluate.
The next condition for quality is relationship. Relationship is of the greatest importance because relationship always feels good. Therefore, everything in the organization is about being constructive and never destructive. The managers, coaches and athletes are constantly in an ongoing conversation on how to improve and enhance the journey of process to achieve outcomes.
CoachBri