THREAD: What is Great Coaching?

Here are 11 insights I've learned over the past 10 years in working with world-class athletes and coaches across sports.

On Learning, Motivation, Culture, and Sustainable Performance.

👇👇👇
1. Do the Work to Understand.

When you don't know what you're doing, you tend to focus on the small things that don't actually matter. You emphasize what you can control, not what has an actual impact

Do the work to differentiate what looks good versus what impacts performance
2. Drop the Ego. Find People Who Know More.

The best coaches seek out wisdom from others.

Fiercely guarding your "secrets" backfires. Coaching comes from conversation. The more smart thinkers you're talking to, the clearer your thinking will be.
3. You can love a program, but don't marry it.

There is no perfect training program or system.

If you marry yourself to one, then you stop innovating. Coaching is a game of continual adjustment and innovation. Don't become a systems guy.
4. You can't BS people for long.

You either care or you don't. And the athletes will find out sooner or later.

Be authentic to who you are. Don't try to copy others just because they had success. Mimicry or imitation fails. Do it your way.
5. Coaching is not about prescribing and dictating.

It's about creating situations where the athlete is challenged to figure it out. You nudge them along, but if you always give them the answer, you aren't actually teaching. And they aren't learning.
6. Culture= Filling people's basic needs.

People need to feel valued. Make them feel that they:
-belong
-can get better
-have a voice.

If you aren't giving them that, none of the fancy motivational tactics matter. That is your foundation.
7. Power does not equal leadership.

People mistake leadership with power and control. When it's really about the opposite, autonomy. If you are leading, your goal is to actually give away control.

You want to guide and empower your team to not be dependent on you.
8. Complex to Simple. Not the other way around.

A great coach once told me that good coaches take complex ideas and make them simple, while a bad coach who wants to appear like they know what they are doing takes ideas and concepts and makes them more complex.
9. Never stop learning.

The moment you think you know it all is the moment it's time to retire.
10. How you define success should match how your athletes do

We don't all define success in the same way.

You need to be clear in understanding your athletes’ expectations, then acknowledging & shaping them in ways that ensure a healthy view of competition, success, & failure
11. Coaching is about observation.

Go sit at the top of the stands and watch practice of any good coach in any sport.

Leave your phone. Just watch. Observe the interactions and responses to the coach by the athletes. Read the emotion, fatigue, reactions.
If you want more evidence-based content on peak performance, motivation, and coaching give me a follow.

I post similar ideas and insights daily and threads like this 2x/week.

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More from @stevemagness

27 Jan
Figuring out who to listen to and what's right/wrong in the world of social media, podcasters, and experts of everything is difficult.

As a scientist and writer here's1 trick & 6 lessons on figuring out if a writer, podcaster, or expert should be listened to or not. 👇👇👇
First, the quick way:
See what an expert says about something in an area you have expertise in.

For example, I search for where they talk about exercise or athletic performance.

If they are wrong but confident in it. It tells you that something is wrong in their thinking
They overindex on superficial understanding and don't do the deep work.

It doesn't mean they'll be wrong on everything, but it should make you question whenever the person ventures away from an area where they've had 'skin in the game' success in.
Read 18 tweets
25 Jan
Leading into today's game, the Packer's defensive coordinator made his team watch last year's loss of the NFC championship.

Let's take a look at why focusing on the negative right before a big game might not be the best idea...

A Thread on hormones & priming for performance:
What we watch can prime us for performance. We intuitively know this. We can sense our emotions and moods change as we watch something good or bad.

But what we often neglect is the hormonal impact that occurs, which can cause a performance impact for days.
Let's walk through a few studies. In this study, researchers found watching a victory increased Testosterone levels by 44%. When watching a defeat, no significant change in T levels.
researchgate.net/publication/26…
Read 14 tweets
22 Jan
The "tough/hardass" coaching model occasionally works on the HS/college level because athletes have no control.

It largely fails on the pro level because athletes have more autonomy & understand their value

Pro's want to be treated as people, not subordinates.

Why? A thread:
It's not that young athletes don't want the same things (autonomy) as older. It's that there's an inherent power differential and they are nearly powerless to escape it.

They "survive" the 'tough' training, they don't thrive under it.
Human motivation is very simple. Self Determination Theory boils it down to 3 basic needs:
1. Feel like you belong
2. Feel like you can make progress
3. Feel like you have some control over your life (autonomy)
Read 13 tweets
19 Jan
With most jobs, you need to be two different people, depending on the situation.

The coach who is demanding and a perfectionist when correcting, yet caring and empathetic after a loss

The author who is creative and forgiving when writing, yet ruthless and critical when editing.
When writing I'm lax & forgiving. The goal is production. Good, Bad, whatever, put it on the paper

My editing self is critical & efficient. Focused on cutting. Trim all but the essential

Separating the 'self' allows you to create space so that the creative self doesn't hesitate
The editing is the hard part for me.

What I do to help is dump all of the ‘cut’ sections into a document titled “Future Ideas and Articles.”

It helps to think of it not as cutting, but as the beginning of a potential new project.
Read 4 tweets
11 Oct 20
Lessons learned:

Every year on my birthday I work my way through a year of scribbling in my notebook. Reflecting on what I've learned.

Here are my 2020 takeaways. If you enjoy them, consider sharing them with others who might find them of value.

A long thread:
The key to building relationships and trust is vulnerability.

It's the reason I'm still close to old teammates. We suffered for a common goal. Pain, fatigue, crying, puking. We saw it all. Being 'exposed' allowed us to drop the facade and accept who we are.
Put your ego side.

No one really cares if you succeed or fail. For most of us the pressure comes from inside. We blow things up to be much bigger deals than they are.

The antidote is a bit of perspective.
Read 21 tweets
8 Oct 20
Collect and Cultivate Ideas.

This phrase is a note on my desk. It serves as a reminder that the way towards better thinking, coaching, and performing is to keep exploring. Don't get trapped in your own siloed way of thinking.

How do you collect ideas? Read-Experience-Connect
Read-
Simple. Read a lot. But make sure you go broad. Too often as we gain expertise, we focus only on going narrow, deeper into our field of expertise.

Narrow is needed. But broad primes our mind to think creatively. To connect disparate concepts back to our pursuit.
So what's my reading look like?
For breadth- I read books that give me broad overviews of a variety of fields.
For depth- A combo of 'down the rabbit hole' research articles + textbooks
Listen to audiobooks-to broaden my horizon (history, fiction, etc.)
Read 5 tweets

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