2025 AVCA Presentation - So You Want to Control the Controllables...
Video, slides, and resources
Here are my video and my slides from “So You Want to Control the Controllables...”. The video is about an hour long so I don’t think it will show up in the email. You can go to the web version of this to see it. It was recorded with my iPad but it picks up the sound well enough until the AVCA posts their video.
Please reach out with questions, thoughts, opinions, etcetera. I’m always open to hearing from you.
Here’s a link to Deborah Britzman’s paper. I found it insightful, containing many great observations about why teachers (and coaches) learn the way they do.
Here’s a link to the excellence, actually podcast I quoted from. I highly recommend this for more great observations about our urges to control.
If you want more about the complexity of performance in sport, read this.
At least one attendee caught a math fact I had hoped people would overlook. I set up a math equation, Anxiety = Uncertainty x Inability to cope with uncertainty. I said coaches try to reduce uncertainty to zero, which would result in anxiety going to zero. I later said coaches should increase their ability to cope with uncertainty because it set up my point better. But, to be mathematically accurate, I should have said that coaches should decrease their inability to cope with uncertainty, which would lead to a decrease in anxiety. I didn’t like the double negative so I opted for bad math instead.
Here’s a link to the Walton and Yeager paper. This is one of several papers they have written about “wise interventions”, a concept from education that I think has great parallels to coaching.
Read more about flow here. Mihály Csíkszentmihályi’s work, especially his work on flow, has been very influential for me in areas beyond just coaching.
I’m a fan of the challenge point framework. There is a lot to it but the result is much more connected and engaging coaching.
I showed a longer clip from Instinct at the end of the presentation. It’s something I think of often when I consider what I think I can control in my life. Here’s that clip. (Trigger warning: it contains some physical violence.)