Proactive Coaching: Discipline Now Sets Up Freedom Later
Proactive Coaching: Discipline Now Sets Up Freedom Later
In Leading With the Heart Mike Kryzewski wrote, “Whatever a leader does now sets up what he does later. And there's always a later.” I believe that coaching proactively is the deliberate practice of continually setting up “laters” for athletes and teams.
In the post above, I wrote about helping move players from reactive thinking to proactive thinking. That isn't enough. What good is it to have athletes thinking proactively if you coach them reactively? That makes me think of the old computer programming saying “garbage in, garbage out”. If athletes think proactively then they are thinking about the next skill they are going to perform. If you talk to them about the skill they just performed then you are filling their minds with thoughts that may or may not apply to the next thing they are going to do. They need a proactive coach to complement their proactive thought cycle.
How do you move from reactive coaching to proactive coaching? Proactive coaching is only partly about moving into the same thought cycle that you teach to athletes in your care. It is also about constantly choosing what you pay attention to, what you attach importance to, and what you give feedback about.
Practice and competition each contain more things than you can reasonably feed back to athletes. But many coaches behave as if the amount of feedback they give is a measure of the job they’ve done. This can lead to what a friend of mine refers to as “sprinkler coaching”. The coach is like a sprinkler head, rotating back and forth across all the athletes they see, spewing out a little feedback at each one before moving on to the next and then the next. Once they complete a round, they reset and begin another round of rapid-fire feedback. It is the sprinkler coach's job to cover the entire area as efficiently and evenly as possible. This is exhausting for everyone and rarely productive for anyone.
A proactive coach knows that there is too much going on, both externally and internally, so the coach carefully selects what to talk about and when. The choice of what to talk about is made before training or competition begins and is based on goals and points of emphasis established for the athletes, either collectively or individually. The choice of when to talk is determined by where you observe athletes to be within their proactive thought cycles. Giving specific feedback at appropriate times helps athletes think proactively. A proactive coach judiciously chooses what to say and when to say it in order to help free athletes to perform and succeed in competition.
It’s easy to coach either the last action or an error, and those things may be deserving of feedback. But that’s coaching reactively because you’re waiting until something happens so you can talk about it. This interferes with a proactive thought cycle, which is all about planning ahead and looking forward. Rather than reactively giving feedback on the last thing they saw, the proactive coach considers if what they just saw aligns with a previously established goal or area of focus. If the action aligns, then the proactive coach structures their feedback about the last action so that they are using the last action to remind the athlete of what they did well and what they can do or do better going forward. If the last action doesn’t align, the proactive coach does two things. First, they help the athlete refocus on their next action so the athlete can maintain a proactive thought cycle. Second, they take note of what just happened and what they’d like to work on so that the action can potentially become the center of a future area of focus.
Choosing what matters now and what will matter later is the essence of what Kryzewski wrote about. The coach’s decisions in the present set the agenda for the future. If you always react to the last action, then the agenda you set for the future will always be jumbled. But, if you make deliberate choices about what you will talk about in the present then you give your future agenda much more structure and coherence. Your focus and discipline enable the same focus and discipline in the athletes you work with. They will learn to leave behind things that are outside the current focus, which frees them up to perform the things that matter more. Athletes come to understand what matters most in a particular moment and trust that they can focus on that without distraction.
Coaches regularly preach to athletes that discipline and focus are important tools for maximizing opportunities. It is important to demonstrate those skills every day so athletes are exposed to what those skills look and sound like. The best way to model discipline and focus is in environments you create with the feedback you give. When athletes get distracted from goals and focuses, you are there to remind them what matters in the moment. You can acknowledge other issues that arise and let the athletes know that you'll come back to them and then you can move back to what is most important now. Doing this helps athletes learn how to prioritize their thoughts and actions during training and competition.
Moving into a proactive style of coaching takes time, effort, and discipline just like the changes athletes are regularly asked to make. Modeling that effort and discipline for athletes is a powerful teaching tool.
