The Health Of The Team

The health of the team is reflected in the face of the coach.  We are the standard.  We have to reflect and model the standards that we communicate and expect from our athletes.

When we teach and preach one thing - be on time, be prepared, be accountable, and when we DO something different - show up late, show up unprepared, make excuses, we are sending mixed signals.  When we send mixed signals, we are causing confusion and we lose credibility.

Tim Corbin, head baseball coach at Vanderbilt, says "modeling is what you do and what people see from you."  What would your athletes say about you?  What would they say that you value?  How would they rate you as a leader and a coach and a teacher?  If someone followed you around for 48 hours, what would they see and hear, and what would they say that you value, based on your actions?

The hardest person to teach, lead, and coach is ourselves.  We have to make sure that we are living up to and above the standards that we set for our team, and we have to be consistent through the good times and the bad.  Every action and reaction that we have sends a signal.  What messages and signals are you sending?

Lou Holtz's Three Rules

In a recent meeting with our principal, he shared the three rules that legendary football coach, Lou Holtz, lives by.

The three rules are simple, but when applied right, they can be life-changing.  The three rules are:

1 - Can I trust you?
2 - Are you committed to excellence?
3 - Do you care about me?

COVID-19 has completely shaken up our world.  In education, it has been tough to provide grace and accountability for our students.  There has been a lot of unknowns, and I think a lot of us educators and coaches want to know if we are doing the right thing if we are doing what we are supposed to be doing and if we are doing enough.  

He shared these three questions to put us and our minds at ease.  He told us all that he trusts us and the work that we do and that he trusts us as people as well.  He said that it is evident that we are committed to excellence by the way that we have taken on this challenge of educating our students online.  He finally said that it is obvious that we care by the level of our communication and effort into doing everything that we can for our students and their families.

If we can answer these three questions, and if we do all that we can, we should be able to sleep easier at night knowing that we won the day.  As John Wooden famously said, "Success is peace of mind which is a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you did your best to become the best you are capable of becoming.”

The Greats Get Nervous Too, But Master The Mind

Writer Jackie MacMillan is a writer who has covered the NBA for years. She was a young reporter when Michael Jordan came into the league, and she got a courtside view of his growth into one of the greatest athletes who ever lived.

One of Jordan's most famous moments was the shot that he hit against the Cleveland Cavaliers in 1989 in the 5th and deciding game of their playoff series. She said that before that game, she was able to talk to MJ. It was a big game for the Bulls and for his career. She remembers him talking about how nervous he was leading up to the game, and how he was handling the nerves:

"He was nervous Don't think that Michael Jordan wasn't ever nervous. All the great ones are. Now, once the game starts, those nerves disappear immediately. But in the days leading up to it, talk to all of the greats - Jerry West, Bird, Russell, Magic - all of them will tell you that nerves are normal and managing those nerves and transforming them into positive energy separates the greatest players from the average players. I remember talking to Jordan and his knee was jangling, jangling, jangling at the locker room, talking back forth between positive self-talk and a little bit of just nerves."

I think we look at athletes like Michael Jordan and admire their competitive spirit and their seemingly calm and confident appearance in the biggest moments. Its good to hear that they have the same thoughts, fears, and nervous feelings that we all get. We just all have to figure out how to channel our emotions and energy in a way that will benefit us.

Lebron James has a commercial with Kaiser where he says, "The mind is like a muscle. The more you train it, the stronger it becomes. While the greats mastered the body, the greatest mastered the mind."

Excellence Is A Choice

Jon Gordon recently interviewed Horst Schulze, a cofounder of The Ritz Carlton Hotel company.  Horst is a legendary leader and visionary who has helped reshape the concepts of excellence, service, and competitive advantage, transcending divisions of industry across the world. 

Horst had a couple of very great quotes about excellence and how leadership differs from management.

Horst says that excellence is a choice:

Excellence is a choice.  If you do things with excellence, you are going to win.  Excellence is a decision.  It is not an accident.  It is the result of high intentions, sincere effort, and intelligent execution.  It's not by chance, its a choice, and it directs your destiny.  If you are excellent or not is a choice that you make.  Everything is a decision in life.

When he was asked what he has learned about leadership, he said:

There are very few leaders, but a lot of managers.  There is a difference between leadership and management.  Exceptional managers study their customers, what they want, what they expect, what they desire from you, and you will make sure that your employees know what your customers want, and you will create processes, systems, and controls that make sure you employees do what your customers want. 

If you are a great leader, you will create an environment in which your employees want to do what your customers want.  At the same time, your employees know and are a part of your company.  They don't just work for the company, they are a part of the company.  They are there for a purpose, which is to create excellence.  That is leadership.  It implies that you are leading people somewhere, to a destination.  Companies talk about leadership, but their people don't know the destination or the purpose of the company.  You can't lead unless everybody knows where you are leading too.

He talked about how he gets excellence out of his employees.  He says it starts in the hiring process and from the first time that he trains them, and it is something that they talk about everyday.  He doesn't call it the hiring process, but the selection process, and when they are ready to select a new employee, they ask if they are willing and ready to join a company that strives for excellence and to be the best in the world at what they do.

Horst says that you need people who will join you in this ambition, and if you can hire better people than your competition, you will win.  He tells future employees, "Don't join us if you can't join our dream and vision."

How do we hire better people?  The most important job that we have is hiring the best people that we can hire.

Give them a why and then explain to them the how.
Horst talks about how important it is to merge the vision of the company with the vision of every individual employee.  The objectives of the employees have to match the objectives of the team.  When the team is successful, the team earns respect and when the team earns respect, the employees earn respect; everybody is working for the same thing.  Its the leaders responsibility to identify the vision and to communicate it in a way that the employees want to buy-in and live it.  The leader has to have the dream and sell the dream and show each employee how the dream will benefit them.

Horst has identified 20 things that seperates his company from the competition, and what have to do to achieve excellence.  They teach those 20 things during the first trainings, and they repeat one of them every day so that they sustain excellence.  He says that this is how they become the best and stay the best.

Michael Jordan - The College Years

In "The Last Dance" documentary about Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls, they had some great footage and interviews about his time in college at North Carolina.

Coaches Dean Smith and Roy Williams both talked about how competitive and hard working he was from day one.

Coach Smith said that he was very inconsistent as a freshman, but he was one of the most competitive ones that they had in their drills.  He  said that MJ WANTED to get better, and he had the abiity to get better.

Its not about where you start, but how hard that you work, how willing you are to learn, and how much you are willing to compete.

Coach Williams had a couple of great quotes about his work ethic.  Williams said, "When I think of Michael Jordan, I think of 3 years of watching that youngster get BETTER and BETTER and BETTER.  Michael Jordan was the only player who could ever turn it on and off.  And he NEVER turned it off."

Coach Williams also told a story about how MJ wanted to be the best player to ever play at North Carolina:

Michael Jordan tells me one day that he wants to be the best player who ever played here.  I said, “Well, you gotta work harder than you did in high school.”  He said, “I worked as hard as everybody else.  I said,  “Excuse me?  I thought to you just told me that you wanted to be the best player who ever played here?”  He said, “I'm going to show you.  Nobody will ever work as hard as I will.”

Former teammate James Worthy said that Jordan would make him stay after practice everyday to play one-on-one.  He said that he was better than Jordan, for about 2 weeks.

These stories help see some of the drive and competitiveness that helped make Michael Jordan the great player that he was. 

Advice Acceptance

Brett Ledbetter is one of the leaders in character education.  He works with the best athletes and coaches in the world.  He recently spoke with leaders in our district about how to improve behaviors.

We define appropriate behavior in our district as above the line behaviors, and we define inappropriate behaviors as below the line behaviors.  We talked for about an hour on how to get all of our kids above the line.

One thing that he said was that NBA athletes generally ask these three questions when working with a new coach:

- Are They Smart?
- Is There a Conflict of Interest?
- Do They Care?

You have to have the knowledge, resources, and ability to grow your people.  If you can't or don't, they just won't believe in you, trust you, or follow you.

You also have to make sure that you have common goals.  You have to be working with each other, and against each other.  Everybody wants to feel valued, heard, and appreciated.  Listen to your people and what they want.  Make sure that they know that you appreciate and value them.

Brett said that it is important to build a relationship and to build trust with your athletes.  This allows you to push them out of their comfort zone.  As the old saying goes, 'They won't care how much you know until they know how much you care.'

Good luck going out there and helping these kids grow.  Just remember these three points.

Find Your Own Voice

"Always seek to do your very best.

It does not matter what the rest of the world thinks, but it is of prime importance, however, what you think."

Sherri Coale, the women's basketball coach at the University of Oklahoma, has this quote hanging in her office.

She says that it is important to find your voice and to measure yourself by your own standard of excellence instead of waiting for the world to weigh in on whether or not you are measuring up to their standards.

Everyone has an opinion on everything:
- What we do
- Where we go
- How we look

Thoughts and opinions of others can get noisy, but we have to learn how to keep the rest of the rest of the world out of our own heads and shield yourself from their opinions.

It is part of our job as coaches and teachers to help our kids learn how to find their own voice, navigate through the ups and downs of life, and ultimately not need us as much as they get older and so that they can pass on those lessons to others.

Brandie Jay: The Land and Look and the Perfect 10

In gymnastics, the outcome is based on the approval of judges, so it leads gymnasts to value the opinion of others.  They are taught to be perfectionists because there is a standard of a Perfect 10.  To get the Perfect 10, you have to get a 10 from two judges.  You are taught, from the time you start competing, to value the score that the judges give you.

Hearing this was eye-opening to me.  I didn't realize that gymnasts are trained to seek perfection out of each routine and to look for the approval of others.  That approval isn't even fully based on the routine but based also in part on things that they can't control - like how somebody sees and values their body image, their appearance, and their technique.

They are conditioned to put their value in the eyes and opinions of others.  They even have the term 'Land and Look' which means that soon as they land, they look immediately to their coach for validation and approval for their performance.  In the video, Brandie said that even if she KNOWS that she did a perfect vault, she still immediately turns and looks at her coach for his validation and approval.

This made me think of other areas of sports and life where we value the opinion of others before and over own opinions of ourselves.  In so many ways, we seek validation from other people.

Its nearly impossible to avoid the opinions of others, and it is important, on some level, to be aware of how others perceive you and how well you do what you do, but it's more important to tie your value, worth and success to something that you can control.  In the video, Brett said that gymnasts through this have an opportunity to understand these forces better and so that they are more prepared as they exit out of the sport.  He said that to use the forces that sports provide and repurpose them into helping others become stronger.  Going through this can have a positive impact on ourselves, and can have a bigger force on the world if repurposed appropriately.

A couple of goals I will have moving forward will be defining what success looks like for myself, my teams and my family, and working productively and purposefully to accomplish those goals.

If I get a Perfect 10 score from others because of that, then GREAT.  But I want to find peace and joy in knowing that I, and we, did everything that we can to the best of our abilities.

It Doesn't Last Forever

I am always thinking about 'what WE are BECOMING' because of sports.

Who am i becoming as a coach and a sports dad.

Who are my athletes becoming because of my coaching and leadershil.

Who my kids are becoming because of sports.

My goal as a coach and a parent is to max out on my potential and overachieve, and to enjoy every step of the way.

My goal for my athletes and my kids are to max out, to overachieve, and to enjoy every step of the way.

I try to do my best to do a great job of teaching and growing athletes, but i think its just as important for us to be able to look back on our experiences with joy and happiness.

We only get one chance at this.  Lets mkar sure we have fun with it.

Every Great Team Has Trust

Every great team has trust.

Sometimes we have to accelerate the process of trust.  Trust = relying on others.  To accelerare trust, put your players in the position where they have to rely on each other.

Trust needs trustworthiness and trustwillingness.  Being trustworthy means allowing your hand to be taken, and trustwilling means not yanking your hand away.

It helps to define and show what trust, trustworthiness, and trustwillingness looks like in action and on the field.  Its important to create a culture where the players are willing to go ALL-IN and they are willing to do it for each other because they trust each other and they love each other and because that is the expectationm

How To Go All-In

One issue that coaches, teachers, parents and any person in a leadership asks consistently is, 

'How do I get ___________ to give me their full effort?"

- How do I get my athletes to go hard everyday?
- How do I get my students to work as hard as they can?
- How do I get my kids to give their full effort?
- How do I get my athletes to play with grit, heart, and toughness?

Becky Burleigh is the women's soccer coach at University of Florida.  She recognized that her teams sometime create excuses for not going all-in.  One of the excuses is that if they don't go all-in and fail, they are able to justify it by saying that they didn't give it their all or that they didn't care. Intentness to succeed can lead to anxiety, and the excuses of not caring or not trying their hardest can be a coping mechanism.

She said that they needed to identify and define what it looks like to go 'all in,' all of the time.  

They wanted to create a visual of what going all in looks like.  They then had to create a supportive environment. If we go all in, we are probably going to take risks and make some mistakes.  They had to figure out how they were going to move through those mistakes.  For coaches and teammates, we have about 1-3 seconds to react to a mistake, and we are either going to hold someone to that mistake or help them move through that mistake.

The two takeaways that I gathered from her was that we have to know what going all-in looks like, and we have to create an environment that encourages our athletes to learn through the mistakes that come with going all in so that our athletes feel comfortable being vulnerable.

Instead of telling our athletes to go harder, it might help if we told them to run faster, or beat their opponent to a spot, or be the first one to dive on the floor for a ball.

Instead of telling our students to work harder, it might help to identify what specifically they can do better.

Identifying what needs to be done helps, and being able to measure the level of it being done helps because when you measure something, you pay attention to it.  

Their reminder is green.  The color green means for them to keep going and to keep going hard and going all-in.

While we identify what 'all-in' is and looks like, we have to build relationships and build trust with our athletes, kids and students so that we know what motivates them and so that they trust that what we are preaching is valuable to and for them.

Touch As Many Lives As Possible

Trevor Ariza has been in the NBA since 2004.  He has played on a few different teams - some great teams and on some struggling teams.  

On a recent podcast he was discussing his journey and the journeys that some athletes have during their careers and how some athletes don't get or receive the fame or recognition that they deserve.  He said this about his journey:

"No two journeys are the same and everybody has to take their own path. 

Timing always plays a factor in where you are and what you do.

For me, my path was to TOUCH AS MANY PEOPLE as I could.  And I enjoy that."

I thought that was a beautiful way to look at the impact that we can have on the people that we coach and the players that we play with.

We can't always control how much talent we have, and we sure can't control all of the recognition that we recieve.

But we can definitely control how we treat people.  If we all made it a goal to emphasize how we treat the people that we come across, we could change the world through sports.

Let's start with 'our' worlds.

Payton Pritchard on CJ McCollum's Pull-Up Podcast

Oregon point guard Payton Pritchard was a guest on CJ McCollum's podcast, and they asked him some really good questions about his training, how it has changed from year to year, and what he is doing now during the shut down.

The biggest takeaway that I had is the importance of finding ways to put in the work, especially during adversity and adverse times like this shut down that we are experiencing now.  Having a vision and a routine helps you stay on track.

How Did Your Training Change In Terms of Your Approach From Your Freshman Year to Senior Year?

"I have always been a hard worker and got in the gym a bunch, but with each year I've gotten smarter, with my training and what I needed to improve on, and got more consistent with the work.

A lot of guys can go work hard for a day or two, but you have to be consistent at working hard each and everyday.

I got better at improving my weaknesses and making them become strengths.  From my junior to senior year, my 3 point shooting percentage went up and I started shooting from deeper which made guys have to guard me from further out and opened my game up."

How Did Confidence Come Into Play For You?

"I always had the range and the ability to shoot, but the biggest thing was confidence.  My junior year, I had a lot of confidence issues and my confidence went up and down, and there was some low points.  Once I found my confidence again and believed in myself and in what I was doing, my confidence kept growing and my coaches believed in me."

Did Watching And Working With Pros Like Alan Crabb Help You Or Play A Roll In Your Growth?

I try to take things from anybody at any level.  They could be high school, college or NBA.  If I am in the gym with anybody and I see some that I like, I will add it to my game.  I like seeing the attention detail from others and how hard they work, and I just learn from that and add it to what I am already doing.

How Are You Training And Preparing For The Draft?

Its tough to get in a gym, but I can still work in other areas.  You can still do ball-handling and tighten that up as much as you can.  I wake up around 10 and go into the garage and do my ball-handling drills, jump rope, and quick feet stuff.  That takes about an hour and is my morning session.  I run hills at about 3:00 or 4:00, and at night I do some different strength stuff, like lifting weights and stuff like that.

CJ said his team talks about staying ahead of the curve.  "A lot of people have the 'woe is me mentality' where they feel sorry for themselves, not work, and use this time to relax, and that is when you catch and pass people.  Because our options are limited, there are only a few people who are going to work through this crises in terms of working on their game, improving, and coming out of this with something.  It's like when you break your right hand; how do you tighten up your left?  This is a time to really seperate yourself from a lot of other people.  Everybody is not working the same.   A lot of people have talent, but they don't know how to utilize it and many are just too lazy to utilize it.  During this time, take advantage of your resources so that you are coming out of this ahead.

What Is Your Best Advice For High School Players Looking to Get To The Next Level?

My best advice for high school players looking to play at the next level is you have to spend time in the gym and you have to love it.  What players don't understand about the next level is that it is a time commitment, so you have to be ready for that and you really have to love the game.  If you don't, it will get really difficult and you won't like your life at times.

Buzz WIlliams - Love Tough and Building a Winning Team

Buzz Williams, the head men's basketball coach at Texas A&M, was recently a guest on Jon Gordon's podcast, and he left some very good gems.

Coach Williams talked about how he got his start in coaching, and there are lessons in his climb and how he became a Division 1 head coach.  He said that when he was first getting started as a team manager at the junior college and NAIA, anytime he met a person/coach with a business card, he would send them a handwritten letter once a week.  He also worked basketball camp every week of every summer.  By his senior year of college, he was writing 420 coaches a week.  He slowly worked his way up the coaching ranks.  He spent 13 years as an assistant coach, and he has spent 13 years as a head coach.

God Gives Us What We Can Handle

Coach Williams said that his focus throughout his career was to be the best that he could be for the job that he has, that he has been blessed way more than he deserves and that he knew just enough to know when and how to take the next right step.  Internally, Coach Williams said that he is wired to see if tomorrow he could do just a little bit more, be a little more efficient, and a little better than he was yesterday.

Tomorrow, how can I do a little more, be a little more efficient, and be a little better than I was yesterday?

He said that there were a lot of people on his path that helped him, shared with him, and taught him.  Coach Williams said that, "God only gave him enough that he could handle," and, "each step of the way, it got just big enough for him to understand a little bit more."

View Everyone You Meet As A Teacher

When Jon asked Coach Williams why he wrote so many letters to so many coaches, he said that the way that he was raised taught him that relationships were of the utmost importance.  He also said that he "You should view everyone as a teacher. You should view the janitor at the school as a teacher; you should view the cafeteria worker as a teacher. Everyone that you come in contact with has something that they can teach you.

How Do You Have Success Everywhere That You Go

Coach Williams's response when asked why success has followed him everywhere he goes included quotes about relationships and investing in people over athletes. He said that investment equals expectations. Coach said to remind your people of who they are becoming. Try to find ways to invest in each person's life. When you are reminding them who they are becoming, and when you are investing in them daily, that changes the expectations, not only for what you expect of them but more importantly of what they expect from themselves. When you invest in the lives of other people and they know that you truly love them, you can help them overachieve. True love doesn't have an agenda, so we have to spend more time investing in helping them grow in all parts of their lives.

"Invest more in who your athletes are as people and help them be successful as people. Invest in their lives. The way to overachieve consistently is when they know you love them as people and not with an agenda."

Culture

Culture is just habits. 

You get what you repeat. 

It's important for your athletes to know that your culture, your habits, and what you repeat are an investment in their lives. They have to see how it all adds value to their lives.

Search For Wisdom vs Information

As he gets older, Coach Williams says that he has learned how important it is to seek wisdom and to look back at what he has done and its effect on the players that he has coached. He said, "There is so much information out there, & we spend so much time searching for information. It helps to slow down our search for information and increases our search for wisdom. See what you have done, what has worked, and how we can get better for the guys that he coaches now."

How Have You Changed

When asked specifically how he has changed as a coach as he has gotten older, Coach Williams said, "I don't make long-term decisions over short-term circumstances." Coach said that he has tried to move his validation meters to the inside and to stay away from outside influences. We have to be careful that we don't do things for the wrong reasons and that we aren't paying to much attention to the opinions of others, and that the intent of our hearts are for others."

What Do You Tell Young Leaders and Young Coaches?

The blessings you see are many times from the sacrifices that you don't see.

1 - Read way more than you think you should. He reads a book a week. "It's the best and most efficient way to accumulate wisdom."

2 - Write down everything about everything. All of the time.

3 - Build trustful relationships for 10 years from now, but learn to connect the dots between now and then.

4 - Never turn down an opportunity to work or to learn.  You have to learn at a rate that is greater than or equal to the rate of change.  Your rate of learning has to be ahead of the generation that you are leading.

The Gift of Belief

"The greatest gift that I can give to someone is my belief in them."  Coach Williams gave Jon Gordon a note that said, "Nobody will love you like I will love you."  He writes 120 people a month and 60 thank you notes per month.  We all want others to believe in us, and he says that the biggest sign in their practice facility is a picture of their team, and above the picture, it says, "I Believe In You," because he feels that belief in someone is the greatest gift that he can give them.  

He says to his people, "Nobody is cheering for you as much as I am, and nobody loves you like I love you."  Coach says that he wants to be a dealer in hope, and he wants to give a gift of belief.

What Do You Tell Players When They Join Your Program
When asked what he tells his players when they join the program, Coach Williams said that the most important moment in the recruiting process is meeting the people around them.  Knowing their game and how they will fit on the team is important, but knowing who they are and what's important to them and what their dreams and their hopes are what he really wants to know.

Coach Williams went on to say that he wants to coach potential recruits in front of their parents so that he can see how their parents will respond to him coaching their child.  That is an indicator of if the athlete will have success in their program.  He said that they say no to more athletes than the number of athletes who say yes to them.  They value their development process, and they can't do that if players are leaving at the first sign of adversity or if they can't handle coaching.  As soon as he can get in front of the parent of a recruit and coach them in front of their parents and how their parent responds to his is a huge indicator on if this is going to work.

On Holding Players Accountable

Coach Williams said this when talking about holding his players accountable: "

"I have the energy to hold you accountable to what you say you want to become.  The path to what you want to become is not as easy as you think it is.  We will hold you to our level of expectations, standards and accountability everyday, and it is more off the court than it is on the court.  Off the floor, being on time, sitting in the first three rows of class, doing the hours required of study hall and tutoring - we want to be teachers of life.  

Your life mirrors your game, and if you life is trending in a positive direction, so is your game.  It doesn't usually work the other way around, so we make sure that their life is going in the right direction.

We are going about our work with a high level of energy, and we are going to constantly remind them of where they want to go and what it takes to get there."

Leading Through The Shut Down
When asked how he is handling the shutdown, Coach Williams said that there are three ways that you can lead:

1 - You can lead from the front.

2 - You can lead from the side, holding someone's hand.

3 - You can lead from the back and push them forward.

Discerning which position to be in is really important.

There are two types of leaders: Those that are self-serving, and those who are serving others.  

The last thing that he told his team was that they will be the best, most communicative program in the country.  I don't know what this is going to be, but I know what we are going to be in this time.

Coaching Today's Player In 2020

I was listening to Paul Biancardi speak about how to better communicate, connect with, and coach today's athletes.  Paul Biancardi is a former college basketball coach and is now the ESPN's National Recruiting director.  He has been around the game and its top athletes for years, so he has good insight on how to be an effective coach for athletes today.

He starts off talking about how important it is for us coaches to understand that our athletes are different than they were when we were growing up and we have to communicate with them differently.

COACHING TODAY'S PLAYER IN 2020 

1 - HOW coaches deliver their message MUST change. 

2 - Coach's core values, principles, and standards have NOT changed. 

3 - Today's players are CONSUMED with the future. We have to make sure that we are communicating EFFECTIVELY.

How we communicate and deliver our message has to be different.  The core values, principles and standards are the same, but how we give it has to be different.  If we aren't doing a better job of connecting and communicating, our players will start hitting the 'snooze' button on us and tune us out.  

We have to communicate effectively on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis.  When athletes aren't responding in a way that you would like, the problem might not be you, but the way that you are delivering your message.  Make sure that your message is being delivered the right way for each person and at the right time to maximize effectiveness.

Everybody responds differently to coaching, so be mindful of what you say, how you say it, and when you say it.  Timing is everything.  Talk WITH your players and not at your players, and don't embarrass your players in front of their peers.  Be demanding, but be more instructional with your words than critical with your words, and it might help you better connect with your players. Plant positive seeds every day in your players.

Shout PRAISE.
Whisper Criticism.

Trust | Beleive-In | Buy-In

You have to CARE FOR & UNDERSTAND your players BEFORE you can really CONNECT WITH & COACH your players. To get BUY-IN, you have to first have BELIEVE-IN from your players. Build the TRUST with your athletes first, then get the BELIEF, & the BELIEF gets the BUY-IN.

When your players know that you care about them as people, that is when they will listen to you the most. Invest more time away from the game and in person.  Learn how to communicate by asking relevant, open-ended questions and LISTEN to what they are saying. Ask them to describe things to you. Ask them why and how. Don't just ask them how they feel today. Get them answering in sentences. Get in-depth and personal with your players. Spend personal time with them.  Get to know who they are, what they like to do outside of the game.  Ask them what their favorite shows and movies are.  Ask them about their weekends.  Spend personal time with them.

When you invest in your players as people and when you work to build trust, it allows your relationship to grow & they will better listen to you because they know you care about them on a deeper level. Your message will be better received by the team because they ALL know you care.

What you teach is what they will learn. What you emphasize will determine your team habits. What you tolerate will determine your daily atmosphere and culture.