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.