Throughout my years as a coach, I have become more aware of the meaning of interactions. Interactions can be beautiful and full of energy when accomplished in a positive light. Every interaction is valuable and within each interaction there is a lesson. Interactions can take on many forms. They can change who you are and they can have an effect on someone else. Interacting mindfully is crucial to high performance sport. It should be practiced and monitored. I have been focusing on witnessing my interactions from the outside versus viewing the interaction in the first person. This is helping me to discover interactions that could use some fine tuning.
I am working on cultivating a new communication style with my team. I recognize that there is a need for improvement. What I have done so far to improve interaction within my team is simply to bring down the volume level of the gym and make sure that the athletes are close enough to hear the feedback or coaching intervention. It is very loud in our building and I found that I was frustrated with the athletes for not knowing instructions. I then took a big step back and realized that from where they were standing, no matter how hard they tried, it was too loud to hear me from my coaching position. This might happen for example when we are doing complex and I am leading from the front of the balance beam section, or when my athlete is at the farthest end of the vault runway. I have adjusted by bringing the athletes in close while demonstrating a drill, or using hand signals from a distance.
A second interaction improvement will come from creating a culture that includes positive language and quality feedback. I am trying to supply clear information that causes the athlete’s brain to think about the correct que. I am working on things like, “straightening your arms will give you more power through the skill” vs. “don’t bend your arms or your arms are bent and therefore you do not get enough power.” I have spoken to my team and they are aware of the changes that I am trying to make to our interactions. So far we have made progress and it is becoming more natural to communicate this way.
The third interaction in gymnastics coaching, is spotting. Communicating clearly during spotting assistance interactions, so that the coach and the athlete are on the same page is crucial. When I am working closely with an athlete we always have a plan and make sure that we also understand the “emergency exit”. This ensures that we are always safe as a team. Spotting is a skill that is necessary at times especially on the uneven bars. As we work towards our benchmarks and try to improve our start values on uneven bars. I have had to be creative to come up with the safest way to teach and progress the skills.
I have attached a video of my Junior Olympic 9 and 10 athletes working on the uneven bars. Looks like fun, but it is all about staying safe.
andrew evans
October 24, 2016 — 12:15 am
Jesse you bring up some great points in this blog.
Your first step in addressing the environment may seem simple but the benefits will be huge I am sure. Many times I have witnessed training sessions where the coach will speak and then move on while the athletes look at one another asking, “did you get that?” simply because they could not hear or were not in position to get all the information from the coach. Our environment definitely plays a huge role with interaction.
With your second intervention I would love to hear how this would help generate a “growth mindset” culture amongst your athletes. I can imagine that it would be very easy to fall within a fixed mindset in gymnastics from a traditional perspective (I could be very wrong and ignorant here however!). I am sure with your attitude and approach, your athletes will benefit greatly with this intervention of quality feedback and positive language.
Many thanks,
Andy
michael robinson
October 24, 2016 — 6:30 am
Hi Jessy,
It does not take long reading your posts to get a feel for your spark.
I love the idea of mindfulness. It is something I am keen to build on in my own coaching and develop my own mindfulness training.
In this post you identify some very key elements for good interaction with your athletes. This interaction is what I think of as partnering with your athletes. You work to increase the likelihood of these interactions being successful. With my coaches I speak of creating a coachable environment. Like you have pointed out here this depends on creating a space or “coaching bubble” where inside distractions are not present. In this ‘bubble’ you can all be fully engaged. Lowering the volume in the room is a good start to this. Bringing the athletes in close is another. Although you did not mention it, I use eye-contact as a good indicator that you have created this space. A simple check, and you have mentioned this as well, is to ensure you can ‘speak’ with your athletes rather than need to raise your voice. Good communication is like having a talk with a friend in a coffee shop. Yelling is not required.
With the idea that you have created a ‘bubble’ without distractions, where you (and they) can speak easily and eye contact is maintained the content and style of that communication is what you address. You fill the bubble with positive communications. Choosing to find positive rather then corrective communications is what I work for. It is not easy. In fact it is very hard at first. I find myself and the athletes incredibly well trained and practiced at pointing out things to correct, cut out or fix rather then things to create or sttenthen. I believe positive coaching is about creating and strengthening what you want until there is not room for things that are not wanted. Good elements and behaviours will eventually force out all others. Inside the bubble the communication is like this. There is only so much room and it is everyones job to fill the bubble with positive and productive communication. If enough of this is done there is no room in the bubble for the rest.
So… I love the idea of working to have positive communication. Some times you need to push hard for this and work not to be pulled into other mindsets. I struggle with this each day but with practice it gets easier. This is the work of creating a positive culture.
In my sport there is a culture of what I call superficial coaching. We speak of what is on the surface, what the coach can see. The reality is that this is a very limited and indirect source of feedback. Most think only of things from this vantage point. We all become very good at the language of the coach (the outside view). However, the athlete has so much more information they can bring into the conversation. The full sensory and motor system of the athlete is full of cause and effect feedback that we ignore simply because the coach can not access it and therefore not include it in the ‘coach language’. Over time the athlete masters the coaching language and becomes very good at speaking of what the coach sees, ‘bent the elbow more or less’.
The athletes language is very different. It is the language of feel and of generating compression and tension, of creating action or acting on the external apparatus. The best angles are largely found in the subconscious and fully automated based on the real time results. You say you want to cause athletes to use their brain. I take this as asking them to search for and discover the best method to achieve the desired outcome or action. If they understand the effect they are searching for they are far better equipped to find the best way to achieve it then are we, looking on from the outside. I believe it is our job to help guide them with the desired outcome and ask them to find the best way. We have the directions and the questions, they have the answers and we must learn from them. Each interaction with the athlete is a opportunity for us to learn what they have discovered. What we learn from one athlete we can then share with the rest. The athletes train the coach.
I love that you are purposeful in your objectives to better your coaching environment. Love it!
Nice video 🙂
joel dyck
October 28, 2016 — 10:40 am
Nice post Jesse, I appreciate your awareness of the effects of your verbal and non-verbal interactions on your athletes. Being that many of your high performance athletes are very young, I can imagine that the impact of your interactions can be even more significant during these years.
Sounds like you are very intentional about your communication and are creating a positive culture. Keep up the great work!
david hill
October 29, 2016 — 8:31 am
Jesse, I really enjoyed this post and reading the excellent comments from your peers. Mike has some great strategies and suggestions. I will make a couple of more comments to add to the thread. Mindfulness training is about getting the athlete in the right mindset to perform or learn. Often this involves exercises that help the athlete to focus on a given element or context. It is a great mental performance strategy! Cognitive effort on the other hand is a key component of deliberate practice and is seen as a route to expertise. Not only does the practice need to be done in a physically effortful manner, but also cognitively effortful. Many sport practice can be physically effortful without cognitive effort. So I think in the situation you are describing is about trying to increase cognitive effort in practice, and that mindfulness is one tool that you could use to do this. From my perspective cognitive effort and the type of practice interventions are much broader. For example random and variable practice invoke contextual interference which is though to be more cognitively demanding. Reducing feedback (delay or reduced frequency) and increasing questioning is another route to cognitively effortful practice. Another one could be the use of video or modelling in conjunction with practice. My point here is that there are a lot of ways the coach can create cognitively effortful practice. It is important to also consider regulating the amount of cognitive effort as a lot of it can be difficult and lead to adverse effects on motivation or burnout. This is where the art of coaching comes in to play.
So one thing that I have challenged coaches is to consider being very intentional about the intervention strategy that they use in a training session, to investigate its effect. For example, you may choose to try intervening by only asking questions of the athlete. This may be impossible for a whole practice, but could be a consistent approach in one part of the practice. My point here, is that during the practice debrief you can ask the athlete whether they noticed anything different in your interactions. Did they like it? Are there other ways that you could intentionally choose a particular intervention strategy? Examples could include; use of video modelling with only questioning, or delayed feedback which is only give after a certain amount of trials, or using only positive evaluative feedback when the athlete performs correctly (bandwidth feedback). My point is that there are tons of ways to intervene and it is sometimes good to be intentional about the different strategies in order to see which ones may have the greatest effect on the athlete in a given skill / practice context. Give it a try! Keep up the great work Jesse.
robert westman
October 31, 2016 — 1:19 pm
Hi Jesse!
Great post, particularly insightful to see you taking a third party approach to your self-analysis. My favorite part of the entire post was your realization that the gym was just too loud and that interference was what was causing your athletes to not receive the whole message. Often times we can look for very deep solutions to very simple problems, that we might be able to address with a few small changes.
I’ve taken note of Dave’s comment above about trying different intervention strategies and getting feedback post workout to see what worked and what didn’t. Have you found some that work better then others? I’ve often noticed a huge difference from one athlete to another about how they respond to my cues. So what they hear can be very different, regardless of it I’m sending the same message.
Bob
matthew wilson
November 14, 2016 — 8:02 pm
Jesse,
Great post!
Thank you for sharing these ideas. Your second ‘interaction improvement’ resonated with me. As someone who works in a similarly technically driven sport, I can see how ensuring that prescriptive feedback is not only positive in nature (‘do this-ness’) but also states the benefit, or the why, helps get buy in and facilitates progress. I’ve already put it in my back pocket and look forward to using it!
Thanks again for putting this post together!
Best,
Matt