It has been a great (school) year, despite the different challenges I faced along the way. I have not been in school for about 2 years, so it was a bit of an adjustment to come back. Nonetheless, I must commend this UBC program for a large part of my performance, both as an athlete and as a coach. As an athlete, I was able to hold both National and Pan American titles in Mixed Doubles, in addition to achieving some career-best tournament finishes. As a coach, I was able to work with the UBC Badminton Team this season, in which they finished with a team bronze at the College/University National Championships. Additionally, I had the opportunity to assess myself as a coach through the LPI, enhance my YTP abilities, develop Gold Medal Profiles, and putting everything together into a practicum and a final panel presentation, attended by my National Team Coaches and the executive director of Badminton BC. Indeed, it has been a productive year.

 

 

But it doesn’t stop there, and I don’t think it ever will. Here are some additional reflections for me to consider in the future:

1) Adjustment of Coaching Philosophy to a Life Philosophy
As a recap, my coaching philosophy includes five major concepts:

1. Mastery (“Progress, not perfection.”)
2. Ego (“Ego is the enemy.”)
3. Lead By Example (“Do as I do, not what I say.”)
4. Adaptability (“Be water.”)
5. Value Yourself & Others

But what if I’m not coaching? If I’m competing as an athlete, learning as a student, or regardless of what role I may play in life, can I establish a fundamental philosophy for life in general (AKA life philosophy)? I must credit Andy Evans for the idea, as it was part of an amazing panel presentation which I was fortunate to attend. I do think this is a valuable concept, and I hope to develop a general philosophy which I can apply to all areas of life. However, I do understand that circumstances change, which may affect my core beliefs and values, leading to a change in life philosophy. But I almost anticipate that to happen, and thus, I can remain flexible, or adaptable to anything life throws at me. Yes, adaptability is part of my life philosophy.

Although it hasn’t been too long, I have redefined a few things for a life philosophy. This is similar to an “IT statement” from Mark Verstegen (founder of EXOS), which he describes as a kind of purpose statement in five words or less. More on this can be found in his book, “Everyday is Gameday”. I will share my IT statement from early 2016: Consistent Progress Evolves Personal Power. I picked just three key words out of a list of ten (from a greater list of words), but I added some other meaningful words. My three choices were “progress”, “evolution”, and “power”, but “consistency” and “personal” have their own meanings as well. Considering I already have a life purpose statement, how do I construct a life philosophy?

Actually, it’s quite simple. For a life philosophy, many people may turn to religion, but I personally chose stoicism. I only stumbled upon stoicism for about a year (ironically the same time as this coaching program), and I have found many applications of it for all aspects of my life. Perhaps I can illustrate my coaching philosophy concepts with quotes:

1. Mastery: “A consciousness of wrongdoing is the first step to salvation… you have to catch yourself doing it before you can correct it.” – Seneca
2. Ego: “It is impossible for a person to begin to learn what he thinks he already knows.” – Epictetus
3. Lead By Example: “Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be one.” – Marcus Aurelius
4. Adaptability: “While it’s true that someone can impede our actions, they can’t impede our intentions and our attitudes, which have the power of being conditional and adaptable. For the mind adapts and converts any obstacle to its action into a means of achieving it. That which is an impediment to action is turned to advance action. The obstacle on the path becomes the way.” – Marcus Aurelius
5. Valuing People: “The way you see people is the way you treat them. And the way you treat them is what they become.” – Goethe

For closure on this part of the reflection, deconstructing my “IT statement” leads to a similar conclusion:

• “Consistent progress” = mastery
• “Evolves” = adaptability
• “Personal” = individuality, valuing people, ego
• “Power” = success, lead by example

Perhaps I was already on the right track…

 

2) Future Trends
Another great example from Andy Evans’ panel presentation was when I asked him if what he would choose: good people or getting results? Personally, I would have chosen the latter (although I know it’s often not a binary answer), but I was surprised when he committed to the former. That really gave me something to think about. Don’t good organizations often favour good people? But maybe I’m not totally off.

If we had to discern the difference between people and results, it would be much more difficult. However, if we had to choose between good people and good results, I think they come as a package. If you have good results consistently, you probably have some good people working with you. If you have good people but no results, it should just be a matter of time before good results come. Perhaps it’s incredibly difficult for sport programs, as they actually are competing for top spots. For example, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft can coexist because they can all be winning at the same time.

Looking back at my sport organizations, I have been quite critical of them most of this year. I think it is very difficult to forecast where things will go, but there are some good people working within the organizations, trying to make improvements as we go along. However, there are also some that I don’t trust, based on previous experiences. Very often, we get the one solution: find good people and then results will come. However, how do we know someone is “good”? How long will we give them for results to occur? What happens if we find out that they’re not as good as we thought they were? Of course, every business and organization will have to handle these situations in their own way, but in the future, I think they may start trending the same way: automation.

It reminds me of those people who protest for a greater increase in minimum wage, and McDonalds responded with more automated machines to take orders. Grocery stores also have more self check-out counters. But automation isn’t always about a machine taking someone else’s job. Perhaps it could help someone with their mundane or dangerous tasks. How can automation help a sport organization? I’m sure a lot of administrative work can be at least partially automated. National rankings, tournament results, and selection criteria can possibly be automated. Isn’t selection criteria simply an algorithm to nominate your best athletes for funding? I don’t know how tedious the actual task is, but a well programmed algorithm can replace seeding committees, or at least allow them to analyze the final results instead of having to sort through all the information. This year, we have had at least 3 tournaments with incorrect seedings in our National circuit, including the National Championships. Perhaps a well-written algorithm can create an annual targeted athlete list as well?

Regardless of the wonders of machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), emotional intelligence (EI) becomes very important, especially in the future when we may be integrating more with AI technology, including such things like, Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, Microsoft’s Cortana, and “OK, Google”. Reading emotions is still a complexity that humans have over machines, and EI plays a much more important role, especially in the case of managing people who can manage machines. I know I have been putting off Daniel Goleman’s book for a long time, but perhaps I will have the chance to read it this summer for an intro to EI (in between studying math, statistics, and programming). Although current advances in technology exist today, it will still be some time for it to be fully integrated into workplaces. Until then, we must become good people, find other good people, and then, the good results will come.

 

3) Decision Training Complexities
My video annotation was predominantly based on decision training, and although the session went well, the feedback was intriguing because it led to more questions and more opportunities to solve problems and improve! I didn’t consider the reaction time piece, including using the camera frame rate to calculate how much time the athlete could react to the shot, so that is something I will have to play with to see if there are better insights to improve my approach to decision training. I told the athlete to look at my racquet, but perhaps that may not be the best cue after all. It may not be necessary to see the final position of the racquet, but to notice which direction the racquet is moving. For example, if the defender is moving their racquet toward the backhand side, it will very likely be a backhand defensive position. But then to take this further, is it better to notice the shoulder position of the racquet arm? If the shoulder is moving forward, then it is likely to move the racquet to the backhand side, which will become a backhand stance. Can shoulder position then be something that gives the racquet position away? Without eye tracking technology to track quiet eye, all I can do is warrant a guess for now.

Perhaps I can take video footage of different athletes, and go frame by frame until I get to see shoulder movement, then freeze the video and ask an athlete which position their racquet is most likely going to be during defense. That would make an interesting project!

 

4) “Keep Your Coins, I Want Change.”
Change is never easy, or is it? Writing blogs all year has been a great experience, especially because I have a greater outlet to “complain” compared to my athlete blog (just kidding)! All jokes aside, I do think blog writing is a great reflection process. Additionally, it allows one to develop confidence in their opinion, but to be humble enough to know that it is, in fact, their own opinion. But with opinion comes accountability because I am the author. That becomes a great difficulty because with more confidence, the less ability to change and vice versa. I know I have been tackling some issues about confidence, and perhaps the ultimate certainty that I have is that things will change (ironically). It would be interesting to see how many times I use “perhaps”, “maybe”, “possibly”, or other derivatives in my posts, and also how many times I come to an indecision about two concepts. How many times must I use “but”, “however”, “although”, etc?

Change can also be slow. Perhaps things happen over a longer period of time, but they do change. It’s like my badminton career… every part of my body is slowly hurting more! Maybe I could have taken better care of my body, but how would I really know the effects of my actions? This is the part of me that isn’t confident, and there have been times where I have been in constant change, but with no net growth overall. It’s like the concept of homeostasis, or dynamic equilibrium, where there is change all the time, but no net effect. But sometimes… going nowhere is better than going the wrong way completely.

A lot of the blogs from this year have been about change and new insights, and often questioning old beliefs. Additionally, I don’t think I’ll ever forget the NCCP core competencies ever again! Although time consuming, I do enjoy writing even though I often write a bit too much. However, I like to add depth because shallow articles can be found all over the internet. I would like to think depth offers a true reflection. One of the final lessons I have learned this year from my blogging is an oldie, but a goodie: “Choose your battles.” There is quite a bit of complaining throughout my blog, and after the year has ended, some of those problems were never really that important. It reminds me of a quote from Daniel Kahneman, author of “Thinking, Fast and Slow”: “Nothing in life is as important as you think it is, while you are thinking about it.” Despite how important things seemed in those moments, oftentimes it led to nothing, or at least nothing significant.

As an athlete, I’m in my final years before retirement. Change has been slow, and I don’t see things accelerating in the near future. Despite the difficulties I have faced, I do hope it gets better for the future athletes, especially funding and other opportunities. There’s no sense for me to complain about funding anymore because it is something beyond my control as an athlete.

“Keep your coins. I want change.”

 

5) It’s Not What I Have Done, It’s What I Will Do Next
I have this written in my athlete blog to remind myself that I need to constantly progress in what I do, and that I should never be content with what I have achieved. If I’m still living, there is much more to do! Stoicism has given me many reflections on the shortness of life itself, in which I can apply the concept to different aspects of my life. For example, consider the shortness of an “athlete life”. The athlete life is full of aspirations, successes, and failures, but at the end of it, I will just be another athlete that comes and goes. This is similar to the metaphor of sporting life being a hotel. A visit at this “hotel” is an athlete’s career, in which some stay a bit longer than others, and some may have a more enjoyable stay. Ultimately, it is never permanent, and someone else will take your place in the hotel. Life is more or less the same. It’s like taking a vacation. Some people opt to do more, some people opt to do less. Some may have everything go according to plan, some may have all their plans ruined. But in the very end, time is limited: you cannot do anything and everything. Additionally, for some, it’s not where you go or what you do, but rather who you get to do it with.

So as the final reflection piece, I would like to expand on possible things I can do with some of my major assignments from this year.

• Coaching Philosophy: Develop a life philosophy (completed earlier in this post) and start implementing it (the hard part).
• Leadership Practices Inventory: Work on my Emotional Intelligence, retake LPI after retiring as an athlete.
• Innovation Practice: Continuing developing decision training methods, and getting more feedback from students regularly.
• SWOT Analysis: Using a SWOT analysis to further define a career goal (e.g. SWOT analysis of competing until Tokyo 2020).
• Block Periodization YTP: Continuing implementing and experimenting with block periodization for personal YTP and other athletes who may be interested.
• Performance Results Tracking: Update PRT trends with newest World Rankings
• Gold Medal Profile: Collaborate with other coaches and athletes in Canada, and possibly internationally to enhance a collaborative GMP
• Podium Pathway: Work with Badminton Canada to develop a Podium Pathway, work with PSO to implement locally
• Blogging: Continue to write on athlete blog about once per month, possibly revisiting the NCCP core competencies once again.
• Video Annotation: Record myself coaching occasionally, instead of only considering performance footage. Compare differences over time.

 

Conclusion:
I would like to thank the wonderful group of people that were a part of this program, including instructors, classmates, mentors, and other support staff. This has been a remarkable program so far and it has definitely exceeded my expectations. I hope things will work out continuing the Masters program at the end of summer as I look forward to continue learning new things from different places and different people. Although I won’t have much of a summer break with four international tournaments including World Championships in Glasgow, I will be trying to learn Python, web scraping, and statistics in between. Thank you to everyone for making the program possible!

Carpe diem