The title for this post is too long. Whatever. I can already feel my own self-judgment rushing on. Really, Chris, you’re about to lecture coaches about how they’re only as good as what they can convince someone to do, and you can’t even make a concise title?
Nope.
So for lack of better writing, here’s what I’d like to discuss today. It goes back to themes I’ve often found myself pondering as I do this job that I love so dearly, coaching. It weaves those themes in with my tempestuous mistress, positive psychology. Torturous analogies abound.
Peak Knowing What’s Wrong
If I had to put my finger on when I peaked in terms of knowing what athletes and other coaches were doing wrong, I’d guess around 25 years old. I’d coached a couple of years, enough time to shake off the deer in headlights look but not enough time to have any grasp of what I didn’t know.
So I looked out and picked everyone apart. If only they would all take my genius advice, things would be going a lot better. Or so I thought.
I think most coaches start from a position of knowing a lot of what is wrong. They can observe someone do something and see the flaws. I often observe coaches in this stage watch a race and then “brilliantly” point out that they told the swimmer not to do that thing. Wonderful stuff.
Learning What’s Right
It was about this time that I encountered the field of Positive Psychology. At the time, I believed very narrowly that studying this would make me a better coach. I suppose it did.
What has stuck with me more than any single theory from Positive Psychology is the pervasive world view of this pseudo-religion. That is, instead of studying the flaws in people, what if we looked at what is great about them? What if we studied what is right and tried to figure out what caused it to exist, or grow?
Adopting this world view made coaching a lot more fun. Instead of being ground down by the flaws all around me, I realized I was surrounded by wonderful people who were working really hard at an existential goal. I learned to like athletes that didn’t listen to a thing that I said!
It often “didn’t work” of course. I still found flaws, things to complain about, and people I didn’t like. I have persistent dreams about returning to work at Georgia Tech, only even within the dream I can’t figure out how my boss and I reconciled our differences.
Delivering Knowledge
Knowledge is great. It’s fairly useless, especially as a coach, if you can’t deliver it to other people. I often find myself wishing delivery worked like so many things in our current world. I could just type the right words, tap the right button and POOF, knowledge delivered.
Alas, delivery of knowledge is endlessly more complex. The simple part is if you know what to do you can’t just tell them. You have to convince them to receive it.
In the world of coaching, we have a number of tools at our disposal for this purpose. Many of them I advocate for here. You can improve the clarity of your message, try to influence the mood of the receiver, or build relationships.
The dark arts of coaching will always be there. If you want to convince someone to do something, you can always threaten, punish or manipulate someone into doing something. You’ll find you have increasingly less avenues to do so, a trend I can’t see abating anytime soon.
I’m not holier than thou. I’ve practiced the dark arts, but I have to admit that in any case I can think of that I failed. I failed to convince someone to take my advice. I failed to get someone to follow my lead, and as a result I leveraged a power imbalance to get my way anyway.
The dark arts are like the performance enhancing drugs of coaching. They work! They’re a nice shortcut to success, although hopefully as opposed to PEDs their window is shutting instead of remaining open wide. In the long run, though, you’ll pay a price for using them.
Better to work on some positive skills of persuasion, and stay your frustration at the many moments when you still come up short. Resist the temptation and try to get better at the actual job: coaching.