In the late fall of 2023, I was sitting in an auditorium style classroom on the campus of Tufts University. I had just finished a couple days of holding forth to the team about various topics from my team education on Positive Psychology.
Now I was in the audience. When I get the chance to visit teams, I often take the opportunity to sit in on team meetings or watch practice. In each case, I think they are invaluable learning opportunities for me. One of the luckiest parts of what I do for work is that I get to see coaches from all over the country and across the world run their team.
This particular meeting was about their upcoming training trip. For an hour or so, head coach Adam Hoyt gave detailed instructions about what the swimmers were responsible for over the camp. Two things were obvious from my perspective.
That the trip had been meticulously planned. There was organization around details that I think are often left to chance.
The information was very purposely being delivered with the entire team seated, in person.
Now for something like this that reads like a laundry list, you might think “well, can’t we just send out a long e-mail?”. Of course you could (and I do think the information was duplicated in written form). I want to use this as an example, however, to make a larger point.
Communication cannot simply be measured by what words have been transmitted. The transmission itself, the HOW a message is delivered, is perhaps the most underrated skill in any profession, much less coaching.
But I already told them!
I’ve spoken before in this space about ego defense. Put simply, these are rationalizations that we make to protect our ego when reality punctures it.
One of the most common ego defenses of coaches is when their athletes fail to perform up to the coaches expectations. I’ve been guilty of this many times. You say out loud to anyone who might be sympathetic: “I told them already”.
Strip away the ego defense and we have a common problem. Almost every coach I know has more than enough knowledge to help the athletes in their charge advance and improve themselves. Yet that information doesn’t always transmit.
It gets lost in translation. Or perhaps it is ignored. Or only partially, disastrously, is it understood. For whatever reason, the improvement energy travels along whatever power lines of communication have been laid down and in the end the athlete is not energized to improve.
These days, we have more ways to communicate than ever. In fact, every professional has at their disposal an overwhelming array of tools that they can use to send a message.
In my opinion, it is a mistake to not realize the vast power difference in different forms of communication. Take for example this business and the lines of communication I use to interact with potential customers.
I maintain a social media presence, largely on instagram. I produce a podcast and write this blog. I also, this past year have gone to two swimming “conferences”, one in January in Sweden and most recently the CSCAA annual meeting.
The effectiveness of attending the conventions, in terms of engaging people to work with me, blows the other efforts out of the water. Yet I have spent more time on the other two, partially because there is not always a conference to go to and also because I love my wife and children dearly.
It’s perhaps a bit unfair to the podcast to say what I did above, which actually has been a big draw over the history of my business. There is something intimate about being inside someone’s ear that really helps, and I think the long form of it makes it easier to discuss things with depth and nuance.
And these blogs, which from my backend statistics are very, very lightly read (perhaps 100 people or so a day), and yet punch well above their weight when I see people in person.
That is perhaps the final point in all of this, that there is no “bad” form of communication or “good”. If you want to get through to people, it’s worth thinking about how those forms of communication work with each other and cooperate to deliver the message you are trying to deliver.