"That Sucked"

“That sucked”

If coaches got a nickel for every time they heard that, there might still be Coin Star machines in front of grocery stores. Last week, I was working with some coaches and one of them interrupted me with a question. He wanted to know if he was reacting well when athletes walked back from a race and said “that sucked.”

So I thought I’d take the opportunity to discuss what is really going on when an athlete (or anyone, really) says this. Where are there are opportunities when you’re on the receiving end? But before I do that, I feel inspired to comment on a part of my methodology that will be important to understanding how look at situations like this.

Soft vs Hard Power

Almost all of what I advocate I would define as tactics for executing soft power? What is soft power, and what is “hard” power? For the purposes of this blog I’ll keep it really simple.

Hard power is often the most brute force, compelling way to move something or someone from point a to point b. If a child won’t leave the playground and you physically pick them up and carry them away, that is hard power. When a coach tells an athlete that they should do something or else a bad consequence will follow, that is hard power.

As you can see, hard power is all about compulsion. You want someone to do something, so you look very locally at the thing you want them to do, and you execute whatever power you have for them to do it. I am not saying there are never instances to execute hard power, only that hard power has several drawbacks that mean you should exercise great restraint in using it.

One is that hard power is locally effective and systemically ineffective. Meaning, you can influence one specific behavior but it does not effective behavior generally. If you lift a kid off the playground- they are off the playground but the behavior that caused you to lift them is very likely to repeat.

Because hard power is systemically ineffective, it takes a ton of work to maintain. It does not build new independence or skills in the person you are trying to intervene with. At best it instills fear, and that’s at BEST. Fear has a nasty habit of overwhelming our sense and reason, which makes it very hard to act any other way than instinctually, which is not what you’re looking for when trying to change a habit.

Soft power exists at the other end of the spectrum. It is indirect and gentle. When best executed it is so gentle that it doesn’t seem like power at all. Soft power is planting a seed and patiently waiting 3-6 months for a tree to sprout.

Soft power has the disadvantage of not being immediately satisfying. It is not problem solving. Soft power is proactive, and being proactive hardly ever feels effective in the moment because the moment we should feel that sense of what we have accomplished is so distant.

You’ll see a little better what soft power is as you read, because that is precisely what i’m going to suggest when faced with extremely unproductive attitude of “that sucked”.

Empathy First

Empathy is the first step of any execution of soft power. It is an often misunderstood and misrepresented concept, especially by the lazy advocates of hard power.

The goal of empathy is understanding, and fully communicating that understanding to another person. That is it, in entirety. People get tripped up with empathy because they do not understand its boundary.

Empathy does not mean you excuse any and all behavior. To return to a parenting example, if one child hits the other, you can understand why or what led to the moment of frustration, without condoning physical violence.

When you’re coaching and an athlete pervasively comes up to you telling you their performance sucks, seek to understand where that is coming from first. Here are a few of the most common reasons. In most cases, more than one of these are true.

1. The athlete motivates themself through being hard on themselves. That is, they execute hard power on themself to motivate. They feel that they want more than what they just did, so they try to spur themselves to do more to achieve it through self-punishment

2. They are overwhelmed by external critique. They seek to pre-empt any critique from you the coach by staking out an extremely negative position. If they already said it sucked, will you go even harder into the negative?

3. They lack skills in goal setting, or don’t set goals whatsoever, leading them to fluctuate wildly in what they expect from themselves, often ramping up expectations wildly in the moment.

4. They do not fully know how to emotionally regulate and separate their feelings from thoughts. “That sucked” is a thought, in case you are playing at home.

5. Returning to point 1, they actually believe that this system of motivation is responsible for their success up to this point.

There are more reasons, but you get the point. Your goal should be to understand, and to communicate to the athlete that you understand. You cannot start a soft power process without empathy. To return to the tree example, it would be like just throwing out the seed wherever. You could be on concrete, you could be on fertile ground. Who knows?

Break the Thought Pattern

With empathy, you have an understanding of both the emotional landscape and the thoughts emanating from it. Any intervention from this point forward should be focused on intervening on the thought level. Anything people believe, they can learn to believe something else.

For a thought like “That sucked”, the emotionality behind it is usually some level of disappointment. They saw a time on the board, their heart sank, and now they have to talk about it!

One thing I try to be extremely disciplined about is that I never argue with athletes over what they should or should not be happy/disappointed with. You may find that you coach athletes that are often disappointed. You want me to reframe that for you? Fine, I will. That is an athlete with high standards!

You might reply that those high standards are not consistent, particularly in the lead up to the performance. Which is where you come in as a coach.

But I digress.

You want to find points of action that lead up to this moment and try to influence a change. Let me give an example for each of the underlying reasons discussed above.

1. Try to help an athlete build positive motivational structure. Most athletes that motivate in this way know what they don’t want. But what do they actually want? Take as many opportunities to actually get them to stop and think: “what do I want?” and “how do I get there?”. Ask them to consider how many actions they can ladder up to making that outcome possible. Avoiding negative outcomes is exhausting in the long term, while feeling like your chipping away at something you dream about is not.

2. Paradoxically, avoiding external critique makes you MORE vulnerable to external critique, until you are so fragile that you can’t take anymore. As a coach you have to find a way to be critical, but only on their actions, never what they are feeling. Allow them to be disappointed, do not hold back from critiquing and evaluating their actions. Being honest with athletes about what you see actually builds trust in the relationship and their confidence over time.

3. Ask them to set goals, always with some emotional distance from the event. I prefer to prompt athletes to set two goals. One is aspirational, what you do you think is possible but not likely. Essentially, what do you think is the high end of your performance? The second is what is good enough. Where is the line where you agree ahead of time you will be satisfied. Now you can hold them accountable if they achieve “good enough”- they told you they would not say “it sucked”.

4. Practice naming the emotions and then separating that from the thought. Disappointment is a feeling. Judging your performance is a thought. So practice with them saying “I’m really disappointed right now”, and taking a beat before they launch into “I thought I could do better…I wanted more…etc”. When you don’t consciously organize these, you can easily think your thoughts are feelings and vice versa, which blurs how you will act.

5. Challenge the system! This is probably the hardest but also the biggest payoff. So many, particularly high achieving, athletes credit their success subconsciously to vicious self punishment. This ultimately becomes a hard cap on their potential. Actually ask them to walk through all the consequences of this self punishment and see if that’s really what they want as a path to sending them down a different set of actions.

Hearts and Minds

“That sucked” is an instinctual reaction. As a coach, if you have the tools you can use it as a branching opportunity to develop the athlete you are coaching. It is crucial to have a plan so that you can act decisively to shift perspective with an athlete and seed the actions and beliefs you want in the future.

Coaching for Coaches is a High Yield Investment

What do you think of when you hear the term “moneyball”?

Do you think of the Michael Lewis book? Do you think of the actually quite good movie they made with Brad Pitt?

Do you draw a blank (please don’t)?

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In my re-emergence into entrepreneurship I’ve had to wade back into social media vectors I hoped to never touch again. I’m guessing because I’m (almost) 40 and have two kids, I’ve been targeted for all sorts of influencers in “investing”.

I find myself almost always making the same critique. Most of the “genius” investing strategies are sort of reverse engineered. So, for example, trust this guy because he invested in Google when people were like “what’s a search engine?” or trust another person because he got in on Apple in the 1990s when it seemed like everyone but my family thought they were going out of business.

It’s weirdly designed for a social media environment where clout is built around having a lot of “followers”. But if an overwhelming amount of people follow something, does it turn out to be a buy low sell high proposition for most of them? By sheer probability, it does not.

So here’s my pitch, based off the podcast I recorded earlier this week with Trever Gray. If you are a coach, and want to make the biggest positive impact on your team, yourself and your family, invest in some coaching.

Right now, if you get into private coaching, that’s not where the money is. Coaches, for the most part, are not wealthy people. They are not thinking about investment in themselves because it doesn’t seem like an option.

Earlier this year I debuted a six week coaching module for coaches. I asked one coach how much they would have otherwise spent on themselves had they not forked over the $210 for my course. The answer is all too obvious: nothing.

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My favorite author Nassim Nicholas Taleb has a saying that goes something like this:

Never ask a doctor what you should do. Ask them what THEY would in your situation.

Never ask a chef what’s good on the menu, ask what they eat.

Basically, don’t trust decisions that other people tell you to make, figure out what decisions they make when they have skin in the game.

So you might read what I’m writing here as a bald plea to hire me to be your coach. To be honest, I’m pretty confident that I’ll be full up coaching on that front sooner rather than later, regardless of whether anyone reads this blog.

So instead I’m offering free advice. It’s not advice that I think you should do, I’ll tell you what I DO. I invest in coaching for myself.

Before I had even turned the page and devoted myself full time to this business in January 2023, I had already hired not one, but two coaches to help me. Before I’d cashed a single check for anything Chris DeSantis coaching related, I had committed nearly $10,000 in investment to something that I would never be able to quantify with an earnings statement.

The first person I hired was Nikki Kett, without whom I can’t even imagine how the launch of my business would have gone without. The coaching she has provided me in terms of emotional management paid for themselves in real time.

The branching possibilities from the progress I made with Nikki mean that I expect to reap many times what I paid over the course of my career. Not to mention the unquantifiable value to my relationships with my wife, my children and the people I work with.

The second person I hired is Sherri Fisher. Sherri is probably less familiar to people within the swimming world. I reached out to Sherri for help after I finally, fully admitted to myself that I was struggling with ADHD.

Sherri has a made a career out of helping people “like me”. I walked away with a completely different understanding of how I could make the way I’m wired work for me. In essence, take the positivity that I had in the video above and multiply it by a factor of ten and you might approximate what I consider the opportunities from my “learning disability”.

So don’t take my advice to hire coaching because you think it’s what I want you to do. It’s what I did, it’s what I plan on doing for the future, even though I didn’t “know” what the exact dollar and cents payoff for me was going to be.

Ultimately if you’re coaching you’re part of an organization that is investing in the experience for athletes in your program. There has been an explosive growth in people who will bring consultant-coaches in to work with athletes on their team.

Only a smart few are getting where the real biggest opportunity is, however. Coaches are a force multiplier. Investing in coaching is the “Moneyball” investment of our time for coaches everywhere. Go where everyone else is going to want to go, when the opportunity is cheap and available.

What To Do With "Data"

Two years or so ago, I went to the doctor. I’d like to come up with something poetic to say about why, but it was pretty simple.

I felt like shit.

Naturally, I surmised that years of medical school, training, and real life experience treating thousands of patients would help Doctor Sharma to come up with a good path forward for me. I wanted to feel better, and I wanted to do what it took to feel better.

Dr. Sharma listened to me patiently, and promptly order a “comprehensive” blood panel. We were going to get to the bottom of it! They drew what seemed like an infinite number of vials of my blood and sent them off to a lab for analysis.

Weeks later, the results were in. I dutifully went to my follow up appointment, ready to finally find out what was “wrong” so I could fix it.

Dr. Sharma looked at my chart dispassionately.

“You’re low in vitamin D, I’ll prescribe you a high dose of Vitamin D”.

“That’s it?” I asked, incredulously.

“That’s it, you’re fine, maybe you should work out more.” she demurred.

“I work out five times a week, are you saying I should do six?” I stammered. She looked confused.

“Maybe you should eat some more vegetables” she added.

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When we go to make decisions, we’re always weighing subjective and objective factors. In my case, the subjective was easy: I felt like shit. So I went in search of data to explain why. I didn’t get any kind of explanation in that moment.

Another way of looking at what I did was to look to confirm what I already thought. After all, I felt pretty sure of how I felt, and no data was really going to tell me otherwise. It’s not an entirely wrong approach to take, but it is important to think about, what will you do when the data doesn’t match your subjective take of what is going on.

Lately, when I swim by myself, I’ve renegotiated my relationship with the most important “data” collection anyone does in a swimming pool. At either end of where I swim, a red glowing LED all-knowing entity known as a “pace clock” tells me how I’m doing.

Much like Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character from “The Terminator”, it has the following characteristics:

It can’t be bargained with

It can’t be reasoned with

It doesn’t feel pity, remorse or fear

And it absolutely will not stop.

It just ticks on. Sometimes it tells me what I want to hear, that I’m doing well. Sometimes it doesn’t. There are moments when I push off and feel as if I’m floating on a wondrous cloud. Then the clock brings me back down to earth: just another rep that’s roughly the same as all the other reps you usually do.

So as I previewed, I’ve renegotiated. I don’t dutifully pray to the LED god every time my hand touches the wall. Most of the time, I give the clock no heed. Go ahead and ask me how it feels.

IT FEELS GREAT.

What I’ve realized is that at any given time you can only focus on so much. I was giving a lot of my attention over to processing how fast each repetition I was doing was. What that meant was that I had scant attention left over for everything else I was trying to accomplish every time I pushed off a wall.

So I’ve found more brain power to consider how I’m swimming, where my limbs are at any given time, and how my body is actually moving from one end to the other. I’m having fun trying things that I would have otherwise dismissed as they were likely, in the short term, to earn me a quick reprimand from the pace clock.

Every so often, I still do a “spot” check for quality. I make a quick apology to the clock, ask it to remind me of what time it is, and push off. Then I look again whenever I’m done.

What I’ve found, consistently is that I’m going much faster than I think. Checking in on my “data” less often has allowed me to actually make progress, in real quantifiable terms, faster than if I was constantly checking.

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I get my blood drawn every six months now. A few days later, I have several pages of data to pour over with my new doctor. I didn’t accept the first opinion to “work out more” and take a ridiculous amount of Vitamin D. So I have someone else guiding me on how to square the numbers I have on the page with my subjective account of how I actually feel.

Swimming is a sport where all roads tend to lead to a quantifiable outcome. We’re almost all striving for times on the clock. That can lead us to reduce and simplify. If the clock is what we want to improve, let’s do as much measuring with the clock as possible.

The clock, despite my jokes, is not all-knowing. If you cut yourself off from the subjective experience of being in the water, feeling immersed in that foreign environment, then you’re missing out on half of what you need to make effective decisions on what to do next.

That becomes even more crucial as I swim by myself and have to attempt to “coach” myself. The ideal set up is to have someone else who can constantly help you synthesize your subjective experience and data (clock and otherwise) into gradual improvement of decision making.

Now, I shudder already at the response of anyone reading this and jumping to the conclusion that I believe everyone should shut the clocks off and run practice with no “data”. Don’t mess with success, baby! That’s my motto, but maybe, just maybe, reconsider whether devoting as much attention as you have to that ticking mess is actually the best way to improve the way you swim.