The Power of Positive Coaching

by Roger Freberg

How do we apply these principles to the coaching situation?  First of all, to be a good motivator, your opinion must matter to your athletes.  If they don't care what you think of them, you're not going to be very effective.  The key here is mutual respect.  Coaches who demonstrate respect for athletes will have their undivided attention.  Coaches who belittle and demean their athletes will be tuned out eventually.  Female athletes are especially sensitive to criticism.  The types of comments that males just take in stride can be devastating to a female athlete.  It's also essential to be a good listener.  Many of today's youth do not have adults in their lives with the time and inclination to really listen to them.  If you take that time to show you care how they're doing in school and out of sports, you will have a much better idea of what makes your athletes "tick," and they will view you as being on their side.  You will also gain the attention of your athletes if you are a regular source of positive feedback.  All young people do good things some of the time--catch them being good and make a big deal out of it!  It may be an athletic achievement, or just that they showed consideration to a teammate.  If you want them to do it again, let them know you appreciate it.

CONCEPT 1
-- Part of this process is setting realistic short-term goals. Goals that can be reached with a reasonable amount of effort in a short time are key. Goals can be set daily, weekly and seasonally. A reasonable question to ask any athlete is “where do you want to be by the end of the season?” From this point shorter and smaller goals can be set to reach the eventual goal. In field events, the concept of “inch by inch is a cinch” is the driving concept here.

Now that we have their attention, how do we specifically use rewards to motivate better commitment and performance?  Coaches influence better performance through the process of "shaping" (the scientific term is the "method of successive approximations").  In a nutshell, shaping means that you gradually raise the bar for obtaining praise and rewards.  We start novices by praising them for being alive and standing up on two feet! Seriously, at the outset, we have very broad criteria for gaining praise.  As the athlete progresses through skill levels, we become very gradually stingier and stingier with our praise and approval.  The tricky part is to know when to ask an athlete for more.  This is like walking a tightrope, and a mastery of this skill separates the truly great coaches from the ‘wannabes’.  If you are too free with praise, the athlete is not motivated enough to improve.  They're feeling just fine at their current level of performance.  Try withholding your approval a little bit at this point and the athlete will immediately start searching for ways to regain it.  If you don't praise enough, the athlete will get discouraged and stop trying.  Go back to square one and start praising the most important things they're doing right, and they should get back on track. 

CONCEPT 2
-- Finding the right “carrot” is important. In my own experience, I once scratched a line in the dirt for a shot putter as a challenge. If he threw over the line, I would buy him all the Big Macs he could eat. Food was his life. I was shocked at how much he could eat! Soon, everyone wanted the same deal. It was a very successful and expensive year.

In addition, the successful coach knows each athlete very well, recognizes plateaus in performance, and caters approval and praise and reward to the individual.  It's also very helpful to keep your athlete in touch with reality--subscribe to publications that list outstanding performances, watch your local and state lists, let your athletes know where they stand relative to everybody else.  There's nothing worse than thinking you're the greatest because you're the state champion, when you don't even make the national lists!

Not all the news we have to deliver to athletes is good news.  Once in awhile, an athlete will really have a disastrous performance that just can't be ignored.  There are ways of making "correction" more palatable, however.  Instead of launching into a diatribe on flaws and faults, begin your discussion with a summary of what went right.  Something, even if it's a minor thing, always goes right. 

CONCEPT 3
-- By starting off on a positive note, you reaffirm your role as being in the athlete's corner, and whatever corrections have to be delivered will come across as more constructive. 

Use objective methods, such as reviewing films, to make your points whenever possible.  You can't argue with a camera, and there's less need for face saving on the part of the athlete.  If you're angry, wait until you're calm to have your discussion.  Above all, the athlete doesn't need your exasperation and despair in the middle of competition.  Nobody performs their best when they're being yelled at.  It helps to remind ourselves that this is all about the kids--it's their performance, not ours.  It may be difficult, as one of my friends related, to see your career being dribbled down court by an 18 year old, but the coach's success is entirely secondary to the athletes'.

CONCEPT 4
--Our eventual goal is to make each athlete a ‘student’ of his/her events.  By modeling effective analysis of performance, and soliciting the athlete's views, we are teaching our athletes important athletic and life skills.  The sign of a truly effective program is in the success of its athletes once they go on to the college level.

CONCEPT 5
-- Here, the teacher becomes a cheerleader.  The athletes are as prepared as they're ever going to be when they enter the stadium.  This is not a time for last minute adjustments of form and technique.  Perceptual motor patterns operate at their best when they are on "cruise control." 

Too much thinking about last minute advice will bring the automatic patterns back up to the conscious level, and everything the athlete does will slow down.  If you must fix something, try to restrict your comments to one area — in working with shot-putters you might focus on keeping their shoulders down in the middle of the ring, for instance.  Instead, a coach should focus on activating the athletes' "fight/flight" sympathetic nervous system, which will provide the burst of energy our ancestors depended on for their very survival.  People really can do amazing feats like lifting cars off children when they are sufficiently motivated.  There are many ways to do this.  One of the most interesting is the "haka" used by New Zealand rugby squads.  By adapting traditional Maori prewar rituals, the New Zealanders recreate the "emergency" mindset needed for top performance, and they manage to scare their opponents half to death at the same time!  The functions of brain and body are intertwined--by assuming the facial expressions and postures of the prewar rituals, the athletes are telling their brains that an emergency situation exists.  The brain responds by shutting down low priority systems like digestion and putting all resources into heart, lungs, and muscle.  Outstanding performances are the result.

If possible, restrict your real instruction and feedback to the practice setting.  Your role at a competition is entirely different. 

In closing, we might remind ourselves that the coach-athlete relationship follows the rules of all human relationships. 

CONCEPT 6
-- In successful relationships, positive interactions outnumber negative interactions by a factor of at least 5:1.  When positive and negative interactions approach a 1:1 ratio, the relationship is doomed.  Some of us are just naturally more positive people, but all of us can do a better job if we concentrate on bringing out our more positive sides.

CONCEPT 7
-- You can strengthen the natural bond between you as the coach and your athletes by getting your veteran athletes involved in the ‘coaching’ process by assigning them mentoring responsibilities over the younger athletes. It is important to remember that before motivation can come from an athlete it must first come from the coach and the veteran athletes. It is the responsibility of the coach and the senior athletes to inspire and lead. You must provide the reason ‘why’ the young athlete wants to succeed.

It is important to realize that ‘motivation’ starts with having a dream. That dream may be as humble as earning a varsity letter or as grand as winning the Olympic Games. In either case, it is the responsibility of the coach and the veteran athletes to ‘inspire’ and provide support for the ‘dream’ within each of us. Good Luck in this great track season ahead.

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