New Year - New Coach
2018 has come and a New Year often brings a time for resolutions or new goals or focus areas in many aspects of your life. Making changes to your coaching or your approach to coaching is often a chance to improve on your craft. But how do you know what changes to make?
Feedback. If you haven't already, find a mentor or a person that can take time out to observe you prepare, deliver and analyse a coaching session or if possible - a week of competition season. If this is not possible, gather feedback from your playing group. This can be formal through a survey that addresses your coaching content, style, delivery etc or can be more informal through one on ones in various settings. It is vital that you ask for honesty - always.
Once you get the feedback you will be able to gather a picture of what type of coach you currently are and how others see you. You may have an idea of how you would like to be seen but you may get a different picture from what people really see. If thats the case, an opportunity just presented itself. Regardless of whether you liked the outcome of the feedback, you constantly evolve as a coach. Yes, you will have certain "coachisms" that are particular to your personality but you should be looking to improve on various aspects of your coaching each year.
“Strive for continuous improvement instead of perfection”
In my case, learning a new sport as coach particularly meant that I had to rely on my Emotional Intelligence with my team as my strength. Whilst I gathered information and industry experience with my new sport, the way I delivered sessions and two-way learning between coach and athlete was very similar. As I was able to meet and learn off other coaches in my new sport - my own coaching style evolved.
I had a clearly defined goal and focus to gain industry experience. I'm grateful that the various coaches I came in contact with were so willing to share knowledge and experiences with me. I came away with a better understanding of my new code, the cultural differences of the sport and most importantly, have been able to give the athletes in my program a far superior experience than had I not chosen to evolve.
My personal goals this year are to come up to speed with introducing and improving how I currently use technology in the program. Particularly how I use vision from both training and game situations as a learning tool. My players are inquisitive and the vision based learning style has really touched base with a number of charges. It means a bit more work in front of the screen, but also a lot better decisions being made in competition.
I wish all my fellow coaches the best for 2018 in the journey Coaching for Impact.
HR