Something to Fall Back On
The Importance of Frameworks
We had our athletic department and graduate assistant orientation this past week. The graduate assistant piece is essentially an introduction to coaching and leadership, and the part I spend the most time on is the least exciting part on paper: you need a framework to work from.
The reasoning is simple. Without guiding principles, you make decisions out of the emotion of the moment, and the emotion of the moment is typically not a reliable friend. Coaches who improvise their way through a season usually aren’t careless people. They just don’t have something to go back to.
We put two frameworks in front of them as options for how they think and lead.
The 3 C’s
Think about the coaches you actually trusted. My guess is they knew the game well enough that you believed what they told you, they knew you well enough that you believed they meant it, and they were the same person almost every day.
Competence: knowing your sport well enough to be trusted.
Care: knowing your people well enough to be believed.
Constancy: showing up the same way often enough to be counted on.
Good coaching isn’t about willpower. It’s about systems that make competence, care, and constancy sustainable. Almost every coach can start all three. The hard part is sustaining them in week eleven, and that’s a systems problem rather than a character problem. We’ve written a lot about what that looks like in practice, in the books and here.
3D Coaching
3D Coaching says every athlete you get shows up in three dimensions at once, and you’re coaching all three whether you meant to or not.
The physical: what they can do. Skills, strategy, conditioning, the things that show up on film.
The mental: what they believe they can do. Confidence, focus, how they respond after a bad rep or a bad week.
The heart: why they do it at all. Purpose, identity, and what they think they’re worth when the scoreboard stops cooperating.
Most coaching training stops at the first dimension and leaves the other two to instinct. Instinct doesn’t work for most people.
The first dimension gets you a competitive team. The second keeps it competitive under pressure. The third decides whether any of it means anything to them ten years later, and the deeper impact their experience had on them.
I’m not asking anybody to use both of these. They’re two options and there are even more out there. However, these are what I think are the best and easiest to understand and put into action.
We’ll keep going deeper on the 3 C’s here, and over the next year we’re doing a 3D episode a month on the podcast.
You can listen to the first one at beyondcoaching.alitu.com
Check out our book!
You can listen to the first one at beyondcoaching.alitu.comWe also just launched the ICP Daily app, a short and practical dose of this thinking every day, built for coaches who want to sharpen one thing at a time. It’s $1.99/month and available now in the Apple App Store. If the 3 C’s resonate, ICP Daily is how you keep them in front of you once the season gets busy.
Things That Are Making Us Think
What Happens When the Camera Never Turns Off by Steve Magness : Insightful article by Steve on our content driven society.