Creating a Culture of Confidence Part 2

How to Develop a Culture of Confidence

• Form trust
• Coaches present complete understanding of movements and training plans
• Create vision for program including values, expectations, and short term and long term goals
• Explain plan to achieve goals
• Set certain goals that are quickly obtainable to establish early success
• Develop relationships with athletes by communicating often in a variety of settings and about a variety of topics
• Encourage athletes to keep positive imagery in their minds - visualize success
• Form an environment of learning with feedback, personal accomplishment, and physical change

Characteristics of Confidence in Athletes

Self-Confident:

• Doing what you believe to be right, even if others mock or criticize you for it.
• Being willing to take risks and go the extra mile to achieve better things.
• Mistakes: takes ownership, learns from it, makes corrections, and forgets about it
• Waiting for others to congratulate you on your accomplishments.
• Accepting accomplishments graciously. “Thank you. I worked very hard on that. I appreciate your recognizing my efforts.”

Low Self-Confidence:

• Governing your behavior based on what other people think.
• Staying in your comfort zone, fearing failure and in doing so, avoid taking risks.
• Working hard to cover up mistakes and hoping that you can fix the problem before anyone notices.
• Extolling your own virtues as often as possible to as many people as possible.
• Dismissing compliments offhandedly. “Oh that was nothing really. Anyone could have done it.”

Creating a Culture of Confidence: Part 1

I was very fortunate as a 20-year-old kid to have a former high school basketball coach ask me to join his staff. I began coaching and immediately started to picture how down the road I would be known as one the greats. I had it all figured it out. Luckily for me, I started at the freshman B level and was humbled immediately by what it really takes to be great.

Working with young men at the freshman level through the varsity level is more mental than anything else. These young athletes have more going on in their lives than anyone realizes and as a coach you serve the role of father, friend, advisor, and confidant to name just a few.  It is an honor to have a young man come to you for help because it shows they have a confidence that you have their best interest at heart.  My former head coach showed me that honor by giving me my coaching opportunity. He wanted to instill confidence in each of his players.

There is energy in the room before a game where players wait for the coaches. Each game has a different feel. There are no guaranteed wins, but some games hold more meaning than others. Often times in those pre-game speeches before important games he would ask the players, “Do you feel that energy inside of you. Do you feel that inside of your stomach? That’s not nervousness. Nervousness means that you are unprepared for the task at hand. That is excitement! You are full of excited energy because you have practiced smart and hard and you are fully prepared for the challenge tonight!” It was such a simple thing to say, but I can still see the confidence and focus the players exuded after he would say it.

My final project as an undergrad was to create a coaching portfolio. At that point, I had shifted my focus to training athletes instead of coaching a specific sport. My mentor encouraged me to make it my own and reflect on what I truly believed was most important. I would discuss strength programs and specific lifts with him, but in the end it always came back to caring for the athletes and wanting them to succeed. The head coach understood that confident players succeed, but how do we create confident athletes. I created my coaching portfolio not with x’s and o’s but, how I want to develop a culture of confidence in a program to help young athletes in sport and beyond….to be continued

By: Steve Breitenstein

TCBOOST SPEED MYTH #1

IF YOU WANT TO GET FASTER IN YOUR SPORT, THEN YOU JUST NEED TO GET STRONGER AND MORE POWERFUL AND IT WILL TAKE CARE OF ITSELF.

It is unbelievable to me that we continue to come across collegiate and professional athletes who have never trained for speed.  They may have done agility ladder work, sled sprints, hill sprints, parachute sprints, you name it, but they have never truly trained in a way that will significantly improve their measurable sport specific speed of movement.

I believe the sport and coaching community has made a very unfortunate assumption in working with athletes from youth through professional.  That assumption is that the athletes they are coaching understand and know how to properly move on the field.  That they know what the acceleration phase should feel like, how to execute a great first step, how to decelerate, change direction, transition into the top speed phase, even how to jump and land.  It is as if we assume that these are core competencies everyone has and we just tell them to go sprint around this cone, run across the field and back, do some suicides and then we focus on the skill of the given sport. 

The truth is that sprinting, cutting, multi-directional movement and jumping are all skills that need to be taught.  We start teaching 6 year olds how to dribble a soccer ball and hit a baseball without every teaching them how to run?  The thing that amazes me is that most of the time they are never taught.  They go from grade school, to junior high, to high school, and possibly to college and beyond without ever being taught how to execute the skill of acceleration, the skill of top speed, the skill of deceleration, the skill of cutting. 

We have had amazing results with our athletes by teaching them the skill of movement through progressive drills, film analysis, whiteboard diagramming, potentiation work, and proper coaching cues paired with the development of high levels of absolute strength, power and speed-strength.  

Achieving Your Goals- Part 2

Continued from Part 1 - 

Often goals stop at just writing down the goal. Here is the trap a lot of my personal training clients fall into. I want to lose 20 lbs. in 4 months, now what? In order to succeed, there needs to be a plan in order; a step by step how-to. What do I need to do to make this happen? What must I NOT do in order for this to happen? Who in my life can I trust to help me and who is NOT going to aide me? The book Bring Your “A” Game does a great job of illustrating the proper way to outline a goal, as well as improving self talk and controlling controllables. Here is general outline I walk through with my clients when discussing goals prior to training. For each goal, identify positive and negative actions that will influence the outcome.

Ex. Goal: Make the high school basketball team

Why do I want to achieve this goal? I love playing basketball

When am I starting this goal? May 6th

When do I need to reach this goal? Tryouts are Nov. 1^st

What actions will positively affect this goal?

1.     Take 500 shots a day

2.     Work on my ball handling everyday

3.     Improve my conditioning level

What actions will negatively affect this goal?

1.     Becoming academically ineligible

2.     Breaking the schools code of conduct

3.     Choosing to hang out with my friends before homework and practice

Who can help me achieve my goal and how?

1.     My coach can help me with my skill work

2.     My teammate Tom will help me practice.

3.     My Teacher will help me with tutoring so I can stay eligible to play.

Who is NOT going to help me and why?

1.     Some of my friends who only want to party

Be as specific with the list as possible. Refer back to the list often, especially when the journey becomes a struggle. Focus on the controllables during times of adversity. When I was a junior in high school, I had a coach tell me to think about all of my athletic goals right before I did my hardest sets in the weight room. Right when you think you have nothing left, think about where you want to get and what it is going to take to get there. I no longer train thinking about playing varsity basketball, but I still visualize where I want to be and what I need to do to get there. Instead of being inside a hot gym in the middle of summer, I’m visualizing in my car at 5 am before I coach my first group and I know I won’t be done until 7:30pm. While this article is not the end all on goal setting, use it to reevaluate your own goals, find someone to support you, and create a complete commitment to succeeding.