Skills lesson final

Tue, May 23, 2023 9:04PM • 11:45

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

coaches, skills, players, team, strengths, cricket, interviewed, win, anxiety, matrix, talk, leader, podcast, weaknesses, theater, attributes, areas, result, good, learn

SPEAKERS

Paul Barnett, Jon Deeble, Eddie Jones, Peter Moores, Tim Walsh, Gary Kirsten, Salliann Briggs, Damien Hardwick

Paul Barnett  00:00

Welcome to the lessons from the great coaches podcast. I've learned that you don't do it alone,

00:06

you learn so many different things from so many different coaches. That's an elite learning environment.

00:13

How you deal with how to be resilient, how important it is to infuse joy in the process of learning. To be a good candidate, you've got to do more than you take.

00:24

What an interesting way it is to be a leader.

Paul Barnett  00:29

My name is Paul Barnett, and you are listening to the great coach's podcast, where we explore leadership through the lens of high performance sport, by interviewing great coaches from around the world, to try and find ideas to help all of us be better leaders. As the podcast has grown, the great coaches we've interviewed have shared so much insight and wisdom that we decided to create episodes dedicated entirely to the ideas that have resonated with us the most. Today's episode is on the topic of skills. And it features audio quotes from a wide selection of coaches that we have interviewed from around the world. The lessons from the great coaches podcast. There are times when I become despondent about climate change, and the anxiety it causes my children. But then I remind myself that there was only 66 years between the Wright Brothers first flight in their plane, the Wright Flyer, and Neil Armstrong's famous step onto the moon. And technology today runs in ever faster spirals. So hopefully, the new technologies being deployed today will lead to better solutions tomorrow. I was reading about Wilbur Wright recently. And there was a quote attributed to him where he said, it is possible to fly without motors, but not without knowledge and skill. And it got me thinking about skills, and what the great coaches have to say about them when it comes to individual and team dynamics. The first example comes from an Olympic gold medal Rugby Sevens Coach Tim Walsh, who talked to us about A skills matrix, and how we used it to build a team that was able to complement each other

Tim Walsh  02:15

that vision around what we thought was going to win a gold medal. And then so we had the vision and then it was like, Okay, what how are we going to get all those players to together. So basically had to do a skill matrix. So what what was the competitive advantage gonna be, and then what style of play that looked like and then what we needed for that for the or what attributes you needed for the for the players, both mentally and physically. So basically a skill matrix and a squat balance of all the different factors that would give us the outcome of that desired vision for that team. So skill matrix. And then so whether it be speed from from the athletic track, like Elliott green area skills from basketball, or climbing down the vision and passing and awareness from from touch players, the contact skills and power running over of a rugby league or rugby union player. So all that is a skill matrix and then going right we need a certain number there certain number of these, the way that we're going to play is going to be this way. So we're going to need a lot of girls that have had the skill attributes already that were that they gathered from from touch football around awareness and ability to pass left and right at a high level and make decisions.

Paul Barnett  03:32

Sally and Briggs, coaches cricket in the Women's National League in Australia, she builds on this idea of Tim's by talking about the importance of understanding your strength, and then working to make it a super strength.

Salliann Briggs  03:48

I think it's really important that everyone in our team understands what their strengths are, and therefore makes them super strengths. And then that goes on, for example, with Fielding, like you've got to be able to execute at least two positions, because in T 20, cricket and if we've got a left and right under right now we've got time constraints, we can't afford you to be letting our team down or hurting our team because you're in a position that you're not. And therefore it was just about raising expectations of what phase was.

Paul Barnett  04:20

This focus on strengths versus weaknesses has been a common theme in many interviews. And here, the iconic Eddie Jones reflects on how this has changed over his journey as a coach.

Eddie Jones  04:36

Well, I think again, I can the big change in coaching now is that probably when I first came into coaching I always wanted to fix players weak areas always wanted to improve their weak areas, and now out almost entirely focused on this strength of how can I make that strength better? And it's it's the big thing I reckon in terms of care. Searching for any player because all the players you coach, they generally want to be better. And if they don't want to be better, you don't want to is, is getting a picture in their head of of where what they can be, and then helping them find the way to get there.

Paul Barnett  05:20

But it's not a natural change, there is still a part of coaches that wants to look at what someone can't do, rather than what they can do. Damien Hardwick talk to us about the authentic leadership course he went on at Harvard to learn this, and how this helped him be a better leader, and ultimately lead his team to three premierships.

Damien Hardwick  05:44

I think what tends to happen with coaching, and this is just a natural, not even in coaching, it's just in life in general, instead of looking the glass half full, we always look at it's half empty. I was always looking at what players not always, but I'd probably tend to look at what a player couldn't do instead of what a player could do. And then what I started to find out, well, listen, if we started after the course, that I did, looking at the strengths of myself, but my team and the players, if I started to look at what they could do, what I could then offset that, obviously, they're gonna have some areas like me that they weren't, weren't as strong as I could complement.

Paul Barnett  06:18

The best performers in the world are able to separate their performance from the result. According to World Cup winning cricket coach, Gary Kirsten, they are able to manage the anxiety gap that comes from underperformance by having an appreciation for their skills, and what they are capable of.

Gary Kirsten  06:35

Our approach as a leader is always I think the best performers in the world are able to separate the result from the actual show that they're putting on, which is the performance when they in the show they in the show, they're not in the result. And I think a lot of anxiety and expectation. Maybe they I don't know what they call it anxiety gap comes from joining the performance with the results. So in other words, what you're doing in that moment of theater is matched up to whether you're going to win or lose. And I think that's where a lot of athletes don't reach their full potential, because they start to fear what that result might be. And then it plays out in the theater. Certainly the great sports fan that I've worked with cricketers that I've worked with, when they in the theater that in the theater, they there to put on a show, okay? And whatever happens happens, and they don't actually really care what happens more times than not your real high performers. They kind of know that they're going to win more than they're going to lose, because they're flipping talented. And what they've realized is that if I can really express my talent to its full degree, I'm more times than not better than others. And if they don't succeed on a day, they don't really care because they know that they're going to come back and they're going to, they're going to win the next time. So kind of able to separate that out when that on show they're delivering on their skills.

Paul Barnett  08:01

But many of us do not fall into the group of world class performers that Gary talks about, it is far more likely that we will experience the anxiety that comes from performing below ours and the team's expectations. To balance this pressure out baseball coach John debo. It goes the words of John D. Rockefeller, who famously said, The secret of success is to do the common thing uncommonly well.

Jon Deeble  08:32

And keep I always say, Yeah, the thing is, let's get the fundamentals right. I often talk to coaches, when I was with the national team, a junior coaches, they'd have 27 different plays, I keep saying, Guys why? Let's do three really good. And that's, you know, in professional baseball, that's what happens to I'm a big believer, if you've got the basic fundamentals down, when things aren't going well, you're not going to fall very far. Because you've got the basics. And I say that a lot.

Peter Moores  09:00

As the coach, your job is to help people understand their strengths in the context of the team, and balance the effort they put into improving them versus focusing on their weaknesses. Here is English cricket coach, Peter Moore's to explain this. So caring and critiquing somebody, you want them to get better. You see the fault and you find yourself if you're not careful, forever talking about what's wrong, not right. So you focus on weaknesses rather than strengths? Well, again, you come to the great coaching for me, you have to help people identify to become a really good player, you're going to have identified your point of difference the area where you can maximize so all professional or elite. Sport is normally based on how well you play, but also how badly you make somebody else play it off. You make somebody playing worse because they see how good you are at something, not how poor you are or something. So the coaches reflect that. So it's sort of a bit of a buzzword in coaching. Now they're called Super strengths or whatever. For me, I've always looked at it really that you have to spot a weakness and help the player recognize if that weakness is at a point where it's below a threshold, so it's going to be exposed or make them fail, then there has to be improved to the point where you can't see anymore.

10:25

We hope you enjoyed our episode on skills, and found one or two things that you can bring to your own dinner table, locker room, or boardroom table for discussion. The key lessons I've taken away from our interview guests on the topic of skills are to use A skills matrix, to understand the breadth of skills you have across the team to focus on strengths, and how you can make them better to help athletes separate their performance from the result and to manage the anxiety gap. And use training to help the team execute the fundamentals in an uncommonly good way. Here at the great coaches podcast, we are always trying to learn, so please let us know if you have any feedback. Just like Peter Dovey who has said, so much insight and good ideas for the community coach in these podcasts. Thanks, Peter. The interaction with people around the world who listen gives us great energy. And so if you have any feedback or comments, please let us know. And all the details on how to connect with us or in the show notes or on our website. The great coaches podcast.com