What Is Coaching?
Posted on August 28, 2017 by James Hartley, One of Thousands of Family Coaches on Noomii.
If your coach does not believe in you, you have the wrong coach!
The link here is from the movie “Courageous:” www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sUKoKQlEC4
The trailer scene is intense and the coach pushes his player beyond any point his player ever imagined he could be motivated to achieve. I like the image of the blindfold for the reason being that the player had to have faith in his coach, as we get further by faith than we do by sight (it is psychological). The best talent in the world can step on the court or in the arena and lose to a team with lesser talent who have had good coaching; coaching that has maintained their strengths and developed the parts of their game that needed strengthening.
I recall coaching a minor basketball team a few years back. Our players were smaller than the opposing team and this team had beaten us throughout the regular season. We were in the finals and needed to beat this team to win our division finals. The much taller team was leading by the end of the first half of the game but only by a few baskets and it was the tightest scoring game we had with them all season. During half time we took our team into the locker room and we worked on motivating them to give it their all in the second half. We explained that the opposing team was being thrown off their game as in the last 3 minutes we had scored 8 points and shut them down; something they were not expecting us to be able to do. We asked our team “Do you want to win this game?” and did they recognise that they were doing better than they had ever done against this team. Their response was “YES, we want to win!”
Our approach with our team during the halftime pep talk was that we were going to beat this team today and we were going to do it by confusing them. The other team arrived at today’s game with a swagger and cockiness which was born our of beating our team all year long. Today, however, we would surprise and confound them showing them a different team, a different and better style of play. We got loud in our locker room; in one voice our unified team cheer said “We got this!”
The story ends that this small team went into the second half feeling they really could win the game and hit the floor wide open. By the final buzzer we were ahead by 6 points and won our division final. I saw our team believe in themselves and, as a result, step up their game. We, the coaches, believed in them and we continued to encourage them as they managed to strip the ball from their opponents and out speed them down the floor. It broke the confidence of the other team and they began to make mistakes which we capitalised on. It was our day and our players had faith in our coaching and their abilities.
Coaching is about bring out the best in those being coached in order that they experience their potential for success. A coach who does not believe in you is NOT the coach for you.
Life coaches can help. It is going through the process together; after all, the winning team does not necessarily have the best players as much as they have a coach who recognises their potential and assists them in bringing out their best.
There is a solution for every situation and the sun is always shining somewhere!
