Transcript
Speaker: Beliefs have the power to create and the power to destroy. Tony Robbins. Welcome to the Captains and Coaches podcast. We explore the art and science of leadership through the lens of athletics and beyond.
Speaker: I'm your host, Tex McQuilkin, and today we're talking about praising athletes, the good, the bad, and the ugly. Does your intent of your words match your impact?
Speaker: Are you withholding praise and positive because that's just what they're supposed to do? Stick with me. Some of the stuff we're going to be talking about, especially introducing for the first time, may sound strange, but when you start to apply it, it's going to unlock a lot of athletic potential for the teams you're working with.
Speaker: Okay, and we're going to be pulling from a few different sources. I am a current doctoral candidate getting my degree in organizational leadership, so pulling in for some fun research from the classes I'm taking.
Speaker: We're also going to have some... tools from some trauma-informed work on confidence and where it actually comes from, and then a conversation and tools that I picked up from working with my buddy, my pal, Luke Summers.
Speaker: If you're a long-time listener of the show, I encourage you, Go back and listen to episode 16, way back when. And we get into neuro-linguistic programming and the words that actually rewire children's brains. Different world different worlds, but same blind spot that we're going to be exploring in this episode.
Speaker: All right, here's the thesis and what we're aiming to accomplish with this episode. Most coaches do do not praise enough. They're withholding it. But the praise that they do give, and if we're careless with it, it can teach kids that their worth has to be earned every single day or even worse, every single play.
Speaker: And there's science for why this happens that we're going explore. so That's what we're going to get into. Most coaches don't praise enough, and when they do, they're careless with it and only rewarding a performance-based, not necessarily not necessarily a process-based behavior.
Speaker: All right. So I want to begin with why coaches withhold praise. And we're starting with the first problem here of silence. And I see this in coaches, myself included, on bad days where we just don't say anything sometimes.
Speaker: Whether the athlete did something right or the athlete did something wrong. Some days, I'm going to let that one go. And if we're always talking about everything that they've doing wrong or everything that they're doing right, then there's going to be no time for practice because we're always communicating with that.
Speaker: So that's what we have to understand is when to properly apply a correction or a direction. and when to properly apply praise for the athletes.
Speaker: Do we stick to small changes, focusing on small wins? Do we only highlight when they make a massive change? That's what we want to get into is why are we silent sometimes?
Speaker: And there's a big three for this that I want you to explore for yourself on why you choose to either withhold praise or even withhold corrections and directions for some bad reps that you run into.
Speaker: So three things. Number one, holding on to the past, waiting for the other shoe to drop. You have your idea of who a kid is, who an athlete is, And then they do something awesome and amazing that is outside of that character or athletic ability that you've labeled them.
Speaker: And so you you don't acknowledge it because you're just waiting for the other shoe to drop. or they let you down in a big game once. And now every rep gets filtered through that old resentment.
Speaker: And that's unfortunate. So if we're holding on to the past, we are preventing our athletes from progressing. Number two, being your own worst critic as a coach. If the voice in your head, coach, is mostly critical, that's the only voice you know how to use with your team.
Speaker: And whether you realize it or not, it's going to, if you're intentional or not, it's going to seep through on your default communication with your team. And the last is going to be fear.
Speaker: Fear that the praise makes the kids soft. Fear of being second-guessed by other coaches. going out on a limb taking a risk on a guy because you're afraid that they're going to make a mistake and then you're going to look like a bad coach that's unfortunate we may call certain things like this discipline or i knew they would do that later on self-fulfilling prophecy or confabulation on a negative performance but that's that's just fear wearing a whistle and it's it's easy to coach good athletes
Speaker: Super easy. They're well-coordinated. They've got great attitudes. They understand. Next play. Goldfish memory. Make a mistake. Next play. and But the ones who need the praise the most, they're usually battling those big three blocks that coaches have when they're withholding the praise that those kids need.
Speaker: A past story. They're an extremely hard self-critic on themselves. And then fear of success. What if they actually prove the story they're telling in them in their mind wrong?
Speaker: And they, then they're just waiting for the second shoe to drop. Kids who never hear what they're doing right, they quietly then decide that their effort doesn't matter. Why why should I try anyways?
Speaker: I'm just gonna i'm just gonna miss mess it up. I'm just gonna fail. So quick jet gut check for us coaches. When's the last time you caught a kid doing something right and said it out loud instead of just nodding and moving on, acknowledging and praising what they've done correct?
Speaker: My favorite, teamwork. Call it when it. That's a phrase I say multiple times during a practice when I see kids just high-fiving or being good pals or helping each other out off the field, on the field. Teamwork. Call it when I see it.
Speaker: And I'm not obnoxious about it because I want them to start saying seeing it and then start saying it. And then before you know it, they're intentionally trying to help each other out and be great teammates, to step up.
Speaker: One of my favorite all time, and I've seen this with my teams, but the first time I saw it is Baker Mayfield. He was in a BCS game when he was with Oklahoma. They were just talking about Baker, you know, the pregame draft ah graphics.
Speaker: He's jumping up and down. He's got his headband on. All of a sudden, he looks down at his teammate, one of his offensive linemen, And the offensive lineman's shoes untied. So Baker popped down. They show him, tie his teammate's shoes.
Speaker: And he's back in the zone just ho hopping around getting hyped up. Teamwork. Call it when I see it. That's awesome. And I've seen my players tie each other's shoes. And it's hilarious.
Speaker: But they're they're getting closer. They're being pals. They're being great teammates. That's a behavior I want to praise and reinforce. So before we get into this, ah I want to introduce a term. It's called neuro-linguistic programming.
Speaker: And I'm pulling this from ah podcast that did with Luke in all the work with children that we've had the opportunity to to write child development and social-emotional learning programs together.
Speaker: And this is something that Tony Robbins leans heavily into for his whole system and approach. So neuro-linguistic programming or NLP.
Speaker: And the core idea is very simple. Even if the name sounds very so clinical, the words we hear repeated about ourselves don't just describe us, they become us.
Speaker: Your brain doesn't always distinguish between, hey, this is what someone said about me and have a defense for that. Or... this is what's true about me.
Speaker: Brain has a hard time differentiating those unless it's trained to do so and has an established belief about itself that can block off the negative, what someone said about me.
Speaker: And if what someone said about you is said enough times In the right way, language stops being commentary and starts being an identity.
Speaker: And this works on good and bad side, both sides of this. So we need to understand and listen for how our athletes are communicating about themselves. We need to be aware of how other coaches are communicating about athletes to or around them because that starts to to become that self-fulfilling prophecy for that kid.
Speaker: And this this matters enormously for coaches to understand, or parents of if you're out there, because it means praise isn't just a nice gesture.
Speaker: it literally It's literally one of the tools you have for shaping what an athlete believes about who they are, their identity.
Speaker: Not necessarily their performance, their identity, no matter what happens on or off the field. But it also means there are different types of praise. And that's the whole purpose of this episode.
Speaker: And they don't all work the same way. And Luke and I broke down three of them in our conversation, episode 16 of Infotaining podcast way back then.
Speaker: The first one, self-talk. First type of praise is self-talk. This is an athlete saying out loud what they believe about themselves.
Speaker: And usually on the field, on the court, we only hear what they negatively feel about themselves. rarely hear what they positively feel about themselves.
Speaker: And this is where coaches need to come in and start to give them these tools and almost fake it till you make it force feed what they're saying until they start to believe it. So what I do is pair words with movement, with posture, with different positions with the body.
Speaker: So if it's paired, if positive words and beliefs are paired with physical gestures, a pose, superman pose, and this is what I refer to as the science of the sidelines, it's going to become more sticky and they're going to start to believe it. Jordan peters jordan jordan Peterson's first chapter of his book, I'm staring at right now, 12 Rules for Life, talks about posture.
Speaker: and how ingrained and connected it is to our physiology. So I want to take words and body positions and combine them. And that combination combination actually helps rewire belief because the brain registers both the language and the physical state together.
Speaker: So as a coach, this might mean a pregame routine where the team is saying something out loud together. Look at the freaking all blacks that step out with the Hakka and believe that they are God stepping onto the field.
Speaker: That is the ultimate representation. What is a version of that that you can teach your athletes to take to their their everyday performance? So we're we're aiming to introduce phrases and positions that these kids can start to say and believe about themselves.
Speaker: And it feels small, it feels stupid, but it's not. And it's not about them. Almost if they feel or think this is stupid and they're looking around at their teammates,
Speaker: they're in a position where it's not going to work, but we need to teach them that it's going to work. They're still in this mode I just talked about where we're more worried about what the external words are rather than the internal and creating the beliefs.
Speaker: Because if you truly believe about yourself, You're going to stand tall, say your mantra, be in this good position, and you don't care what else is out there. I mentioned Baker freaking Mayfield being on TV, looking down in Tyus' teammate's shoes.
Speaker: Talk about self-belief and confidence going into that game. Awesome. If I can find it, going to B-roll it in here. But that's the aim. I want you not only teach these the words, don't just tell them, which I'm going to get into at my next point here, don't just tell them they're awesome.
Speaker: Have them say that they're awesome and then superhero pose. No resting with hands on the on the knees. No resting with hands on the on the the on the head.
Speaker: Rest in the superman pose and repeat awesome words about themselves. Find some mantra that they can get behind. Clear eyes, full hearts, can't lose is another example.
Speaker: Awesome. Okay, so the next type of praise, this is direct talk. This is the praise directly to someone's face. Now, instead of a kid saying it about themselves, coaches saying it to a kid about them.
Speaker: And this is one of the most difficult. I comment on this. I call it level set on skill set. If a kid's self-esteem is way down here, we got to grab them and pull them up. But it's so difficult, it's going to take a hell of a lot more to grab and pull them up to level if we're just telling them, hey,
Speaker: You're talented. You're a good person. Great game. That is the least effective at changing someone's deep self-belief. It doesn't mean don't do it. It's still good.
Speaker: It still matters. And athletes should hear this. They need to hear this. It's also us modeling how athletes can communicate to one another. It is unfortunately the least effective, but it doesn't mean don't do it.
Speaker: But if you're the only one doing this as a coach on the team, we're leaving a very powerful tool on the table. So this is where I can take these positive things that you do have to say about this athlete and make them more powerful.
Speaker: It's called earshot praise. Instead of saying directly to the kid what I want to say about them, I can say that to another kid or to a coach or to a parent and they're in earshot.
Speaker: This is a big one. So if a kid overhears you talking positively about their performance, about what they've done right or how much they've grown or who they are to someone else, not said directly to them, said about them,
Speaker: and they just happen to catch it, that is extremely powerful for redirecting and getting them level set on their skill set. Praising a kid to a coach or another player in earshot. That's what we're talking about. It's even more powerful when it comes from an authority figure.
Speaker: So because that kid's brain, it reads it as, this wasn't said for my benefit. this was This must actually be true if we're saying it to someone else. Think about what that means for you as a coach. The conversation you have with another coach, with a parent, while the kid is in earshot, even if you don't think they're listening, it might be the single most influential thing that you say all season.
Speaker: And I've got a real life example of this. ah Still coaching summer ball, travel ball, because I'm battling the the ah the freaking PE pipeline, private equity pipeline that's taken over the travel ball. Got an independent team.
Speaker: And... We have middle schoolers. Now this is a middle school team. But hell, invited the middle schoolers out to JV high school practice. And they balled out. They had a great time. They were putting forth their best effort.
Speaker: And so one of our coaches on staff directed his words at the high school. He was thinking about dogging their effort and was saying something along the lines of, we got these middle school kids out here. They are freaking ah passing a catch and catching, throwing, putting on a show, and you guys can't stop them.
Speaker: So he was aiming to motivate the high schoolers, not talking to the middle schoolers, but they heard it, and what did they hear? That they were putting on a freaking clinic bench against a bunch of JV players.
Speaker: So then these kids believed that they were awesome. It was completely unintentional, not directed at them at all, but they're like, oh, man. High school coach thinks we're awesome.
Speaker: Legit. And they believed it. And then they took it into their season. And now the summer. So it's fun to see that grow. So real life example, we were traveling this past weekend and one of the kids shared that ah and just hilarious that I was talking about praise.
Speaker: And then earshot praise came up naturally in the wild. Just ah ah an aside. So that's an example. Now, if coach intentionally did that, that's confabulation, but I'll i'll take it.
Speaker: So ah that that's a positive example. And I've also seen this negative example I'm going to share here is the the part that you really need to be socially and situationally aware of is when you're saying something negative.
Speaker: or other ah other athletes are saying something negative and the kid can hear you. So you're not directing them. You're saying something negative about them, there their performance, and they hear you talking to someone else about their performance.
Speaker: They're going to take that as fact, no matter what you tell them directly. You are imprinting that belief directly onto their identity. It's just pointed in the wrong direction.
Speaker: The kid didn't ask to overhear it. They don't get a say in what you were saying or your beliefs and their their brain, it doesn't have the protective mechanism in there to filter that.
Speaker: So this is where earshot praise can be so negative ah as well. If we don't have this situational awareness and we're giving a kid ah a a negative nickname just between us ah coaches, but then they hear it or someone else hears it, that is time out.
Speaker: No. Absolutely not. So one, don't even say it. If you think it, just push that out. Because if you do have to vent or get that off your chest, someone's going to hear it. It's going to go through the whole game of telephone, get back to the kid, and we're going to have a situation on our hands.
Speaker: All right. So before you say anything about another kid, ah about a kid, two and another adult,
Speaker: sideline comment a complaint to a parent venting a casual aside to an assistant coach ask yourself is the kid in your shop because if they are you're not venting you are programming NLP neuro linguistic programming something that is going to take a lot more work to undo all right so if Earshot praise. Very passionate about that one. Okay, now we're going get into the trap hiding inside of praise itself.
Speaker: So here's where NLP piece connects to something else. Even when praise is delivered well, direct, sincere, specific, there's still a deeper trap waiting and it's about what we're praising.
Speaker: Tim Fletcher, who works in trauma recovery, talks about performance-based confidence. A kid learns that approval shows up only when they perform. And I've had Jim Davis on my podcast, a good athlete projects, and he talked about his experience with this on the football field.
Speaker: He would go go out on the field, make a play, go back to the sideline, coach would be jumping up and down, praise, high five, headbutt. And then make a mistake.
Speaker: And he would go to the sideline and be completely ignored by his coaches. So if you play well, good game, great play, you get attention. Bad game, you get ignored.
Speaker: Over time, the brain the brain locks in a rule. My value is something i earn over and over with no finish line. And when that's true, confidence collapses the second praise once the second praise stops coming.
Speaker: And it always does. with that coaching style. So every piece of earshot praise, every direct compliment, every bit of self-talk you teach an athlete is tied exclusively to performance.
Speaker: The goal, the tackle, the insight. If you're using a genuinely powerful tool to wire in a fragile belief, I only matter when I produce, we're going to be in trouble.
Speaker: And that's the that's default of a lot of coaches. Mistake. ah Get angry. Correct. Make a play on the field. Over. Celebrate.
Speaker: And then somewhere in between, there's ignore for both. Praise, positive things done, or negative things done. The fix is not less praise.
Speaker: It's praise that's specific to what they did. Layered with something that has nothing to do with performance at all. The message that a kid is valued as a person, win or lose.
Speaker: You made a great play.
Speaker: trying to think about how I would phrase this. like you You blocked a pun out there. You've been busting your ass on special teams the entire season, and you broke through. I knew you could do it this whole time.
Speaker: awesome now i'm reinforcing all the process all the effort all the special team snaps that it took to be in a position to block that punt i and i am using this example because i did block a punt and that was the one time i had praise from my high school football coach i think it was sophomore team so uh reflecting on some the coaching scars there but just laughing to myself so any katie taylor mustangs out there you know what i'm talking about block punt I'll send this to you I can get some comments. All right, moving on. But ah let's get into what praise can look like on the field.
Speaker: Three things to actually do with the information we're talking about here. Number one, engineer earshot praise on purpose. Don't wait for it to happen by accident. Tell another coach,
Speaker: in the hallway, loud enough for the kid to catch what you're saying about them. It's not staged. That's what you would probably say to that coach, that parent, that teacher, whomever.
Speaker: Now it's just in a position where they can hear me.
Speaker: That's what I want you to Intentionally think about Earshot praise, you know, we're not complimenting the kid. We're reinforcing a lot of the the habits and behaviors that we want and we're creating belief and identity that that's who they are and it starts to get programmed. It starts to get installed and it can be repeated. Now we're reinforcing and getting them ready for the next opportunity they have to show up and show out.
Speaker: So that's number one. Intentional earshot praise. Number two, praise the process out loud, not just the ah outcome. This is with the individual and with the team.
Speaker: I saw you reset after that mistake. Goldfish memory. That matters more long-term than, great goal, great kick, great book gro blocked punt. Because the the ability to reset after a mistake, that shows up every practice.
Speaker: If we're only praising the performance during the game, then there's large gaps of time that they're they're they're suffocating and drowning in their own negative thoughts, waiting for an opportunity for praise.
Speaker: And everyone's athletic career ends. so that's That's what I was referencing earlier. Where athletic praise, if we're lying on that, it's going to go away. and the next man up.
Speaker: Okay, so number two, praise the process out loud, not just the outcome. Number three, say the quiet part directly sometimes.
Speaker: i'm proud I'm proud of how you played today, and I'd be proud of you on a day you didn't play so well too. All around, you're an amazing teammate. This team's lucky to have you.
Speaker: that sentence does the work of separating the worth from the performance explicitly so that athlete doesn't have to guess this one's going to take reps it's going to take time and tone target timing are three t's that we talk about for our leaders to learn communications this is where this comes into play for our coaches as well so three is say the quiet part directly to make sure it is absolutely clear and not assumed
Speaker: Praise withheld stunts performance. Praise that's only conditional stunts identity. And now we know there's a hierarchy to praise itself. Self-talk plants a seed.
Speaker: Direct talk is good but limited. and earshot praise. Used carefully and used well might be the most powerful tool you have as a coach. Used carelessly, it's also the most dangerous.
Speaker: And here's one thing to do with this episode. at At your next practice, at your next training session, find a moment to say something good about a kid to another adult, to another coach, to another parent, to another teacher, knowing that kid can hear it.
Speaker: And just as important, watch what you say about kids when you think they can.
Speaker: Sports don't teach lessons you do, coach. Sometimes that lesson isn't even spoken to that kid at all. It's the conversation they weren't supposed to hear.
Speaker: That does it for another episode the Captains and Coaches podcast. Thank you for tuning in. If you like what you heard here today, be sure to like, subscribe, rate, and review. Share this episode with a coach you feel needs to hear it.
Speaker: Let's help raise the game together. Thank you again for tuning in. See you next time. See you.
