Reflections: How First and Last Moments Shape Coaching

A surgeon’s simple habit changed the way we coach. We dig into how the first and last moments of any experience anchor the emotion, memory, and meaning people carry forward—and how that insight can turn ordinary sessions into powerful learning events. Starting from an unexpected colonoscopy analogy, we translate a soft start and a calm finish into practical tools for rugby and any team environment.

We walk through three levels of application. At the season level, we show how a strong opening meeting and a thoughtful closing ceremony frame the story your players remember, even when results are mixed. At the session level, we share quick ways to prime attention in the first minute and seal learning in the last—without bloated speeches or gimmicks. At the drill level, we lean into Mike Cron’s “pot lid” huddle: a fast circle where players toss in what they noticed, name one cue, and close the lid so insights stick.

You’ll hear why perception becomes reality for each athlete, how small bookends shift motivation and mood, and which phrases keep things clear and human. Expect concrete timings to try tonight: 10 seconds to set purpose, one cue to guide reps, 30 seconds to harvest takeaways. The aim is simple—design the start and the finish so the middle gets better on its own. If you coach any sport, lead a team, or teach a class, this approach will help you reduce anxiety, boost confidence, and build lasting memory.

Try the framework this week: start well, finish well, and watch buy-in rise. If this sparked new ideas, subscribe, share it with a coach who cares about craft, and leave a short review so others can find the show.

For all your sports equipment and some of the most innovative rugby products going around, head to silverfernsports.com.

If you want to chat directly or explore options for your school or club, flick an email to ben@coachingculture.com.au
.

Great gear. Built for coaches.

Chapters

• 1:53 A Surgeon’s Lesson On Memory
• 3:12 The Colonoscopy Analogy
• 5:18 Why Beginnings And Endings Matter
• 6:49 Applying It To A Season
• 8:32 Shaping Training And Games
• 10:16 Drill Design And The Pot Lid
• 12:16 Practical Wrap And Challenge

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 1:06

Welcome to Reflections, the midweek session with me, Ben Herring. Lovely to be here with you. And I've got something which is quite deep today. A bit of a conversation I had last week with a friend of mine who's a doctor and a surgeon, in fact. And he told me this little piece of information that they do at the surgery amongst their crew, which I found has massive relevance to coaches across the board. And this piece of gold is based in a lot of science, and they use it as standard practice for their clinic. And I just thought there's such an awesome thing to be able to take from other professions about how you do things in yours. And so the analogy that I'm going to give you is a bit of a funny one. And it's a it's about a colonoscopy, which is there, for those that don't know, it's when you get a camera shoved up your colon all the way to the end, and it takes a recording of everything that's up there and it then comes out. So when you have that, it's a pretty unpleasant experience. And bear with me on this analogy. It's a powerful analogy, and I'm going to give it to you. So he said this. This is the quote which got us talking for days as we do. Chew the fat, reflect reflect on it all. He said this. How you start and how you finish disproportionately shape the emotion, memory, and meaning of an entire session. I'm going to just say that again. How you start and how you finish disproportionately shape the emotion, memory, and meaning of the entire session. That's a guy, a doctor, Dr. Simon Usher. Now, I would like to just expand on that for Rugby, but first I'll give you the analogy of what he talked about. He said something to the effect of this, and I'll layman version it down for us all, because I'm not techie enough to know the all the inner workings. So he said something to this effect. When you first put the camera or the little tubing up your colon, so that first bit when it goes from into your bum essentially and it's up there a couple of centimeters, it doesn't actually feel too bad. Like the first bit is actually all right. The nerves or whatever it is mean it's not uncomfortable the first bit. Where it gets comfortable is in the when it's going up there, up the colon and it's going around that track, right? That's the uncomfortable bit. So he said their little practice did this where they would put it in just that one or two centimetres, and then they'd then start just casually talking about what they were doing it for. So what you're gonna find is it's gonna go up there. It might be a little bit uncomfortable at times, uh, but otherwise it's it's all good. Your tubing's rubbery, it moves, you won't, you won't have any um problems here. Now, what that is is essentially a little bit of a soft start. Instead of just going all the way up there straight into the uncomfortable, that unknown, he's almost preempted what's gonna happen when it's not uncomfortable. So starts like that, then it goes up. But because you had that first experience where they were talking about what was gonna happen, and it already started, and you're actually thinking, it's actually not too bad. It's not too bad. And then when it does go up a little bit further into the colon and that tubing, you kind of that was your anchoring point. You kind of go, Oh, it's actually, you know, it's not too bad. Because the way it started actually started quite nicely. Likewise, too, when it comes back at the end, they stop and they pause two centimeters before they pull it out. And they just go, hey, look, so we went up there, this is what we saw, some good stuff, and it looks all good. So um, yeah, really well done. You did a good job. And they have that kind of small talk with it still in that last couple of centimeters. And then they say, Righto, and now we'll finish up. And they pull it out. But what that does is that last little experience, the the patient then goes, Oh no, this is not too bad. No, cool, cool. That's yeah, right, oh, not too bad. And then their sentiment is laced by that last couple of seconds of that sitting in there when it was not uncomfortable. And I just love this concept. If you've just gone straight in and just gone straight up, done the job, pulled it straight back out, you're probably gone into that nervous as you do as a patient. And the whole time you're clenching and you're, oh, what is going on here? And then when it finishes, you're still thinking like that. And you have to unrecover a little bit. And I just thought that was cool. So he was saying they do a lot of science on this stuff, that how you start and how you finish to the patient disproportionately shapes the whole experience, the emotion, the memory, and the meaning of everything that just happened. So that little bit of time spent at the start and the little bit at the end actually helps do wonders for the session. Now, I want to just put this now into a rugby coaching context for you. So there's three things to look at. And let's start when you look at the bigger picture of, say, a season. Think about if that statement's true, and there's a lot of science to suggest it is, how you start the very first thing you do in a season campaign, and the very last thing you do disproportionately shape the emotion, memory, and meaning of that entire season. Doesn't define it, but it disproportionately shapes it. Meaning if the very start and the very end are outstanding, you're probably gonna find the meaning and the memory and the emotion of the whole thing is gonna be better than if they were terrible and quite a lot better. And it kind of makes sense to me. Like when you get into a season, and the first thing you do is you go have a really awesome presentation on this is what we're gonna do, we're pumped up, we're excited to be here, we're connecting with each other, you're getting excited about the the group of mates you're gonna be working with, and the first, very first session you have together as a team is outstanding, you go, yeah, I'm ready. You may lose every game in the season, but then if the last thing you do is a massive send-off and you have a really great celebration, regardless how you've done, you come back together and you sign it off the right way with the right acknowledgments and the right sentiment, the right tone and the right shape for your team, it diminishes potentially all of those losses a little bit. It curbs it. Now I'm talking extreme here, right? Like as if you've lost every game. But if you just had a normal season, you get those the bookings right, if you're booking that season really well with a really cool feel, it's gonna really shift the perception. Now, I'll I'll go even narrower and I'll talk about your sessions. So if you then break down into a session, so it could be a game, it could be a training, the same things apply. How you start and finish disproportionately shape the emotion, memory, and meaning of the entire session, the entire game, that entire training. So, for example, when you come into that session, you might want to start with something which is uplifting, upgauging, even if it's just for a minute, to make sure you're starting in such a way that's going to disproportionately proportionately shape things. And likewise when you finish, I said it just okay, see a later team, and off everyone walks. If the training was average, the last thing they would have in their mind is averageness. If the training was average and you have a great send-off and you celebrate whatever, you could celebrate someone's birthday just for argument's sake, then the last thing they're walking away with was an uplifting cool thing. And it affects the then perception of how that training was. And why is that perception important? Because perception is reality for that person or any one person, someone's perception of things is their reality, and you want everyone's reality, whether it's actually true or not, to be thinking the right way. And this is a great little tool to actually shape that. And the last little narrow down, you could even narrow down this further to a skill or a drill you're doing. You might do a drill for say seven minutes, say 10 minutes. How you start it with your intro for 10 seconds, 20 seconds, whatever it is, and how you finish it was with your get together, bring it in, actually can really determine how good it is. And I'd like to reference Mike Cron. Uh a couple of weeks ago, I went away and did this forum with Mike, and he talked about this phrase when you finish any drill or skill, come together in a real quick circle, and he called it take the pot lid off. So imagine your circle, your huddle is a pot, and he said, take the lid off, and they'll get everyone to just throw in whatever they learned from that session. Like, say you did a tackling drill, you might just say, Ride oh, team, throw it in. What have you learned? And people would say, Oh, get our feet close. Yes, he'd say, Yep, that's good, because you need to be close with your your feet, correct. What else? Oh, look where you're going with your eyes. Great stuff, he'd say, That's perfect. Squeeze tight with your arms, and everybody would just chuck their ideas in and it wouldn't take long. And he'd say, Anymore? No, great stuff, team. Love that. And metaphorically, he would put the lid back on that pot, done. And I just watched it in action how awesome it was that everyone was just firing whatever they learned in that session into this pot. The lid went on and done. Away. Next drill. How do we start another one? And I loved it because their last experience of that drill was a heckload of learning. And it was also a heckload of leadership and be brave speaking up and throwing your idea in. The way Mike did it was open to everyone. No one felt embarrassed to make a mistake. Everybody was throwing their idea in. And that's the last thing that is remembered. All these ideas, all this learning. And that disproportionately shapes the whole session. It doesn't define the session. But if you didn't do that, it would just be, oh yeah. You do that, and all of a sudden you're reinforcing all this real cool stuff, which magnifies more so what you just did. So there it is. I just think that's a really amazing thing as a coach to just remember, remember how you start and finish. And even if it's just 10 seconds, 10 seconds to just say, What did we learn in an excited way? And then people bang it out, open the pot lid. And then you're just finishing in the way that way that's going to actually, you know, build in well, get the learning you want. That is my reflection for the week. Coming from a surgeon doing it a colonoscopy, which isn't pleasant, but something there for coaches. How you start and how you finish disproportionately shapes the emotion, the memory, and the meaning of the entire session. So with that in mind, be really deliberate and purposeful about how you start and finish your sessions. Do that. Take the time. It doesn't have to be long. It can be 10 seconds at the start of a drill to get something going. And it can be 30 seconds at the end of a drill just to reflect, to educate, to make sure it's actually going in. Put it in practice this week. If you're coaching at the moment, give it a whirl. Every drill you do, start well, finish well. And see how the whole mood of the whole session in your team goes. I would like to think that it would go very well. And you'll have great buying and the reflections from the team would be good. Until next time. We'll catch you next week.