What If Your Best Coaching Is Silence

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Transcript

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Hi team, welcome to the Midweek Reflections episode. I'm Ben Herring, and I love chatting about this stuff. And today's episode is just a little reflection piece that I had a wonderful conversation this week with a fellow coach, and we were talking about what is a trend that does happen in coaching is the idea that you're overcoaching, the over-teaching things. You're giving too much detail and expecting that detail to stick in land. And I think the reference point is this how often do you hear yourself say or or another coach say, I told them, and they're just not doing it? That happens a lot. But just because you tell someone to do something a certain way as a technique or a drill, it doesn't mean they're going to do it. The art of coaching is to understand that it's not necessarily what you say. It's not the detail in that, it's how you do it. And sometimes it's not always what you say, it's how you let things be sometimes. And sometimes you've got to let things

Welcome And The Overcoaching Problem

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just grow organically and just be there as the little guide along the way. And the best reference that we were chatting about and we came up with was that of parenting. Now, if you're a parent, or and even if you're not a parent, if you think back to your youth, your teenage years, and you think about your experimenting with drinking or that sort of thing. And most people go through that stage where they have their little blowouts drinking. And if you think back to your parents, anything your parents said to you about what you should and shouldn't do when it comes to experimenting with that stuff, and you probably took it with an absolute grain of salt. You probably paid very little attention to it at all. If you're anything like me as a teenager, you were just on your own tour. And essentially, you had a few flu, a few blowouts, as most people do. You drink too much or whatever, and you learn. You experience that stuff and you learn for yourself. And then you adjust based on that. And quite

Parenting As The Coaching Mirror

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often you don't pay any attention to what was said. You just go, gee, I'm not going to do that again. Or gee, I'll do that differently next time. And so it is when we think about our coaching culture. And I've watched a lot of coaches, a lot of coaches, and something which is becoming really prevalent uh these days, I think modern coaching, a lot more than probably the old school days, is the amount of technical instruction and detail we are putting in all the time. Feeling like that need to teach all the time. We've got to be talking, we've got to be pulling things up and saying, no, technique this, fingers have got to be pointed to target at this degrees, this is where you release, this is where your hips need, this leg needs to go forward. All these little details we feel like we have to say. Like we have to, we have to put these things in. It's like, imagine a parent saying all these little things like before you were going out for your first, you know, date or your first, you know, time at the pub, like tuck that shirt in, the fold's got to be like this. You've got to shine your shoes, you've got to fold your laces like this, you've got to do your belt up to that notch, you've got to iron your pants, you've got to wash your shirt, you've got to do all these little things. And the chances are you'll just go, please, enough.

Why Details Don’t Land

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I just want to go and do it. And I'll learn from them. Whatever happens, I'll just make it work. And that's the same with our sports teams. We're talking rugby in this context. If we're doing a handling drill, if it goes wrong once, we don't stop and say, oh, we've got to put a hands to target. And then something else happens, we stop and go, oh, we've got to have your left foot forward. These are little erroneous details sometimes. Sometimes, in fact, more often than you might think, you've got to let the drill just go and go and go. So you're getting lots of repetition. You're experiencing all these things. And to coach on the run as you go, just little snippets, just at the right time, when people are receptive, when they've made that mistake and you say, oh mate, that's all right, just next time, put your hands up. No problem. Then they're receptive. If you say it all before and you try and struct after every single rep, you're not getting that experiential experience. So I have a little policy myself is I make I make fellas, ladies and boys and girls that are coaching. Do at least five. If you're gonna make a tackle, make five and just have something simple to start with. Let's say make five tackles and go forward every time. You might video that and say, okay, come back here, have a look at this. There's your five tackles. What can we tweak? I don't think my legs very close. Righto, this time mate, we'll do another five. Get your legs closer. Go forward and get your legs closer. And that's all you critique. If each after every single rep you are critiquing the thousands of different technical points, they're simply going to be lost. And you're going to be your players are going to be hesitating all over the show. And you don't want that. You want them to experience stuff. We're doing a lot of drills at the moment where we just keep it rolling, just keep going for three minutes. Let's just do this drill for three minutes. Then we may bring it together and make one or two points about how we can improve it. And then we do another three minutes and we get many touches as we can in whatever

Five Reps Then One Simple Tweak

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particular aspect we are coaching. If we're coaching, draw and pass, let's create an environment for three minutes where we're getting as many reps at drawing and passing as we can. Continuous. One of the beautiful things is not to think too much. The more you think by throwing in things, the more the players hesitate. They're not getting the full experience. If you're just making them go, go, go, go, go, and then you stop and reflect really quickly, and then you go go, go, go again, the experiential experience, I think, is absolutely wonderful. I certainly know that the mistakes I made in my youth and my teenage years off the rugby pitch, uh, I I need to experience. I needed to most young people need to experience it to truly get the value out of the lessons. If you're just listening to what someone said and not experiencing it firsthand, it's not as powerful. It doesn't stick and sink in as much as it should and could. So you gotta let them ride. And that's a big ass for a lot of coaches because you've got to actually sometimes do less. Do less what you think. Part of coaching is not coaching rugby, but you are coaching the person rugby. There's a step in the middle between coaching and the rugby. You're coaching the person, and sometimes that person just needs to experience the thing you're trying to do. And so you need to facilitate them actually experiencing it. Let them review, reflect on themselves. You don't always need to be the voice that's there telling them. In fact, a lot of times players will learn the lessons just by experiencing it for themselves. So create that environment. If you need any tips on that, if you want to know how, please reach out. This is what the Coaching Culture Podcasts do. How do we get our drills so people can experience them without having to coach and teach the techniques? Drop me a bell, hit the

Create Learning Through Flowing Drills

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show notes. Until next time. Stay well.