The Tape Doesn't Lie: How to Become a Better Communicator as a Coach

Most coaches use film to help players improve, but very few use it to evaluate themselves. In this episode, Zach shares why reviewing your own meetings, practices, conversations, or presentations can dramatically improve your communication and leadership effectiveness. Drawing from his own experiences with podcasting and public speaking, he explains how self-review exposes blind spots, reveals patterns, and accelerates growth.

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Transcript

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In sport, one of the most valuable tools that we have for our own development is film. Film sessions are embedded into almost every level of performance now. Teams like to study their opponents, players will evaluate their own individual techniques, coaches are oftentimes breaking down the decision making and the play calling. Film, in essence, gives us something incredibly valuable, feedback. And it's really the most important part here is its objective feedback, because it gives us what actually has transpired and not what did we feel like might have happened. But I think there's something within this process that applies just as much to leadership and communication as it does to performance on the field. It's something that many of us stop doing once we move into positions of authority, and I actually think this might be one of the simplest and maybe the most underutilized way that a coach or leader can immediately elevate their impact. So today on the podcast, we're going to talk about this idea. If film helps athletes improve their performance, what might happen if leaders started studying themselves the same way? Now, real quick, before we dive in, I did want to just uh mention again that I am hosting a free webinar this coming Monday at 4 p.m. Pacific time. Uh that's Monday, May 11th. Uh, if any of you are interested, we're gonna talk about the three biggest ways that I've seen coaches lose a grip on their team's culture. These are the gonna be the subtle mistakes that I've seen show up time and time again that also don't oftentimes happen overnight, but gradually over time they cause the energy, the standards, the connection inside a team and the culture to kind of slowly fizzle. So if that's something that you're looking to strengthen in your own environment or try to bulletproof in your own environment, um you can register with the link in the show notes. I'd love to see you there again. That's gonna be Monday, May 11th at 4 p.m. Pacific time, and the link is uh the link to register is in the show notes. Now, back into today's episode. I've heard coaches say for years that the tape doesn't lie, or the other variation is like you can't cheat the film. For many coaches, this is kind of their way of saying that the film often reveals a more objective reality of what actually just happened. Now, last year I had an opportunity to go watch the Denver Broncos um during a joint preseason practice uh scrimmage with the Arizona Cardinals. And, you know, it was interesting to watch because there's just so many moving parts. It's like, it's like it just feels like this like well-oiled machine, how organized it is. It kind of feels like organized chaos with all the different components going on simultaneously. But one of the biggest things that stood out to me was how much was being filmed, like literally everything. They had different drills being filmed, they had the team periods being filmed, like the individual work sessions, like not to mention, not only were they filming a particular session from one angle, but then they had like another angle, like a higher up angle through it. Um, they just had cameras like everywhere. And I think at the highest levels, not just in sport, but in other settings too, we often see the top performers obsessing over details. In this instance, for just this preseason scrimmage, I couldn't help but notice how much they were using film to capture and evaluate a lot of those details showing up for the team. We inherently tend to recognize and appreciate how valuable this is in a team or sports setting, but I think it also applies to other aspects of life too. Here's a personal example. This podcast has actually been um an essential part of my own kind of feedback loop. Um, and I can promise you that there are very few things in life that I dislike more than going back and listening to my previous interviews or old episodes. I hear myself asking a question or saying something, and all I can think is like, why did I ask that? Did I really ask it in that particular way? What in the heck was I trying to get at there? Um, just there's a lot of moments where I go back and I kind of cringe listening to it. Here's an exam uh an additional example, which I debated whether or not I should share this because this might ruin some old interviews for those of you that have tuned in, or maybe you go back and you listen. But one of the very first things that I noticed by going back and reviewing my interviews and watching the film is that I would oftentimes start questions with some form of, hey, I'd be curious, and then I'd ask the question. I'd be curious, I'd be curious. Like, and once I noticed it, it became all I could hear. And now maybe nobody else has noticed up until this point, although again, now I probably have ruined this for you. Um, and maybe some of you didn't care, but I noticed it. And more importantly, I didn't realize how often I was doing it until again I went back and I watched. Same thing with something like stacking questions. This is something that you learn in kind of the trade of being a sport and performance psych person. Um, anybody that's I think a good leadership or performance coach, they don't stack questions. They ask one question that gets to the root of things and then they listen and then they build off of that with another question. But there are times, and I still kind of do it from time to time, and I'm trying to get better at it, is that I'll ask two or three questions at once. And what you're doing is you're trying to add context or clarity, but in reality, oftentimes it just creates more confusion, or you're pulling people away from the question that you really wanted them to answer in the first place. But again, I wouldn't have recognized any of these patterns had I not been reviewing the film. So I my point here is that I think many leaders are often trying to improve their communication without ever truly observing it. And film is a great way to do so. So if your goal is to elevate your impact as a leader and you need better feedback, better feedback includes more accurate feedback. And I I think you could make a case that there's not a lot more accurate feedback out there than watching film of yourself. And without feedback, what we do instead is we just default to our perceptions and our intentions. And yet, as we know, perceptions are often flawed. This is where something like um if anybody of you uh any of you has read the classic book Blink um by Malcolm Gladwell, he talks about how quickly people will form judgments of us in thin slices, even within mere seconds, people are gonna constantly read you, your tone, your body language, your presence, which means that you're not just getting evaluated based on your intentions, you're getting evaluated based on what's is observable. And if you've never actually observed yourself, you're just gonna guess. And film thankfully helps remove some of that guesswork and it closes the gap between who you think you are as a coach or leader and actually how you're showing up. So if you're listening to this and you're trying to figure out, like, okay, how where do I even start in terms of utilizing film for myself? Here's maybe a simple process. Record just one interaction or meeting this week. Doesn't have to be everything, doesn't have to be all the aspects of what you do, but find one team meeting, or maybe it's when you're uh explaining a drill, and then watch the film as if you're a coach and not a critic. You're not watching to judge yourself, you're just watching to pick up on patterns. What am I doing well that I need to keep doing? What's maybe unclear that I didn't realize? Where am I maybe over talking? Did I lose the room here based on the body language, not just uh of what I'm doing, but also um of what the my team or what my the people in the audience are reacting with. Then look for one thing, one behavior that maybe you can adjust. Maybe it's again the asking one question at a time, it's eliminating some sort of filler phrase, uh, slowing down your delivery, being more direct, whatever that might be. And then here's a quick bonus. This is like an advanced tip, but I think this actually works really well. It was something that somebody shared with me years ago to improve my process for like public speaking. Watch yourself with the sound off. Because I think this is where you'll start to notice things that you you otherwise would have overlooked. You might realize, like, okay, how engaging am I being just in my presence and my body language? Do I look approachable? Do I look closed off? You know, does is my hand in my pocket where I look really casual? This is one that like somebody shared with me. Like, if you look at all the top speakers, they don't have their hand in their pocket. Um, it's they that they use their hands more effectively. And I can't rem call this um exactly. So someone out uh maybe I'll I'll mention this again in a future episode, but they did this like study looking at um the most top-rated uh TED talk videos. And one of the interesting things that they found is that oftentimes the most watched or engaged videos have uh aligned with the people that are doing the most intentional work with their hands during the presentation. So kind of an interesting uh observation that's been made. So again, when you turn the audio or the, I'm sorry, yeah, the audio off, I think it can help you um start to tune into some things that maybe you otherwise would have missed. Um, because I think most of us we obsess over the message itself, which is great, but sometimes we don't realize how our body language and our presence is actually diminishing our words just as much. So for all of us coaches and leaders in sport, again, we know that if we want to grow our players, film's a great way to do that. My recommendation though is that if you want to grow yourself as a leader, watching film is something that's definitely relevant for you as well. Sometimes the fastest way to elevate our impact isn't to learn something new, it's just seeing clearly what we're already doing. And there's probably no easier way to do that or cheaper way to do that than to go watch the tape.