Solobrief: How to Talk About Talent

In preparation for book clubbing with Corey Manley, I break down how I communicate about talent with coaches and athletes.

Solobrief: How to Talk About Talent Chris DeSantis

Transcript

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Hello and welcome to the swim brief. I'm Chris DeSantis, and I am back from vacation. Thank you to everybody who sent me some kind words and listened to the podcast while I was gone and engaged with those podcasts. Got a really not a lot of nice feedback on the podcast that I put up while I was away. We're just about to get back on track with guests again, but we're going to record another solo brief today. I've got some thoughts from vacation. I want to talk a little bit about talent because it leads into the podcast that I'll be coming with the following week. So I'm going to preview that a little bit. I'm going to talk about talent today. So let me start there and I'll tell you where the podcast is headed next week so that you guys as listeners even maybe have a chance to interact with me a little bit ahead of it. A few weeks ago, I had on this podcast Christopher Henrickson, sports psychologist from Denmark. I had a chance to hear him speak in January, and a lot of people responded to me about that podcast. He had a lot of interesting things to say, but you know, I was a little embarrassed. Like I was talking to him and engaging with the stuff, but I actually hadn't read his book. And so uh Corey Manley, who some of you may recognize as a previous guest of this podcast, and he's also somebody who uh has donated to keep this podcast alive and has recently returned to his role at USA Swimming. So he's back working for USA Swimming. I think I believe his official title is Performance Scientist. We'll we'll make sure we get that right. If that's not right, Corey, when we have you on the following week. But Corey was talking about reading Christopher Henrickson's book, and I said, what if we both read it and then we talked about it on a podcast? Um as we record this, I'm recording this on Thursday, April 16th. The book is coming to me. I'm giving myself a week to read it. It's actually only 250 pages. Shouldn't be that hard to get through. But if you as a listener um want to get the book as well, um, I just ordered it off Amazon. I think you can get a Kindle copy of it for like $10. And uh it's presented in a pretty, I would say, friendly in terms of usability format, as far as I can tell. It's got like 10 sort of core recommendations in there. It's all you need to know about talent development. And um, so anyway, Corey and I are gonna talk about that. We're gonna have a lively discussion. I'm really looking forward to having him back on there. But as I was away, and travel is always really good. I uh people listen to this podcast probably think like, oh my gosh, Chris, you're somewhere every other week. I love to travel. I love to travel because it I find it really energizes me, especially intellectually. I just getting exposed to a different situation with different people, different culture. It makes me really think and reconsider a lot of stuff that I think about and and just approach it from a fresh perspective. So I was in Japan for a couple weeks, went all over the country, was in Tokyo for five days, was in a very rural part of Japan called Sato Island for three days. I was in a little little city, smaller city named Matsumoto, in the uh which is near Nagano, if people you know are thinking about uh the city that hosted the Olympics. It's uh up in the mountains, and then was in Nag Nagoya, which was I think the third largest city in Japan. So a pretty broad diversity of places over there. And um, you know, I think anybody who's traveled to that part of the world, you know that there is a very distinct culture. There's some really sort of distinct culture, cultural customs that go, uh, especially in Japan. And I was really struck by those. Uh as a as an American Dane, I think the thing that I was struck by more than anything else was the the sense of doing things, you know, not from the perspective of like, hey, what's directly good for me? What's the selfish thing to do? What is, you know, best for me as an individual, but like it's so obvious. I mean, especially when you just see the scale and the the I'm really thinking about the train travel and all the public transit and all that stuff. I mean, that stuff is impressive in Denmark, but it's on a completely other level when you get to Japan, and that requires a level of cooperation and a level of thinking that I'm going to contribute to something that is going to benefit everybody. And it may not be, you know, in the moment that it's being considered good for me, right? And so I've been thinking quite a bit about that. I'm not saying I came back with a perspective that all the focus on individuality and everything else that we have is is bad. I just saw how it could work in a very, very different way, and I found that very, very interesting. I want to talk about talent today because this is a subject that I think is very important for coaches to communicate really, really well around because it's on the mind of you as a coach. It's definitely occupying mental space of the athletes that you coach. And, you know, I want to talk specifically about two ways in which you can influence the way that you think about it and the way that the athletes you coach think about it in a in a very important direction. Because, like most things on the psychological side, I think that often as coaches, we leave some gaps and we leave things unsaid, we leave things uncommunicated about, or we only communicate about them in a reactive way, right, when we perceive those topics to be causing us a problem. And if you're not proactive in the way that you talk about talent, just like anything else, what people fill into those gaps, those gaps in communication, it's often just not very good, right? The the conversation can get really dysfunctional, it can get really toxic for the kids on your team, for the parents for sure, of kids on your team. And it can get even, I think it can get into some funky places for you as a coach as well, right? And so I want to talk about that. And I I want to talk about it in two different ways. So let me just preview the two sections essentially we're gonna have of this podcast. The first one is gonna talk about how I think you want to steer the conversation intentionally. That is, what do you really want to emphasize in the way that people talk about talent on your team? What do you want to promote? What do you want to, you know, feed in terms of the conversation? And then the second part is a more like real politique. Like, let's just acknowledge what people are going to be talking about anyway, you know, what where people's minds are going to be going, regardless of where you try to steer it, and then how you handle that. Because I think they're both important. I think you always want to have this effort to take the conversation in a direction that you want it to go. But I think you also have to have an acknowledgement of just like where people's natural pull into the conversation is, and then what you can do about that, because you're not gonna be able to avoid entirely being reactive. But if you give some thoughtfulness to how you're going to be reactive, how you're gonna respond when people try to pull that conversation back into an area that can go bad really fast. And so we're gonna cover both of those. So let's talk about first defining the conversation uh around talent on terms that you like as a coach. And I think before you even do that, it's important to have an idea of what the hell we're talking about when it comes to talent, because this is another one of those big words that gets thrown out there and people don't really know what it means. Or people, when you actually make them think about it for more than a second, actually think it means something quite different than they what they instinctually grab for. Okay. And I'm always a fan of making people think for more than a second. That's if you could like sum up my approach to almost everything, it's like make people think things through. Because often when they do that, they come up with something a lot better than what they draw from instinctually. So what is what is, you know, where do where do people go instinctually? I think people instinctually, um, and we'll we'll cover this in this in the second half, where they go instinctually is like, well, talent is this kind of like innate magic, you know, that determines basically how well you do, how how you perform, and sort of like the both the ceiling and floor of your performance. This is just this innate genetic pre you know predisposition to be a certain amount good at something. And I don't think that's entirely inaccurate, but I think if you think about it a little bit more, the way that I like to define talent is basically along these lines, and this starts to get into the way that I think you want to steer people to talk about. I think what people are really saying with that is you can have two athletes, and let's just say you control every variable that is going to influence their performance. Talent will be more or less kind of like a multiplier. So you can feed the same inputs into them to the extent that you could ever do that, which you can't, by the way. Important point to bring up. You can never people, again, we're bleeding into the second half of this conversation, but people will always want to say, like, oh, I'm, you know, I work so much harder than that person, or my inputs basically are better than that person, but they're faster than me. Very hard to tell, actually, whether or not that's true because there's so many things that go into influencing performance. Many, many more than any of us can actually really rationally grasp. But nevertheless, we have this perception that, like, okay, you have people and they take various actions that influence their performance, but the talent level means that for some people, those actions have a much bigger impact in terms of performance. And for some people, um, and we're talking about relative performance here, the relative performance is just not as fast. It's not as good, it's not at the same level, right? And so why I think that second conversation about sort of inputs and outputs is as important is because where you want to steer any conversation about talent on your team is away from this conversation around these innate qualities and into the things that people can influence, right? The controllables, for lack of a better term. The more that, I mean, and this goes back to something that has blown up um out of the positive psychology world, one of the original big, big, big, big, big picture concepts, and that's growth mindset, right? The whole idea behind growth mindset was if you have students, if you have athletes, if you have people that are focused on talents, as we've just defined it, as you know, these sort of innate fixed qualities that people have, they're likely to be much less motivated. Even, you know, if their their perception is really low, if their perception is really high of their innate ability, they're likely to be much less motivated to take those active steps that can actually influence their performance. Because why would you, right? If everything's more or less predetermined, the sort of thought process is, well, then why why put an effort in, right? Because it's not really going to matter whether or not I do it. I'm smart or I'm not. I'm talented at swimming or I'm not, and therefore, let me lay off it. So you you want to steer the conversation. And I I have a very basic way to do this that I've this is a story that I've told a number of times out in speaking engagements, out in um probably on this podcast. People who've been listening for a long time have heard this story before, but it's it's worth repeating. And I there's a very simple exercise. If you're a coach, you can do this with your team. I did this once on a training camp in Calleja, Spain. Beautiful, just outside of Barcelona. And I was there with my team in Denmark. We're pounding it out. Swimmers are really tired. I just thought, let's just take an hour and talk, you know, pool side. Let's have a conversation. I had a whiteboard and I said, I want to talk about talent. Let's let's discuss everything that you guys think is a part of how talented you are. What do you, what are you just name things. It's a very open-ended brainstorm. What do you think goes into how talented you are? We made this huge list. I mean, it must have been, I wish I had a picture of it, but like, you know, it's probably almost better that I don't. You you should do this on your team and see what kind of answers you come up with. Because I I bet on the open-ended of this question, people are going to come to a lot of the same areas. People were talking about, oh, you know, some people are just so smooth and controlled in the way that they swim. They just look graceful and beautiful, you know, and talking about sort of technical stuff and your ability to respond to training, to adapt to training, to recover from training, you know, obviously your physical dimensions of your body, right? How tall you are, how long your arms are, how long your legs are, your feet, etc., flexibility. So we had this long conversation with all these categories in it. And then I asked a second question, which I think is the really important question when it comes to this. I said, okay, but how many of these things can you not change about yourself? Right. So, like the way that you swim, the gracefulness with which you swim, the technique, the form, et cetera, can you change it? And everybody pretty much agreed that the answer was yes. And so then I said, So is it really just a fixed, innate quality that you have, or is it something that you can influence? And they all agreed that something that you can influence. We took it off the list for talent. And I think if you go back to the list of things I described, you can do the same for almost everything. Right? What can you not change? You can't really change the dimensions, you know, like can't change the length of your limbs, your height, etc. I keep on saying this, and you know, there's like these wacky things out there where people are doing limb lengthening surgeries and stuff. I don't think that you can like, you know, get two inches taller by breaking your femur and have that positively influence your athletic performance. So for the for the purposes of what we're talking about, you can't change those things. And I think that's really important conversation to have, that there's this long list of things that we may associate with talent. And those certainly, you know, there may be some in undefinable innate qualities that mean that certain people just kind of seem to develop a prettier form more easily, but that is something you can develop. And I think when you steer the conversation in that direction, when you talk about talent in a way that it's very obvious to people that there is something they can influence, that really changes the game. And I think that is where you want people focused, right? That is the essence of growth mindset. You want them to believe that the things that most of the things that go into whether or not they will grow and develop and get to the level that they want to get to are available to them, are things that they themselves can influence. And to the extent that you can get people thinking about that and steer them away, right, from that fixed perspective, I think it's gonna be very, very healthy for the way that, you know, potential and what you're capable of is discussed on your team. And from there, you know, I think you want to take the conversation as like, like, okay, so if we agree that technique is changeable, what can you do to influence your tech team? Right. Again, it's like sort of like these goal conversations. You agree that we can change that, you want to change that. What do you think is gonna change that? What actions can you take, right? Translate it into concrete actions that they can take that are within their control that can influence their development in those categories, right? And I, you know, you know me, I always like to go one layer deeper. So just gonna cover this briefly. But I think you want to develop and actually foster the underlying belief there, right? What do they believe that influencing those factors will do for them? Make that explicit for them. Because if you don't have an explicit conversation, that's where I think people end up getting demotivated because they're like, okay, yeah, I'm doing this and I have some sense that it's supposed to help me do better. But I actually don't really, I haven't developed that belief. And they're more likely to abandon those concepts when the chips don't fall the way that they want them to. And that's what you I mean, ultimately you don't want that, right? As a coach. That's just not that's not gonna be good for you. Okay. So let's, and I've been dying to get there, you know, because I'm just like anyone else. I feel a magnetic pull of where this conversation goes on talent. Let's talk about where people's minds really go and how to respond to that. And I think even before I say that, I just want to address too, just sort of a sound psychological concept that I find myself returning to time and time again, which is, you know, I think people come to me and they go, Chris, like, you know, positive psychology, let's let's talk about the, you know, ideal way to do things. What do you think is best, all of that. I think that's always worth having a conversation about. But then let's also just like, let's address reality. Let's address what people are really thinking about, what they're likely to really think about, and what you're probably not going to be able to get them to stop thinking about. Because if we don't do that, then we risk kind of like gaslighting our athletes and having them some sometimes be like, coach does not understand what I'm thinking about at all. Coach does not understand me. And when you lose touch of your athletes in that way, you come off as very unempathetic. They're less likely to engage in this conversation. You want to be in the conversation so you can counter some of their worst impulses when it comes to the way that they think about talent, but they're less likely to engage with you if you just seem like, you know, you're kind of in outer space and you don't understand, right? That's the that's the teenager's lament. You don't understand. Like my daughter's 12. I keep telling her that any day now she's gonna slam a door in my face and go, Dad, you just don't understand. That like seems to be a natural rite of passage for the teenage years. So, how do you talk about talent and and and the way people's minds go? And I I think this is something that is, I think, acutely going on right now. And I experienced it in my own home. I just referenced my daughter, but I I want to go back in time like three years ago. We're coming out of the three, four years, maybe it was four years ago. We were coming out of the pandemic. It's four years ago. And she's gonna swim summer league for the first time. And I was like, this is gonna be awesome. I mean, like, you know, I think anybody who's a swimming person listens to this and they know summer league is super fun. And so, like, how could somebody not want to do summer league? So I I had her in my car. Are you excited? You know, you're gonna do summer league the summer. She's like, Daddy, I don't want to do summer league. I was like, what? What do you mean? I've told this story before, right? What do you mean you don't want to do summer league? And she goes, I just don't want to. I mean, I I guess I'll I'll go to the practices, but I don't want to go into any any of the competitions. And I was like, why wouldn't you want to go to the competition? She goes, Well, everybody else is gonna beat me. And that that was like, you know, you can see, I I I hope everybody in this podcast is picturing, you know, the amount of gears that were churning in my mind as I'm like, oh my God, you know, this is my kid, right? This is extra real now. This is my kid basically looking at this and going, like, well, if I'm not the best, if I'm not, you know, instantly good, then why even try, right? And and I I bring that story up because I think my perception is that this is more acutely felt at this moment, that there are more young people who are actually thinking about talent in this way, thinking calculating at a younger age their ability level versus other people, and calculating in a way like, is it worth putting in my effort to what I'm doing while, you know, potentially I just won't be that good or whatever that means to them, or I won't be the best, right? And I mean, what we're really talking about here is comparison, right? And I I I think it's I I think it's important to acknowledge that we're talking about comparison because I think we all have a sense that things can go wrong with comparison, but I I also think it's one of those things it's very human, very instinctual. You're not gonna get away from comparing yourself to other people. You can get better at reacting to the way that kind of instinctual comparison makes you feel. I mean, I was talking to a coach about this yesterday. I have a tendency when I meet somebody new in the coaching world to really elevate them almost onto a pedestal. So I like pump them up in my own mind, right? And then inevitably I find some way to like severely chop them down. Uh so I've started to try to stop doing that, right? Because it's just too much in either direction. I start to look at people, and as I'm starting to pump them up, I'm just trying to be like, what do I admire about this person? What do I think I can learn from this person? Right. Well, acknowledging like they're not perfect, they're not right about everything, they're not, you know, the smartest, the best, they're just an another coach. And then I don't feel the need to like have this drastic sort of overcorrection on the other side, and I can just be fair to people from the beginning. Right. That's sort of one way to learn to approach the way that you end up feeling when you compare yourself to other people. Um and so I think it's important to acknowledge that talent does dictate quite a bit on how well people perform. It does. There's there's no getting around that. As much as we can tell people that we want them to focus on the controllables, talent plays a huge role. And there's a couple of ways that I just think it's being intellectually honest to acknowledge that this plays out. One of them is people who follow me extra hard on social media probably know I've been mixing it up a little bit with people recently in various spaces, a little bit on the training end of things. I think one of the reasons why we have so many elite athletes training in quite diverse ways is because it actually doesn't matter that much. As much as we think. I shouldn't say that much. It does matter, but doesn't matter as much as we think. The training. Put another way, again, if we come back to that definition of talent on these inputs and the outputs in terms of performance. The inputs do influence the outputs in terms of performance, but they're not like a hundred percent determinative. So I think we have this focus on training because it's an input that we can wrap our minds around rationally. It's it, you know, you can take an averagely talented person and train them perfectly, but they're not going to be an Olympian. I'm sorry. If you if you thought that coming into this podcast, I think most people don't, but if you thought that, I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news, that's just not true. And what's probably more true is that I think the range is, and this is just me guesstimating, is probably more closely to like if you took, you know, a top, top, top, top percentile talent and train them like an absolute, like you're just your preparation with them and their preparation of themselves was just absolutely catastrophic. So you're talking about like gold medal level talent and you just do everything wrong with them, they'd probably still go to Olympic trials. Right. So we have a sport where we have time standards, so it's like very easy to sort of block people in. I think if you really were just like completely moronic in the way that you prepared them, they'd still be pretty darn fast. And conversely, right, if you took somebody who, you know, maybe with average preparation, they'd be a senior champ level swimmer, right, at your at your local, at your LSC, your local swimming committee, and you trained them amazingly, you could maybe get them up to a national level. You could get them to a futures championship or something. You could maybe sort of like move them up a category, but that's probably about it. And so I think it's important to acknowledge that because, you know, sometimes I think what athletes have internalized, and this comes back to where growth mindset can go really wrong, is we are focused so much on the controllables that sometimes I think what we're communicating to them is like if you do everything right, anything is possible for you. It's not true. It's not something probably better than than they can imagine is possible for them. I think something well better than what they're doing right now is possible for them, but it's not anything. It's not gonna be, it's not gonna be just unlimited, right? There's there's reality is gonna kick in at some point. And I think this is one of the things in the positive psychology community we've discussed a lot in terms of growth mindset. I think the concept is really, really sound. I think when it's really, when it's well applied, it can have amazing impact. I think when it's sloppily applied or sort of not fully understood, it can end up being kind of detrimental because what you're gonna have with some athletes is if you're just focused on controlling controlables and anything's possible and all that, and jazzing them up on that, when they're not when they're working their ass off and they're really just crazy diligent, and they're not even sniffing, you know, a junior national cut, just to make an example, you risk them internalizing like it's because I'm actually not and that is not what you want them to learn, because that's where people burn out and and and leave and become so perfectionistic and relentlessly self-critical that they just sort of internally combine. You wanna uh save some space for reality, for talk about talent. And I think it goes both ways. I think, by the way, we just talked about that end of it, but I think it's important to have the conversation on the other end. A lot of people shy away from this. A lot of people shy away from telling people where their potential is because, you know, they believe that that puts pressure on an athlete. And I want to acknowledge that that is absolutely true, right? I mean, it I have seen it go wrong where, you know, coach just wants to communicate, you know, I think you're capable of X and Y and Z, an athlete all they hear is I expect you to do X and Y and Z. Or else I still you guys know me, I still think I don't think you should take that off the table. I'll give you an example of one time in my recent history uh when I just went for broke and I feel like it's paid off. So I could I can talk about it now. Um you guys have been listening here a long time know that I worked with Princeton University a few years ago, and I can say categorically, the athlete who interacted with me the most, who I think was the most eager about trying to pick things up to get better, Mitchell shot. That's not a surprise. I mean, if you've been following NCAA swimming, you know that Mitchell has done amazing things for Princeton. But I remember I had a conversation with him, this was like a couple years ago, when he had yet to be, I don't think he had qualified for an NCAA championships. Matt Crispino listens to this podcast, can correct me if I'm wrong on that. And I was like, Mitch, like I've been watching you swim, and I think that if you really develop what you're doing, you can beat anybody, like anybody. I'm talking anybody in the entire world. That's your ceiling. And I think I just had a perception that, you know, that Mitch to a certain extent was thinking about that and just acknowledging that, okay, was healthy for him because it allow it gave him the ability to talk about it, right? It it gave him the because that is, yeah. Does that transfer a lot of pressure? I would, I would feel some pressure if I was walking around knowing I could be one of the best in the world. But again, if we just pretend that's not true, are we really doing a service to the athletes that we coach? Are we really helping them because telling the truth about something might, you know, might have a negative impact on them? Or should we figure out how to tell them the truth and make it work? I'm always a fan of the latter, right? Figure out a way to tell the truth and make it work. And I think I delivered that and it was right back to a conversation of, but you're not that person right now. And so let's actually have a conversation about what you can do to get to the point where that's possible in the moment. All right, that's where we're gonna wrap this one on talent. I hope that you guys are enjoying listening to the solo podcast. I hope you're also ready to come back with some guests. We got some great guests coming up. Corey Manley, as we referenced, uh, is on the calendar. James Marshall, who is somebody that I've been working with with some of the stuff that I've done with Gain, a fellow Nassim Talib enjoyer. If you guys love the works of the inserto, if you love the works of Naseem Talib, you're gonna love my podcast. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, get out there and read Antifragile by Nassim Talib. It'll change your life. Okay. Or just listen to the podcast and hope that you get a sense of what he was talking about. One of the most influential books I've ever read. And James's gonna come on. He's doing all really, some really cool stuff in terms of coach's education and gain and all that stuff. So I'm looking forward to having him as well. And then the return of an old friend of the podcast, and I don't mean to, I'm not picking on him for his age. I'm just saying he's been, he's an OG. He's been in on the swim brief podcast for a very long time. Used to be a uh sponsor of the podcast, and I don't think I've ever acknowledged that. But Kyle Johnson, and if you don't know who that is, you really should listen to the podcast. Kyle is an incredible coach, somebody that, you know, I think once you listen to him for five minutes, you're gonna go like, we need to have this guy on board. Because I'm gonna pick a few things up. So everybody look forward to those. Thank you so much for listening. Thanks for following. Thank you for all the positive vibes you guys have been sending my way. I really, really appreciate it. And I'll be back with you guys again in a week.