Ten Second Coaching.

By Wayne Goldsmith Three important messages: * Nobody consumes anything in long form any more, including your players. * Connect, Engage, Inspire - ten seconds each and all three fit in half a minute. * Twenty athletes. Twenty minutes across a week. That’s the whole job. In the distant past, coaches would get a group of young athletes together and run a “motivation” session for forty-five minutes to an hour. Stories about the greats of the sport. An old player invited in to talk about the good old days. Somebody successful from another team or sport talking about what it took for them to get to the top. And the players sat there. For an hour. Then the coach would say - “well, that just goes to show anyone can do it”. There was nothing wrong with it. It was how we all connected and communicated. Times have changed. Nobody watches the whole game any more: Think about the world we actually live in now. When we were growing up we sat and watched an entire game. Football, basketball, rugby, cricket, baseball. The whole thing from start to finish with our parents or our mates. Look at how sport gets consumed today - by kids and by adults. One-minute highlights. Three-minute highlights. Even the extended highlights package is ten to fifteen minutes at most. We’re consuming what we love about sport in smaller and smaller pieces. That’s not a moral failing. It’s just the environment we coach in. One Video, One Minute, One Message: I was talking to a colleague who works in supermarkets and I asked how she trains her casual staff. She gave me a line that I haven’t been able to shake. One video. One minute. One message. She said there’s simply no point running fifteen-minute or half-hour sessions on how to pack shelves or connect with customers. Her staff are young and there are a lot of them. She has to land it in about a minute or it doesn’t land at all. I walked away thinking - she’s right. And we’re in exactly the same business. Ten Minutes: the meeting rule that makes clubs flip out: When professional football teams bring me in, one of the first things I tell them is to cut their team meetings to a maximum of ten minutes. Ten minutes for everything…. Head coach feedback, assistant coach comments, analysts, manager, captain’s talk, general business, travel information: All of it. Ten minutes. Max. And they flip out. Because they’re used to having a captive room for an hour. All of your information is important. I get it. It’s critical to what the team is doing. But your average professional player is somewhere between eighteen and thirty years of age and they will not give you an hour. They won’t give you forty-five minutes, or thirty, or even twenty. They want the “highlights package” of what you’ve got. They don’t want the whole game. Ten Second Coaching: three moves, ten seconds each: Connect, Engage, Inspire. Think of coaching like TIK TOK. Can you make a point, can you deliver a message, can you coach a player in less than a minute? You can: It’s called Connect, Engage, Inspire. Connect - ten seconds. Use their name and step towards them. “G’day Bill. Good to see you. How are you today?” I’ve said your name. I’m looking at you. I’ve stepped towards you. Everything about that says - “I’m here, I know who you are and right now you are the only person in the world who matters to me”. That’s the easy one but almost nobody does it deliberately. Engage - ten seconds. Ask a question. “I was watching your play on the video the other day. When you go left - why do you do it that way? What would happen if you went right there instead?” A question engages the problem-solving part of their brain. I’m coaching with them, not at them. And when they solve it, they own the solution - which means they’ll take responsibility for executing it at training and on game day. Inspire - ten seconds. You may be the only person in that kid’s life who says anything positive to them. The only one who says “I believe in you. I believe you can do anything”. Ten seconds. That’s all it takes to be that person. Thirty Second Coaching: what it actually sounds like: “Hi Susan. Great to see you training this afternoon. How was school?” Not bad, coach. How are you going? “I’m great - thanks. Listen - I was watching the game video the other day. You know when you take that long shot. I love the way you take it from deep. I had an idea though - what do you think would happen if you took it a little wider instead of where you usually take it? What do you think?” Athlete replies - coach listens. “Interesting. Interesting. Do you think we could work on that this afternoon? I think it’s really going to benefit you. I think it’d make a big impact. What do you think?” Yeah. Yeah. “But your shooting is amazing. I love the way you shoot. And it lifts the whole team - when you score from that far out, man, I love it. Keep up that fantastic work.” That’s Ten Second Coaching. I connected with the athlete. I asked her something that made her think - something that could make her better - a problem she could solve. I left her with a “wow you’re amazing - I believe in you”. My friends - that’s where coaching is now. Summary: Think about what this means. Twenty kids in your team - all you need is twenty minutes across everything you’ve already got planned this week. You don’t need extra time. You need a different plan for the time you’ve already got. We can spend our energy trying to drag the world back to the one-hour team talk Or we can be smart, adapt and coach in the world our athletes are actually living in. Connect. Engage. Inspire. Ten seconds each. You can change the life of an athlete in your team in thirty seconds: I promise you that. Three Practical Applications For Your Coaching: * Cut your next team meeting to ten minutes. Everything - coaches, analysts, captain, travel, general business. You’ll find out fast how much of that hour was habit rather than quality information. * Run the maths on your own squad. Can you find one minute for each of the players in your team this week to connect, engage and inspire? * Practise the step-towards. Name, eye contact, one step forward. It’s the smallest thing in this entire post and it’s the one that changes how a kid feels about walking in the gate. Let me know how you go with Ten Second Coaching - and with changing the way you connect, engage and inspire. Thanks for reading, listening and watching. Wayne Wayne works with professional teams, clubs, federations and schools on coach development and communication - and mentors a small number of coaches each year. [email protected] Further reading: The Coaching Course Sport Needs Now - https://coachwayne.gumroad.com/l/coachingcoursenow. For sporting parents: Raising Athletes - https://coachwayne.gumroad.com/l/raisingathletes This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit waynegoldsmith.substack.com/subscribe