Coaching Good Habits

Coaches are in the business of teaching good habits. Both in your specific sport and life on the whole.

In volleyball, we coaches are constantly harping on athletes to get their feet to the ball, to angle their shoulders to target, or to extend their transition further pst the 10 foot line. All of these skills could also be described as habits.

It takes around 21 days to form a new habit, and around 66 days for it to become automatic (source). Therefore it is useful to think of your training blocks in 2-month increments. What habits do you want your athletes (or your coaching staff) to have at the end of 60+ days?

Most of the time, coaches are able to pinpoint the 3-4 skills or scenarios that they need to focus on with their teams and then practice plan around them.

When it comes to identifying ‘life habits’, it usually becomes more of a grey area. It becomes even more grey area when it comes to establishing how to teach and enforce those life habits expectations.

Here are some simple “life habits” and how we can train them in our gyms:

• Punctuality: helping athletes understand the importance of knowing their calendar, getting out the door on time, and arriving to their commitment early.
  • Establish the expectation on when athletes should arrive as well as what the consequence is for being late (have the team choose the consequence- most of my teams choose 1-2 liners)
• Growth Mindset: our job is to push athletes to the edge of their comfort level. This means that they will fail often. We have to instill the confidence and trust that failure converts to progress in the long run.
  • Look for body language cues from our athletes (eye rolls, head down, sighs of frustration, etc) and have individual conversations when noticed. Affirm your athletes that this is part of the progress and clarify any questions they may have about the skill or drill you are performing.
• Interpersonal Communication: whenever you form a team, you are going to have a mix of personality types. Our athletes need to learn how to work with a variety of people (extroverted, introverted, stoic, emotional, etc).
  • This is more art, than science but be on the lookout for red flags in communication. One of my personal favorites to identify is when teammates walk away from each other after an error.

Tips and Tricks for Habit Formation:

1. Write the habit down. The simple act of putting pen to paper makes it more likely that you will accomplish your goal. In David Goggins “Can’t Hurt Me” he discussed the idea of the Accountability Mirror. He would write all of his goals and daily habits down on post it notes and put them on his bathroom mirror for him to see first thing in the morning and last thing at night. If he didn’t complete one of those tasks, he had to look himself in the eye.
2. Start simple. If you are trying to learn to meditate, don’t start by saying i will mediate 1-hour a day. Start by saying I will meditate 1-minute a day. The human brain is wired to reward success, so let yourself be successful in the formation of a new habit. You can always add time (aka difficulty) later on.
3. Assign accountability partners. Have your players team up

 

Best of luck instilling those winning habits!