This article was provided Coaches Network

By Dr. David Hoch, CMAA, CIC

In my senior year of college, I interviewed for several prospective teaching positions. At the end of each interview, the person conducting the session—usually an assistant superintendent or principal—asked if I had any questions. I always did: “What are the chances of coaching at your school?”

When I heard that one school needed coaches in every sport, I immediately accepted its job offer. Initially, I coached the freshman basketball team. The following year I moved into the junior varsity position. Halfway through my first j.v. season, the head coach asked me, “Where would you like to be in 15 years?”

At 23 years old, the thought had never occurred to me, and I stuttered, “I coach soccer, I’m your j.v. basketball coach, in the spring I coach tennis, and I teach five classes a day. I love it. I’m extremely happy.”

He responded. “I didn’t ask if you were happy. I asked where you would like to be professionally in 15 years. See, in order to reach a goal or career objective, you have to take concrete steps to build credentials in order to get to your desired position. It doesn’t happen by accident. So, where would you like to be?”

Since I didn’t have a ready answer, the head coach dropped the subject. However, a few weeks later he repeated the question. This time, I muddled out, “I might like to be a head men’s basketball coach on the college level one day.”

“Good,” he replied. “Now, what steps are you going to take to get there? Being my j.v. coach isn’t going to get you to your goal.”

This was my first exposure to a mentor. I had no idea what the concept involved prior to that interaction. As I went through my career, I had two additional, extremely helpful individuals serve as mentors. They were invaluable to my professional growth.

While some mentors may simply “appear” in your life, there may be others whom you have to seek out. The following thoughts should help you find your next career guide.

Keep your eyes open. Learn to spot the coaches or teachers in your school or in neighboring districts who have a wealth of knowledge, experience, and wisdom. These individuals are usually very easy to recognize. They may not have a title, but everyone gravitates to them and seeks their subtle, sound advice. Get in line and ask them to help you.

Be open minded. Stay receptive to ideas and advice. While it is good to have your own ideas, you can learn a lot by listening. You don’t always have to follow the advice you receive, but at least be willing to consider ideas and suggestions. Take advantage of the experience and perspective of others and, in doing so, you may proceed more quickly and without encountering as many obstacles.

Look beyond your circle. Venture outside your specific sport for advice and help. For ideas on sport-specific skills, drills, and practice organization, coaches within your sport can be extremely helpful and should be consulted. But on a broader topic like your professional career, reaching beyond your individual sport makes sense because you will be expanding the number of potential mentors.

Increase your odds. Join professional organizations, such as your state coaches’ association, and attend their annual conferences. When you do, you will come into contact with others in your sport and in athletics in general who may be able to point you in the right direction. Your next mentor may be the individual sitting next to you at a session or someone you meet at lunch.

Show gratitude. Always thank anyone who is willing to help you determine and move toward your career goals. This person has his or her own life and responsibilities. By giving time and energy to help you with your future, a mentor is providing a gift and making a sacrifice.

And of course, as you progress in your career, don’t forget to reach out and be a mentor to the next batch of new, inexperienced coaches. Giving back is a privilege and an important part of the job for any professional.

David Hoch retired in 2010 after a 41-year career as a high school athletic director and coach. In 2009, Dr. Hoch was honored as the Eastern District Athletic Director of the Year by the National Association for Sport and Physical Education. He was also presented with the National Interscholastic Athletic Administrators Association Distinguished Service Award, and in 2000 he was named the Maryland State Athletic Director Association’s Athletic Director of the Year. Dr. Hoch has authored over 460 professional articles and made more than 70 presentations around the country. He welcomes comments and questions and can be reached at: davidhochretad@gmail.com.

This article was provided by Busy.Coach, a great source of ideas for the coach that want to improve their productivity

By Mandy Green

So as you are headed back to work after the holiday break, hopefully you have already set up your plan of attack.  Are you ready to have the best year, best month, best week, and best day ever with your program, recruiting, and career as a coach?

If your response to that sentence was, “yeah right, I wish,” I imagine that last school year was filled with people, texts, emails, and voice messages begging for your time, attention, and energy.

As you look back over this past year, would you say that you had more wins or losses for you each day work wise?  By winning, I mean did walk into your office with a plan and then you dominated your day by actually getting your most important work done?  I would consider the day a loss if you found yourself giving your time, attention, and energy away freely to anybody who asked for it.  And then before you knew it, your days were gone and you had no sense of accomplishment or progress.

If you are finding that more often than not, your days were on the frustrating side because you didn’t feel like you made any significant progress towards your vision and goals, it goes back at some point to how you are prioritizing things during those days.

How have you been doing in this department? Really think about it. Do you feel like you are proactive and in control of your days or do you just wake up and respond to everybody all day? Obviously as coaches, we have to be available to our team, staff, administration, and recruits, but not as much as you may think or are currently doing.

Today I want to teach you one new way to think about your prioritization. When you do a better job of prioritizing things, I know that you will find that you will start having more wins than losses day by day.

Stop prioritizing the easy.  You know if you are guilty of prioritizing easy if your day feels like there is a whole lot of busy work but you don’t feel as if you’re spending a significant amount of time on work that can make your program better.  I’m sure that you probably intended to do a significant amount of high priority work before you got in the office.  But you think that to get a great start to the day and to build some momentum, you will just get some of the easy things off of your to-list. And then what tends to happen is that you never ever really get around to doing work that will really move the needle for your program.

Coach, you set up your day.  You can choose to do things first that will make a real difference in your program and could change your program for the better in a significant way.  Sure, those other things need to get done.  But choose to do them only after you have spent at least 90 minutes on high priority things.

Stop prioritizing easy, “prioritize progress”.  Things that matter to your program. When you are planning your day, ask yourself, what 3 things must happen today that will get me some real movement forward? I want you to take on something hard every single day. If you do that you will start to find yourself getting a little bit more confident, more momentum, and more into that space where you’ll feel like you are doing things you were meant to do.

For more great ideas to improve your productivity visit Busy.Coach

This article is also posted on The Coaches Toolbox

The BIG TIME is not a place; it’s the state of your heart. It’s not something you get; it’s something you become.

Book Notes by Bert DeSalvo

Each one of the concepts is like a game piece, and when we move them with a purpose, THE BIG TIME will suddenly appear. Just knowing about them has no real pay value. The key is in understanding and believing in them, for this is what motivates us to put them all together and use them.

**The BIG TIME is not something you get – it’s something you become.

The put-up game, just like a football game, takes practice – the right kind of practice. Put-ups, just like anything else, have to be learned; they have to become habit – they don’t just happen. Can be verbal, thumbs up, high five, hug, nod, smile, notes, etc. Put-downs are all around us and we can become involved in them just by association. This game actually reflects a person’s own self-centeredness and inadequacies without his even being aware of it. It can easily become a self-fulfilling prophecy: By putting others down, we end up putting ourselves down. Criticism and negative put-downs become steel habits which can turn into cynicism.

It starts with those innermost feeling in your heart that actually transforms your mind. This in turn affects your actions, and it makes all the difference in the world in the way you live each day of your life, regardless of your passion.

The BIG TIME is not a place; it’s the state of your heart. It’s not something you get; it’s something you become.

Many people in our society get caught up in “#1 or No One” mindset

“A mindset of this type sees only the outcome as important – the process has to be endured.”
– Compare themselves to others
– Always have to prove themselves superior to feel secure and successful
– Tension and pressure are often present
– Fear of failure is their primary motivator

If all we do is endure or tolerate the trip to a so-called destination, we’ve really missed the boat. A better way to put it is: We’re on the boat, but we are seasick most of the time.

Potential – ‘ I can be’ zone
Performance – ‘I am’ zone

DO THESE TO CLOSE THE “GAP”!
G = Goal-sets that motivate and challenge us
A = Attitude which is our self-fulfilling prophecy for whether we think we can or think we can’t, we’re usually right
P = Perseverance which develops mental toughness and builds our character

True fulfillment of the competitive experience: bringing out the best in ourselves and others. That’s what MTBTWYA is all about.

Three-Sided Coin
The EDGE is what makes the difference in your performance in any walk of life.

Side 1 – “Best”
– Being the best
– Comparison game,
– Lose ‘the edge’ on this side

Side 2 – “Doing our best”
– Focus on ourselves
– Not concerned with winning,
– “Aim before we fire”

Side 3 – “Giving it our best shot”

– When we concentrate on giving it our best shot, we just reload and keep aiming and firing, while adjusting and adapting ourselves to each changing situation. “When we really learn to enjoy the process of giving it our BEST SHOT in all that we do – we raise the chances of DOING OUR BEST more often. This can directly result in our BEING THE BEST some of the time. That’s what the three-sided coin is all about.

Success Road is based on the trip and the quality of living, not on the destination. It doesn’t focus on the regrets of yesterday or the fears of tomorrow but on the moment-by-moment, day-by-day trip that exposes the excitement and joy in the natural highs of many ordinary things in our daily life.

IMPORTANT TO HAVE GOALS, BUT CAN CHANGE THEM DURING THE TRIP

The goal is not at the end of the story: the goal is the road.

ADJUSTING – ADAPTING – ADVENTURING
HAVE A GOOD DAY – Thermometer – Affected by external changes no control
LEARN TO ‘MAKE IT A GOOD DAY – Thermostat – We set the dial We control it!

This shows what happens when you feel good about yourself – you are willing to take some risks and give it your best shot in all that you do.”

Baseball hitting percentage analogy:
.250 vs. .330 just a 1 hit difference per week for 162 games
The longer they play, the bigger that gap gets.

With concentrated focus we can get that one one extra effort, one extra struggle, one extra anything – and up goes our average.

Sharing pride vs. Selfish pride

Sharing pride – “It’s a special quality that brings out that inner drive and motivates us to give the extra effort to make things happen. This creates an atmosphere of confidence that is contagious.

MAGIC – “Make a Greater Individual Commitment”

Character: Our Best Piece of Equipment

3 forms of Motivation

1. Fear – “The floggings will continue until morale improves.”
a. Produces quick results but soon loses its effectiveness
b. Motivates from outside rather than from withing

2. Incentive – “Carrot on the stick”
a. Produces but eventually mediocrity will set in when people are doing
the right things for the wrong reasons

3. Love – Strongest form of motivation; Genuine unselfish love; No fear – Brings out the best in ourselves. The true joy of having is in SHARING.

When you do Make The Big Time Where You Are – IT’S NOT A PLACE, IT’S NOT THE STATE OF YOUR MIND – IT’S THE STATE OF YOUR HEART.”

This post provided by Busy.Coach

Coaches often have a handful of great ideas about how to improve their program. For many coaches it is difficult to put those ideas into action. Here are some thoughts getting better at following through.

By Mandy Green

I just finished up speaking at the United Soccer Coaches Association National Soccer Convention.

A big thing that coaches were talking to me about this weekend is that they always have a lot of new ideas for how they can work better, but after the initial excitement wears off, they struggle to follow through and take action.

Although you start the day with the best of intentions, of course, you know what happens right? Life throws you a curveball. Maybe an administrator, another coach or somebody on your team stops by for an unexpected conversation.

Or maybe even for you, an addiction to distraction kicks in. Sorry if this sounds a little harsh, but coach, when you allow yourself to get distracted for long enough, you’ve essentially trained your brain to underperform. As a result, you likely struggle from a lack of focus, perhaps an inability to concentrate for long periods of time, and this near constant feeling of being totally overworked and overstretched and overcommitted.

But here’s the deal: if you want to create and contribute and experience extraordinary things in this life — and I believe you do because you are reading this newsletter — then you have to buck the status quo. You have to break cycle of these addictions and really push back against all these other distractions. You need to develop an unshakable ability to follow through on what is most important to YOU.

I mean, just think about it. When was the last time that you really completed a goal that truly mattered to you? When was the last time you set an important goal and you made it happen? I mean, doesn’t it just feel GREAT to check something off your list or complete an important project or say that something is finally DONE?

You see … no matter how enthusiastic we are at the beginning of any new day or with each new project, there’s one crucial habit that makes all the difference in the world: follow-through. And the ability to finish what we start.

As I continue to try to help you decide what’s most important, then to eliminate what’s not important, and to make doing the work that you need to do as effortless as possible, I can tell you without hesitation that THIS ability — the ability to focus on what matters, to finish what you start — has been invaluable to me as a coach, as a business owner … and quite frankly, as a human.

From my own experience, I have found that there are two big problems that get in our way of following through:

First, most of us are working on way too many things at once. We allow ourselves to be pulled in too many directions. Instead of making meaningful progress on a single project that really, really matters, we wind up feeling constantly overloaded and overstretched and get stuck doing maintenance tasks all day.

Now the second problem? Oftentimes we are fuzzy about our outcome. Meaning, most of the time, we’re just working hard and trying to keep our heads above water without a clearly defined, achievable result that we’re working towards.

The good news here is we have the power to fix both of these problems. And when we do, we gain some serious momentum and we train ourselves to become masters of follow-through.

So the very first step is this: we must decide.

Meaning, DECIDE what’s truly most important. And, to be clear — I’m not talking about several things here, I’m talking about choosing just ONE thing. One TOP priority. One single goal.

For you to develop the habit of finishing what you start – you’ve got to be willing to choose ONE important goal or ONE project that you want to get done.

Did you know that the word “decide” comes from the Latin word, “decidere,” which means “to cut off”? So when you decide on one thing, you cut yourself off from everything else except from that which you’ve said is most important.

As it is Sunday and you are hopefully preparing for kicking ass in the office this week, I want you to think about this question: What’s one thing you could focus on (a single project or goal) that, if you finished it, would make a tremendous positive impact on your program and life?

If you’re having trouble committing to JUST one thing, if you’re unwilling to commit to one thing, I want you to remember this: you’re most likely going to be distracted by EVERYTHING.

Shut off your phone, close email and eliminate all distractions. Have a great week!

If you want to challenge yourself to a Busy Coach 30 Day Productivity Challenge this month, go here to get the details.

Email me at mandy@busy.coach.com to let me know how it goes for you. I love hearing all of your success stories of how this is working for you!!!!!

If you are interested in having me help you get your program and staff organized and firing on all cylinders this year, email me at mandy@busy.coach.

Win the day!

What if you planned your entire day the same way you planned workouts? What if you planned your day so that there was no wasted time and you stayed focused on the things that mattered? The answer is that you would be more productive.

This post was provided by Busy.Coach a site designed to help coaches be more productive

By Mandy Green

I am speaking in a few weeks to all of the amazing coaches who will be at Camp Elevate.  As I am preparing my Time Management 101 speech, I am remembering a conversation that I had with a coach while we were out recruiting a few weeks ago.

It went something like this. “Mandy, I know that I am stressed, overwhelmed, busy doing random stuff all day, and not making the progress I want with my program.   I know I need to manage my time better and get organized, but I don’t even know where to begin.”

My response to this coach was that I believe all coaches need to approach time management in exactly the same way that they approach their practices.

For a typical practice:

1. Every minute of practice is accounted for and no time is wasted.
2. Everything is proactively planned in advance and organized.
3. Top priorities to work on take up the majority of practice and are worked on first.
4. Tasks have been delegated to other coaches based on their strengths.
5. There are water breaks in between activities.
6. Whistles or horns sound when it is time to move onto the next stage of practice
7. Coaches reflect after practice is done on what went well and what didn’t so they can make tomorrow better.

BUT, for some reason when it comes to getting work done in the office, a lot of coaches just simply go into their office with no plan, react to everything around them, take no scheduled breaks, and choose to do whatever grabs their attention next until it is time to leave the office! Doing things this way is very inefficient and a lot of time is wasted.  And worst of all, no progress is made towards building the program of your dreams!!

The more structure you have during your work time means you get more work done.  It means you get further ahead with your program.  It means you have to work less outside of your work time.

Ok, let’s plan your day in the office tomorrow just like you would plan practice.

When you start planning your day in the office, just like you would when planning practices for your team, make sure to strategically think about and write down what you could do during the day to move your program forward.

1. Plan everything in advance the day or night before. While there are exceptions to the rule, generally you can’t expect to just show up for practice with no plan of what you are going to do for the day and have it be a good productive practice.  The same holds true for the office.  Write down on a master to-do list all of the tasks you need to get done the next day.
2. Then decide which of those tasks that need to get done are the most important for moving your program forward and then schedule them into your calendar. Everything else can wait.
3. Coaches tend to set up their practices by doing their most important drills when they know their team is focused and has the best energy. Do the same for your most important work in the office and you will produce higher quality work in a shorter amount of time.
4. When a time limit is put on a drill, it creates urgency for coaches so they will work like crazy to get as much productive stuff done with their team in the time allotted. Like you do for your drills at practice, schedule all office tasks in 15, 30, 60, or 90 minute intervals and then keep to the clock.
5. How much more do you accomplish with your teams when they are paying attention and putting all of their focus and energy into what you are working on in practice?  The same holds true for getting stuff done in the office. The quality of your work declines and the time it takes to get tasks done increases when you not 100% focused on the task at hand.
6. Avoid multi-tasking. You would never jump from drill to drill as new drills pop into your head.  Once you start working on something in the office, continue to work on only that task until it is finished.

I could go on and on but you get the idea.

For you coach, once your to-do list is organized based on your goals and vision for your program, it becomes a map to guide you from morning to evening in the most effective and efficient way. This guide tells you what you have to do. It also helps you decide what is urgent and what is not, saving you a lot of time.  Time that you might have otherwise wasted on less important busy-work that isn’t necessarily going to move your program forward.