Coaching Up! Inspiring Peak Performance When It Matters Most

Jordan Fliegel, Kathleen Landis Lancaster

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781119231110
• eBook ISBN: 9781119231134
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Development
• Index: Business

Connect, engage, motivate, and inspire using top coaching techniques

Coaching Up! is about inspiring those who matter to you to achieve peak performance. Whether you are a coach, a business leader, a civic activist, a teacher, a counselor, or a parent, this book will offer you a powerful, highly effective way to connect to the people you care about and move them forward toward their best selves. In sports, coaches have developed ways of connecting with their players quickly in the "heat of the battle, " inspiring them to perform to their fullest potential and "leave it all on the field." Interestingly, although these techniques have not been codified, great coaches have independently developed remarkably similar models. This book aligns these techniques and distills their essence into a fundamental skill set that anyone can use to connect with, support, and inspire his or her colleagues, teammates, friends, and family members. At its foundation, great coaching is based on a solid set of techniques that can be applied to all areas of life. Essentially, those skills boil down to forging authentic connections, providing genuine support, and offering concise direction.

While our everyday pressures may be less intense than those of a championship, the long-term game is even more important. Why not borrow from the best to develop the skills and abilities to win every day?

• Inspire and motivate people to higher performance
• Improve communication in high-stakes situations
• Be more effective both professionally and socially

Getting inside the way great coaching works gives you an unparalleled glimpse at the core of inspiration. A great coach can make the difference between a mediocre player and a world champion. What would that difference look like if you could inspire every colleague in your business? Everyone who matters to you in your personal life? You can be the source of empowerment and motivation that helps the people around you reach higher, go further, and achieve more. Coaching Up! gives you the game plan—and shows you how to run the plays.

1
How the Coaching Up Model Works

“Whether the manager likes it or not, creating great relationships is how careers are built, how businesses are built, and how great teams are built.”

—Steve Chandler and Scott Richardson, 100 Ways to Motivate Others: How Great Leaders Can Produce Insane Results Without Driving People Crazy

The world is awash in clutter. Our brains are being shaped by the media. Attention spans are shrinking. Videos are getting shorter. Nobody wants to read a long e-mail message, let alone write one. Fewer and fewer people even communicate in whole sentences. (Noticed that? Right!) There's a lot of noise out there. How do you cut through the noise to deliver a critically important message—fast? How do you reach somebody with a transformative, inspiring message in a crunch?

The answer—based on my broad and deep experience as a basketball player who has had many coaches at the high school, collegiate, and professional levels, and as a coach who has coached teams and worked one-on-one and in small groups with basketball players for over a decade—is the very simple process I am calling the Coaching Up Model. Sometimes that model encompasses the full span of an ongoing relationship; at other times, it takes the form of a compact conversation. Here's an example of the conversation.

An Actual Coaching Up Conversation

Let's imagine that you are the trainer/coach for a young heavyweight boxer, who, after just a few months of training, has signed up for his first real match. The match begins. At the end of the first round your boxer emerges from a slugfest in which neither he nor his opponent has gained the upper hand. He returns to his corner for a 1-minute rest before heading out for the second round. He's winded, his legs are tired, the crowd is hostile, his left wrist is throbbing, and he isn't sure whether he will survive the next round. You have 1 minute to communicate with him—what do you do?

The clock is ticking. Your fighter sits down; the assistant trainer slips a towel around his neck. The fighter takes a sip of water, kicks out his legs, and relaxes his arms at his sides, as you've taught him to do for maximum rest. The assistant trainer is applying Vaseline to his face to cover the cuts and prevent future abrasions. Fifty-five seconds. Fifty seconds. You hover over him. He looks up to you for answers. You know your fighter's thoughts: “tell me what to do (quick!). Tell me how to win this thing—or help me get me out of here!” You've got to say something! What do you say?

Well, the boxer in this scenario was actually me. I had been training with a CoachUp boxing coach, Tommy Duquette, a former U.S. Olympic team finalist, to prepare for the one and only heavyweight USA Boxing–sanctioned match in which I would ever participate. It was part of a long evening of matches put on at Boston's House of Blues by Haymakers for Hope—an organization that raises money for cancer research by matching up amateur fighters, whose friends and family members donate money and come to watch the fights.

I don't like fighting. But having lost a grandfather to cancer, as well as several other members of my extended family, I wholeheartedly wanted to support this cause. Besides, I love any opportunity to get close with top coaches and learn from them.

So, to prepare for the fight, I put my trust in Coach Tommy. He is not only one of CoachUp's top boxing trainers but also one of the best, most naturally expert practitioners I have ever known of what I would later come to understand as the heart of the Coaching Up Model.

My opponent and I were about the same size, but his conditioning was superior to mine—he had been training far longer and harder, and belonged to a famous boxing gym. I, on the other hand, rarely trained, had not gone for a run in months (thanks to Achilles tendonitis), and did not belong to a boxing gym. But I had one, and only one, major advantage: I had great private coaching.

In this 1-minute break after the first round, Tommy went to work. There were a million things I'd done wrong in that first round. Moreover, he could tell I was totally gassed. In sparring against the same opponent for practice just four weeks earlier, I had lost in two rounds—and sprained my left wrist in the process. Tommy had considered pulling me from the official match, but I was committed to going through with it. Sitting on the stool and looking up at Tommy, I felt my wrist throbbing. I didn't think I could hit hard with it. Tommy hovered above me, studying me benevolently. The assistant trainer kept applying Vaseline. Forty-five seconds dwindled to 40.

Finally, rather than critiquing my first-round performance (or lack of same), Tommy asked me a question: “J, that has to be your dad in the first row over there, right? I love that he's wearing a suit to this thing. You got to introduce us afterward, yeah? Look how proud he is of you! Has he ever been to a boxing match before?”

Thirty-five seconds remaining, and I said, “I see him. Happy to intro you guys afterward. He definitely hasn't been to a match before, nor does he know anything about boxing. What does this have to do with anything anyway? Tommy, I can't feel my left hand.”

Twenty-five seconds left. Tommy leaned in. “Don't worry about that, you did a great job jabbing with it and just keeping him honest. Plus he's scared of your right uppercut. Even though you didn't connect with it, I know he's thinking about it. You totally crushed that round, he's all mentally messed up right now.”

Eighteen seconds remaining. “Yeah?” I said, encouraged. “You got any advice for this round?”

Ten seconds remaining. “No, man, you know what you're doing. Oh, when you go out there, give him that ‘down up’ we worked on…You know, bend your knees and give that left jab to the body. Don't worry about connecting. Then do it again right away. Bend your knees and fake the left jab to the body just like before, but shoot that right hand to his chin. He'll drop his hands to protect the body and won't see it coming. Let's go. You got this, bro!”

Two seconds. I stood up, stepped back into the fight, gave my opponent the “down up,” and landed my right hand with force, knocking him back across the ring. I won by a technical knockout in the second round, in what turned out to be the single most dominating fight of the evening.

What did Coach Tommy do that made all the difference? He made a connection with me as a person, not a function, while temporarily distracting me from the high-pressure situation; provided support for my flagging self-esteem after my performance in the first round; and offered me one simple pointer—a concise, concrete direction that I could easily follow.

That's the Coaching Up Model:

1. Build an authentic connection.
2. Provide genuine support.
3. Offer concise direction.

It's that simple. Tommy connected with me not just as a function—a pitiable fledgling boxer experiencing heavy distress—but as a whole real person, a person who had a dad and indeed an entire actual life that would almost certainly extend into the future after this fight. Strange though it may seem, an athlete—or anybody, really—can lose sight of solid facts like those in a moment of intense stress. When Tommy had me look at my father, even if only for seconds, it gave me a mental break from thinking about the next round, which, of course, helped me relax. It's incredibly helpful to be lifted out of your current self-focus and into a larger, more heartening reality.

Second, Tommy put a positive spin on that first round that I had been feeling so bad about. He supported me by pointing out aspects of my performance—and my opponent's responses—that I was too short-term focused to be able to observe. His observations restored my self-confidence and my sense of at least cautious optimism.

Because Tommy had both connected with me and supported me, I was able to take a deep breath and be sufficiently relaxed, confident, and open to listen eagerly to his direction. And because he gave me that direction concisely and at the last possible moment, it stayed fresh in my mind and active in my short-term memory. I didn't have time to second-guess or overthink it. I just acted, and my training took over and made my action effective.

Time spent on each component of this minute-long Coaching Up Conversation:

1. Building an authentic connection: 35 seconds
2. Providing genuine support: 15 seconds
3. Offering concise direction: 10 seconds

And that's important to note. As a coach, you need to make the largest investment in building an authentic connection. Without that, the genuine support you provide won't seem so genuine, and your player may very well second-guess your direction.

Over time, as you invest again and again in building that connection and providing support, you not only earn the ability to offer direction—much of which is at the request of your player, now that trust has been formed—but also position yourself to communicate effectively in time-sensitive conversations.

If you've ever been fortunate enough to have a player, employee, or friend say to you something along the lines of “Don't sugarcoat the truth. I know you have my best interests in mind, so just give it to me straight—what should I do about XYZ?” you know that you have built an authentic connection with that person. You don't need to spend the first 30 minutes of an hour-long one-on-one conversation reinforcing the connection, then supporting the person, before you can get into the meat of the topic and your actual thoughts about what course of action should be taken. You can skip over steps 1 and 2 and jump right into the direction. Furthermore, you can make that direction concise. What's concise direction? Here are two ways of saying the same thing, concisely and verbosely:

Concise Direction: “Oh, when you go out there, give him that ‘down up’ we worked on.”

Verbose Direction: “I think it would be really good if you could land a big punch at the start of this match. I noticed that you haven't thrown anything to his body, so if you start out by throwing a body shot, he will think it's for real and will drop his left arm to cover the ribs. Then, probably, after he blocks your first punch, you can throw the same exact left to the body again, which will cause him to think because you are an amateur boxer you are trying the same thing again, and he will drop his left arm again to block it. So, if you fake that second punch, and instead bring it back and shoot a right hand over the top of his left hand, you may catch his chin. He probably won't tuck his chin, because he isn't very experienced either, and if you can catch him with a strong right at the start of the match, you can get the upper hand and jump all over him and maybe earn a few points that will carry the round for you. On the other hand, if he doesn't go for your fake, you will be exposed to his right hand over the top and he may hurt you with it. But I still think it's probably a risk we s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Praise for Coaching Up!
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: How the Coaching Up Model Works
• Chapter 2: Building an Authentic Connection
• Chapter 3: Providing Genuine Support
• Chapter 4: Offering Concise Direction
• Chapter 5: Making It Work at Work
• Chapter 6: Taking It Home to the Family
• Chapter 7: Keeping It Real
• A Final Word
• Bibliography and Suggested Reading
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Index
• End User License Agreement