Hidden Cost of Coaching: Part 2
If you missed part 1, we laid down all the framework you’ll need to know for this article. Let’s undo some more programming in part 2.
It’s 10:15pm.
The horn sounds for the end of Game 5. Your team lost 6-2. Game 6 is in 44 hours and now the team is facing elimination. What is the move? Do you stay up and watch the film with your coaching staff?
If you ask most coaches, it’s so mainstream to do this, that they might not even hear it as a question. ``Are we watching film tonight?” became “we’re watching the film tonight.” It's a commonly held belief that coaches should stay up late after games until 2 or 3am cutting film. The kids call it "grinding." You have to do all that you can, right? Right?
Rory Sutherland has another term for what we call grinding. And you’re not going to like it.
Self-Placebbing or Easier to Say… Self-Signaling
Let’s take a quick detour back to Sutherland’s book for a moment to give you an example of self-signaling.
Once you understand the placebo, I think you’ll agree that a large part of the two trillion dollars spent on female self-beautification is not spent in order to appeal to the opposite sex; to put it bluntly, as a woman, it simply isn’t that difficult to dress in a way that appeals to men – you just have to wear very little.* There are also some trends in female fashion, high-waisted trousers, for instance, which men find fairly repellent.* It seems likely that a significant part of what you’re doing when you spend two hours on self-grooming is self-administering a confidence placebo to produce emotions that you can’t generate through a conscious act of will.
Sutherland, Rory. Alchemy (pp. 212-213).
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