Scaling to "Not-Scale"
The last statement from Dr. David Grew is where we will start…
“The patients with access to my digital explanations ask much more insightful questions leading to highly not-scalable conversations.”
What I Was Doing
If I needed to teach a concept to my players, I would:
Find clips of NHL or junior games
Clip them into a short package
Present them to the team or group of players
Replay the clips because it was the first time they were seeing them
Beg them to ask questions which never came
Why didn’t they ask questions?
I wanted athletes who would drill down deeper and engage in a conversation with me about their thoughts and questions. I wanted to better serve the individual and meet each player where they were at. I wanted co-teaching.
With some reflection and a bit of reading, I learned this was an inefficient way of optimizing for what I wanted…
Seth Godin says it another way, “respect their time.” From his blog:
If you want the engagement, you have to do things a little differently than we used to.
What I Do Now
Like Dr. David says above, if you present information that players can watch on their own time, as much as they want… They’ll be going down the rabbit hole by themselves at first. They can spur their curiosity and start to think for themselves and write down questions they can bring to me to fill in the gaps of their understanding.
They can also watch the video 1,2 or 20 times to absorb all of the information. This is far superior to teaching the entire team in a 15-minute meeting and only going over the concept once with no replication of the teaching online for players to go over again later.
Teach to 1
After they watch the video as many times as they like, that’s when the real work starts. They can then come to me with questions, comments, or ways to make it better that I didn’t think of. I’ve created space for that “deeper conversation.”
This way I only provide the information they “want.” The coaching is more specific to the needs of that player.
Some players will understand the concept through the video teaching and they can move on to the next progression of that concept.
Some players will need some gaps filled in their understanding.
Some players will need it taught in an entirely different way.
Meet each player where they are at.
Teach to 1.
Examples
Create a video library for players to reference. Consider long-form explanations for when they don’t know what they don’t know. Like this one:
And shorter exemplars to quickly refresh concepts they have already learned.
Guide before you provide…
You just might start getting what you “want” from your players:
Engagement
Questions
Co-Teaching
Deeper Relationships
Scale the teaching you can to make more space for deeper dives to improve their learning and your relationship with the athlete.
When you start them further along in the journey by providing video teaching first, the conversations will get deeper, faster.
That creates more impact.
That makes you a better coach.
Want to dive in on more of the how to do this…
Check out this thread(give it a like too, it would really help)
Related Reading: Become a “Trampoline Coach”
If you want to steal my entire learning library so you can teach your players on the front end through video and save time for relationship building and answering deeper questions… Click Here