Chris Mance II - Mental Skills Coach

Today my favorite daily blogger Seth Godin told a profound story on his blog about an escaped POW. It’s a 2 minute read that will be well worth the time.

The moral of the story is that having an accurate compass is better than having an accurate map.

This analogy immediately reminded me of two foundational concepts I firmly believe about goals.

1. When pursuing difficult goals, you must flip the script. The process must be the goal, and the goal must serve as your compass. When the process is the goal, then achieving your goal is 100% within your control. By having complete control, you eliminate all excuses. What’s more, your compass must be accurately set with the right goals so that you can ensure you’re following the right processes.
2. Coaches are the best people to help you find the right goals to serve as your compass. This is why I believe everyone needs a coach. Unfortunately, the problem is that almost everyone other than athletes and executives ignore their need for coaching. We all should aspire to be different, and not let this be our reason for getting lost in life.

What Are The Right Goals?

The obvious question is what are right goals and wrong goals?

• Right goals: Having the right goals starts off with having “S.M.A.R.T.” goals. This means goals that are Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Realistic, and Time bound. On top of this, right goals are goals that take advantage of your innate strengths, passions, and motivations. For example, setting a goal for a rabbit to increase speed vs learning to fly.

• Wrong Goals: Having the wrong goals usually means one has some far off, be the “best in the world” or “be a millionaire” type goal. Typically setting these goals temporarily satisfies a desire for immediate gratification. However, these goals are so grandiose and far off that once the euphoria of talking about the goal wears off, the realization that the first step is as clear as mud sets in. It’s at this point that analysis paralysis takes over and the goal turns into a faint dream.

With this in mind, the best thing an individual or team can do in the pursuit of a difficult goal is find a coach to help them. Once a coach helps you define the right goals, finding a process to pursue those goals becomes easy.

This is what we do for families, as our family is the most important team in each of our lives. Specifically, we focus on working with sports families and how the young athletes in the family pursue both their career and sports goals. The way we do this is threefold:

1) Explore Strengths

Young athletes are at their best when they’re doing what they’re best at, and that’s using their strengths. Strengths are found in what you truly love to do, your areas of natural talents. We use three methods to identify your child’s areas of natural talents

1. For children under the age of 10, we use Strengths Spotting to observe your child’s talents using the four categories of behavior clues.
2. For children ages 10-14, we use Clifton’s Youth Strengths Explorer, an assessment to identify areas where your child’s greatest potential for building strengths exists.
3. For children 15 and older, we use Clifton’s Strengths Finder assessment to build a detailed profile of their top 5 strengths with specific techniques to take advantage of strengths.

2) Identify the Passions that Drives Innate Self-Motivation

Once strengths are explored, the next step is to identify the passions and motivations that are innate or come effortlessly.

• What activities or environments is your child repeatedly drawn to or eager to try?
• What new skills or activities does your child pick up quickly and easily?
• When is your child most enthusiastic and fulfilled?
• Which activities is he or she excited about doing again and again?
• When does your child become so engrossed that he or she seems to lose track of time?

3) Define the Vision, Goals and Action Items

In this final step we help you put pen to paper and map out the right goals and a concrete plan to achieve those goals.

1. What’s the right goal? Not some pie in the sky goal. A measurable, time-bound goal that takes advantage of your child’s strengths passions and motivations. In addition, each goal is specifically defined so that you and your child can work together to achieve it by checking off step by step action items.
2. What are the non-sports goals? The fact is that athletic careers are by nature temporary. For this reason you must plan for what will be next. Is it coaching, sports psychology, business, teaching, physical therapy, or something else?
3. What’s your plan for bouncing back from failure? Failure is part of the process. Therefore, you must face failure head on. If you know failure is going to happen, then it’s irresponsible not to plan for it. So we will set-up a plan to evaluate your process, and decide if the process needs to change or if you should stay the course.

Find Out More By Attending an Information Session

To find out more about participating in a parent / child peer group to go through this process with me and other sports families please attend a free information session. Contact me here to get notified of our next session.