Chris Mance II - Mental Skills Coach

Any coach can get lucky and inherit a group of talented athletes and win with those athletes. However, winning one time doesn’t make a coach a winner. Winning once in a while doesn’t make a coach a winner either.

What makes a coach a winner is winning a lot, especially when it counts. Furthermore, there are many ways a coach could win, but there is only one way for a coach to be a winner. That is by having the ability to develop average and good athletes into great athletes.

To do that, a coach must have a growth mindset and not a fixed mindset. In other words, winning coaches don’t put all their eggs in the “natural talent” basket. Instead, winning coaches view an athlete’s current level of talent as only a starting line, not the finish line. Winning coaches don’t see their athletes as who they are, they see them as who they can become with coaching.

While all coaches will claim the growth mindset as their mindset, the vast majority of coaches only give this mindset lip service. A mindset is not something you speak into existence, it’s something you live out through your behaviors.

Moreover, the behaviors of a coach with a growth mindset include:

1. Embracing the use of one on one private coaching to help each of their athletes, even the average and below average athletes, level-up.
2. Consistently using positive training pain (and never using negative training pain) to increase the pain tolerance and mental toughness of their athletes.
3. Assigning homework to specific athletes and following-up to assess if the homework met its goal.
4. Using a consistent process to help the team with goal orientation by focusing on task goals instead of ego goals.
5. Not relying on the “eye-ball” test to make all decisions.
6. Developing an athlete’s self-motivation and avoiding carrot and stick motivation.
7. Building an athlete’s confidence by treating it as a mental skill and not a personality trait.