Chris Mance II - Mental Skills Coach

As you can imagine, there are many factors that define the mindset of a great coach. How a coach views motivation, discipline, pre/post season conditioning, goal setting, and game planning are all factors that have a profound impact on the mindset of coaching.

Carol S. Dweck defines mindset in her preeminent book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success as the connection between how you think and how you behave. In short, Dweck explains that the “views you adopt” define your mindset and dictate how you lead your life. For coaches, this means their mindset views dictate how they lead their team.

With that said, there is one factor above all that has the greatest impact on the mindset of a great coach. That is how a coach views talent. Great coaches view talent as a product of both nature and nurture. Furthermore, since a coach has no control over an athlete’s nature, they invest all their focus into nurturing talent.

For this reason, one may view a great coach as having the mindset of an investor. Every great investor knows the cliché disclaimer of investing. “Past performance does not guarantee future results and current performance may be lower or higher than the performance quoted.”

Great coaches apply this same mindset to sports. Just because an athlete was average in the past, doesn’t mean they can’t be an all-star, and just because an athlete is an all-star today doesn’t guarantee their performance next season. Moreover, just like there are passive investors and active investors, the same applies to coaching. Certainly, it almost goes without saying, that great coaches are like the active investors.

The Behaviors That Define the Mindset of a Great Coach

In other words, great coaches actively coach every athlete, every season to become the best version of themself. As a result, they view an athlete’s current level of talent as only a starting line, not the finish line. What’s more, they never see athletes as who they are and instead see them as who they can become with coaching.

This mindset is analogous to what Dweck defines as the growth mindset. While most 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.