Slappin’ Glass sits down this week with the Head of Athletic Performanse and Science for the Irish Rugby Football Union, as well as author of the highly successful book, The Language of Coaching, Nick Winkelman. In this highly detailed discussion the trio dive into Coach Winkelman’s thoughts on miscommunication amongst teams, and where things go wrong, internal vs. external cueing, the use of analogies for teaching movements, and much more.
Transcript
Nick Winkelman 00:00
Once we are exposed to a context, in this case, playing the game of basketball, without coaching, we can only go to a certain level. I might’ve naturally found myself adopting a certain pattern of movement and go no farther than to watch weekend runners around a lake, and you will see there is a diversity of patterns, even what we generally call running, same thing in all skills. And so once someone’s reached that generalized pattern, then we have an opportunity to call their attention, to aspects of it that they otherwise were not attuned to or aware of. That’s the purpose of coaching. So I don’t think that’s trivial, because what it starts to do is say, okay, actually, this is why we’re even important, we’re able to give the athlete information they cannot access themselves.
Slappin’ Glass 00:52
Welcome to Slappin’ Glass. Exploring basketball’s best ideas, strategies, and coaches from around the world.
Dan 01:02
Today we’re excited to welcome the head of athletic performance and science for the Irish Rugby Football Union and author of the highly successful book The Language of Coaching, Nick Winkelman. Nick is here today to discuss miscommunication amongst teams and coaches, including the hows, whys, and where things go wrong, using analogies and stories, and how external versus internal cueing works when it comes to coaching complex movements.
And now, please enjoy our conversation with Nick Winkelman.
Dan 02:22
Nick, we wanted to dive in with this and something I know that is near and dear to your heart and it’s communication and really wanted to look at miscommunication and what happens when well-intentioned coaches miscommunicate with players and sort of the whys and the hows and where the breakdown is of miscommunication and what as coaches we can do better to help get our point across or the message or whatever it is.
Nick Winkelman 02:52
So an easy one, Dan, to start off with, hey? No, OK. Interestingly enough, let’s start with the word communication. So what is communication? Well, it shares the same root word is to commune, to come together, to form a community, right? And to communicate, obviously, is then to share, in this case, information amongst individuals. I think that’s really important to recognize if we’re going to talk about words, just kind of the power and what hides inside of them. Because ultimately, in their lives, a lot of the answer or part of the answer to the question. So when we miscommunicate, we quite literally are failing to get a message from us to others in kind of an intelligible way. And you don’t even need to look at coaching. If you’re a human on this Earth, you’ve communicated with anybody, let alone a relationship, a friendship, somebody on the street, or even a coffee shop when they don’t quite get your name right and put the wrong name on the cup. Every single one of us deals with miscommunication on a daily basis.
It just tends to be more prominent and, let’s say, impactful for better or for worse when it comes to coaching athletes. And so why does it happen? I think you said something really important, Dan. It’s never intentional. Nobody ever sets out to share a bit of information with the explicit hope that the other person doesn’t get it. And so we always come from a good place. And I think that’s where it’s important that if you are a coach, miscommunication sounds like a scary, very negative word, but it’s a reality. It’s normal. Once we understand why and how it happens, it’s easier to overcome, but also not to beat yourself up when it happens, because we’re both going to be on the receiving end as well as the delivering end between an athlete coach or even between coaches. And so here’s the first thing that I like to think about when it comes to communication. When you are saying something, even right now, Dan, as I’m talking to you and Patrick, inevitably your audience, I am speaking from a place of unavoidable truth for myself, right? I understand. I stand under quite literally every word I’m saying. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be coming out of my mouth. So by the very nature, when you are speaking more or less, it is assumed that it makes sense to you. It’s kind of built into the mechanism of communication. The problem is, when I say something that makes sense to me, but on the receiving end, it either isn’t understood or it’s misunderstood. And that’s where we have a matter of translation. And so we’re trying to create this bridge. Now, how do we do that? Well, hopefully we talk about things like knowing your audience. If you work with younger athletes versus older athletes, are you using age appropriate type communication in terms of your words and your examples and the level of detail? These are all things that preemptively you can try to get right. But even then, the best will in the world, you’re probably gonna get it wrong. And so for me, when it comes to communication, and I’m sure we’ll get into the details, you get your best first attempt.
Nick Winkelman 05:57
I think where miscommunication really starts to take on a negative form is when we’re not paying attention to the signs and the signals that we’ve miscommunicated. So when our miscommunication is invisible to us, that’s when it becomes a problem. Now, I think in some cases, you have athletes that are very self-assured. and they have no issue saying, hey, coach, I didn’t get that. Can you say it again or say it differently? I think when you have an athlete like that, let’s be honest, especially if they do it appropriately and professionally, that’s a coach’s dream. When they have an athlete, immediately signal to them, hey, coach, I didn’t get that. Can you rephrase it? Can you say it again? Can you explain it? Is this what you mean? But let’s be honest, especially if you’re working with younger athletes, that typically doesn’t happen, for better or for worse.
For me, when I’m communicating, the first thing I’m looking at to see if it landed is verbal and nonverbal. So start with the nonverbal. Am I kind of seeing that their head is nodding? Even as I’m talking to the two of you, I’m looking at your eye contact, I’m looking at your body language, I’m looking at whether you’re nodding, and that’s just starting to give me a general sense that you are falling along. But at the same time, people do that in a very polite way, just to signal socially that I’m here and I’m listening. So what I might say to take that a level deeper is I might say, hey, Dan, so what did that cue I just gave you mean to you? Or Patrick, can you put that cue I just offered you on how to shoot into your own words? And so oftentimes we might refer to that as check for learning or check for understanding. So especially if I’m bringing on a new drill, a new concept, I’m introducing a new idea, I might provide that offering to the group. Now, if I’m working with a group of individuals, I might say, hey, can anyone in the group kind of say back to the group what I just said to make sure we’re all cool, we all understand this. And so I don’t always have to pick somebody up. And so in large part, I try to bring the person into the conversation to have, if you would, a feedback loop to let me know whether or not it landed and whether or not it not only landed, did they understand, did they understand it as I intended it? And if I close that loop, that dialogue creates this nice open space for both of us to benefit. Because not only do I get the certainty as best anyone can, that they both heard and understood and now will apply, but also I signal to them, hey, this is a safe space for you to get involved. I want your opinion, I want your insight. And all of a sudden it’s gonna open up the channels from motivation, listening, learning, and attention. Nick.
Dan 08:32
The one thing that I always find interesting in communication, miscommunication, especially between coach and athletes is when we’re going through the learning process, whether this is in training or any game and there’s mistakes made, emotions getting in the way of potential miscommunication or communication. So player makes a mistake, coach gets upset the way that coach communicates because they’re emotional about a mistake or something.
And what role do emotions play in the communication process of coaches and players?
Nick Winkelman 09:05
Let’s use an analogy here. One phrase that I like to use quite often is psychology trumps motor learning. What do I mean by that? Today we’re going to talk about motor learning. For those that haven’t heard that term, it’s simply the science of how we learn to move. In this case, the science of how we learn basketball skills. That’s what we’re talking about. That’s motor learning.
However, we know, as you rightly say, Dan, that there are emotions or mood states or psychological states, we can use kind of different words to point at that same thing. Simply put, we have kind of this mental state that all of a sudden it becomes hard to take on information because we’re feeling this overpowering thing. Maybe it’s fear, maybe it’s anger, maybe it’s sadness. And if anyone has seen Inside Out the movie quite literally right here, anger, sadness, it is screaming out for our attention. Because if we think about, well, why is when someone’s overly emotional, when a child is overly emotional for parents listening, does it become hard for we say, why aren’t you listening? Or why don’t you understand? Why don’t you pay attention? Well, they are paying attention, but what they’re paying attention to is a much louder signal than the coach’s voice. And that’s that internal signal of how they feel.
And so this is the way I would think about it, both as a parent and a coach, is learning. For learning to be at its most efficient, imagine a freeway or a highway, it’s 5am, or it’s 2am wide open. Well, that freeway for my attention, me paying attention to flow on what’s important in the learning environment, when that highway is wide open, awesome. Huge potential to take on information, huge potential to learn those motor skills. But the second I have a bit of fear, a bit of anxiety, a bit of self-doubt. Now, that’s a bit of traffic on that motorway, on that highway that now I, as the coach and the athlete, I’m having to navigate through. Sometimes, the traffic speeds up, and here I am, I appear present. And then in another moment, the traffic comes back to a halt, and I’m back on the inside. I’m going to try to point back to things as we go through this conversation. That’s where I’m looking for body language. That’s where I’m looking for eye contact. It isn’t always the emotions that create the traffic in the mind. It’s also fatigue, if I’m tired. I actually had a player the other evening at my daughter’s practice, and she presented with kind of a body posture that would suggest to me emotionally something was up. And when I asked her, how do you say, oh, I just came back from a match. And now I’m at practice, right? So she was actually just tired, physically tired. So sometimes, our physical fatigue can leave us in a physical and emotional state that also blocks that. And so that’s all to summarize that when I say psychology trumps motor learning. If we don’t create the learning conditions where negative emotions are distributed, it feels like a psychologically safe space, a motivationally rich space, where now my highway is clear, my attention can be pointed at the most important thing to make me learn the most important thing for me.
That’s kind of how that dynamic interacts. And many things can influence. Sometimes it’s not even the coach. It’s how they arrive. Maybe they got in an argument with a parent or a loved one, or a significant other on the way in. And that’s it. And so this is why as coaches, we can never make assumptions. Oftentimes, we take a player’s attitude too personally, where we project too much of the wrongdoing on them, which oftentimes we all know this, we’re an audience to our own emotional state. And so I think skillful coaches know how to clear the highway before a session begins and also know how to do it during a session as they read.
Dan 12:52
Just to stick on that for a second, are there strategies or things that you’ve seen good coaches do to clear the highway? Like you just mentioned, I think probably every coach listening right now has had a situation where you get two hours for practice, players show up, you can tell there’s some stuff going on with the team, maybe some players retire, all the things you just mentioned, but you got to get stuff done in two hours.
What can you do in the first part of practice to clear the highway for players?
Nick Winkelman 13:19
There’s probably a lot of different ways to do it, and it’s probably different for different people. But I think the number one thing is this. If going into a session, I can create clarity. I can reduce noise, and I can increase the signal. I can prove to the player that, hey, you’ve got what it takes to do what we need to do today, because what we need to do today is utterly clear in your mind.
And I’ve connected the dots on why it’s important and how we’re going to achieve it. And so for me, every session, as best I can, it starts with a WWH. What are we going to do? Why are we going to do it, and how are we going to do it? So for example, after a match on the weekend, when the girls come in for a session on Friday, we talk about the last match. Hey, what were our wins? What are we really happy with? What are our opportunities? We’re going to bring those opportunities into training today. Here’s how we’re going to do it. Here’s the mindset. Here’s why we’re going to do it. Here’s how it’s going to make us better. So I think the number one thing you can do, we can’t sort all that out, Dan, ourselves. But what we can do is make what’s about to happen really clear and reinforced to the players that they have what it takes to achieve it.
For me, with the age group I work in, which is under 14th, we always start with a bit of fun. With a conversation, what do you like to start the conversation with? Hey, Dan, how you doing? How’s your family? What’s going on? How you feeling? We treat them as people first. We allow any kind of frenetic tension to distribute. Have a chat. Have a bit of a game. Have a bit of fun. And then we get into a bit of a warm up, and then we kind of ramp into the session from there.
And for me, that’s from an emotional perspective how it works. If I see someone struggling, and I know they’re someone who doesn’t do well with social approval or social disapproval on a break, then I might say 30 second time out, go get some water. And that’s a hand on the shoulder moment. Hey, Patrick, how are you doing today? Energy seems a little bit down. Everything OK? When in doubt, person before player.
When in doubt, person before player. And I just weave and iterate that through. Start kind of global with the team. Let it naturally dissipate. And then as things linger, I’m going right to the person in an appropriate way. And I’m going to know kind of are they someone who likes social recognition? Maybe a bit of banter, a bit of a joke to dissipate it. If I know that’s not their vibe, then it’s a 30 second. It’s a one minute break. Hand on the shoulder. How are we doing checking in? And usually that’s enough either to get the insight you need to make the pivot in the session. Let it ride because they just need a day to get through it. But hey, they’re there doing it. Or that immediately gives them enough of being seen and they feel better as a byproduct.
Pat 15:47
You also mentioned that fatigue can clutter the highway. So maybe looking towards as practice is in the back half and the team’s getting fatigued, what should coaches know maybe a bit how they communicate to the team to still get stuff done?
Nick Winkelman 16:01
That’s a really switched on question because it’s a question that lends itself to how you design a session all the way to how you coach it. And so for me, I would absolutely think of it in the following ways. In the same way, for example, I work in rugby right now. And what do we do? Well, early in the week, literally our first training session of the week is called a clarity session or an organization session. And then the second session in the week is usually kind of a ramp up session. And then the third session in the week is kind of an application session. So by the time we’re to that third session, it’s the least amount of talking. It’s the most amount of application. No new information is introduced.
I think you can take that and I see it in our own work and I see it across sport as a best practice, especially in team sports, and you can map that on to a single session. So for me, the most talking to coach should probably do is at the beginning of the session for the WWH. What are we going to do? Why are we going to do it? How are we going to do it? What’s this thing organized? Are there any questions? Let’s get it out there. Earlier in that session, if I’m going to be introducing any technical work, any skill specific work, I probably want to see that earlier in the session, especially if I’m looking to improve that technical application, which means I might want to have a little bit of dialogue, a little bit of discussion as the person is cultivating that skill. But as that session moves on, we want to see new information decrease, simplicity of the information increase, and have it be more about simple cues, simple reminders, energy and flow based instruction, especially in basketball, where you might want to be coaching quite literally on the run.
You don’t want to necessarily be stopping things because usually there’s a fitness effect. You’re trying to get out of the gameplay as well. At that point, we have to understand that highway is now it’s rush hour. So things are moving, but a lot is happening. And so I can’t be yelling new bits of information out to an individual while this is happening. But if I’ve had core concepts we’ve been working on in the training session in the first half of it, we’re working on in the recent block. And so for example, our girls are learning how to do a handoff and how to do screening. And so it might be as simple as, girls, I see you set a screen, just screen. That’s enough, right? Just from a tactical perspective to remind that behavior.
And so for me, I would say early in the session, new, as we get farther into the session, it’s familiar. So novel to familiar would be a flow. And then I would also say complex to simple. By complex, I don’t mean it should be complicated, but meaning you might be giving more information. So maybe more information to less information as the session flows. That then allows, obviously, as that fatigue accumulates and that highway speeds up and the window for what they can pay attention to becomes narrowed and occupied, we want to make sure that we’re just trying to put the lightest of information through there. We’re not trying to put a Christmas package in a mailbox. OK, let’s make sure it’s just a letter.
Pat 20:22
I’d like to follow up, you started to hit on it, but the motor learning aspect and the skill acquisition. And so if we’ve cleared the highway, if we’ve checked for understanding, but now it comes to maybe the performance or the execution of a skill. I know you do a ton of research and into queuing athletes, but I guess looking at the cues or how we then execute skill or ask our athletes to perform, where should coaches be aware of where maybe like miscommunication can happen in terms of actually performing a skill.
Nick Winkelman 20:54
So, presumably, Dan, Patrick, both of your coaches, have you ever had the following experience where an athlete says to you, I know what you want me to do, I just don’t know how to do it? It’s probably the perennial problem for both coaches and athletes, right? Rarely do you meet an athlete, especially at a certain level, that doesn’t understand what they need to improve on in the way they shoot, in the way they pass, in the way they move around the court, same for any sport, equally for a coach. They usually know exactly what they want to see.
They’ve studied it again and again and again. So, it’s not a failure of knowing what they want to see, and even articulating what they want, but not always being able to build that bridge from their side of the river to the athlete’s side of the river. Ultimately, the question you ask, we can look at it from a lot of different ways, but you have an athlete and you have a desired way you want them to move that you feel is going to somehow improve performance. They’re currently at point A and you want to get them to point B. How do they do that? Number one is the most potent learning stimulus is physical practice. It’s just going through the skill again and again and again. There’s no magical cue, there’s no magical drill that can outperform the sheer fact that practicing the skill in a relevant context is the most potent way to learn.
Let’s say someone who’s listening works with players of a highly elite level, maybe they’re in the NBA or the college, where you’re like, listen, they’ve had thousands of hours of practice and now we’re at the point where we’re trying to take it to another level, a level that is not being achieved by practice alone, and we all get that. If people just exponentially improve, we wouldn’t need coaching. We could just do pickup games on the weekend and everyone would be playing in the NBA, but that’s not how it happens. There’s a reason for that. You can humor me for a moment. We as humans, we’re not the fastest animals on the planet. We’re not the best climbers. We’re not the best swimmers, but guess what? We can run, we can climb, and we can swim. All other major animals in the animal kingdom, whatever, they’re hyper specialized. Certain animals can fly. Certain animals like a cheetah can go really fast. Certain animals can climb exceptionally well, but they can’t generalize. Humans in our survival capacity, our adaptability, literally what is built into us is a default position for a general ability to do a lot of different things, which make us highly adaptable.
But what is sport? Sport speaks to the human drive of what’s possible. It plays into the unbelievable hope that exists in each one of us, and thus it’s us pushing the limits of something very specific. In a lot of ways, it is counterintuitive to the structure of what it is to be a human that has a body that physically moves. That means once we are exposed to a context, in this case, playing the game of basketball, without coaching, we can only go to a certain level. Dan, Nick, and Patrick, each of our levels are going to be a little bit different. There’s going to be a distribution, which is why not everybody’s in the NBA. Not everybody plays basketball, and so let’s imagine everybody gets to that level. Now, that level is a natural generalized, let’s say, human limit without additional input, without additional feedback.
We have another limit we can get to, and that’s when there’s an introduction of a coach. A coach can provide outside information that the athlete cannot see, feel, or hear without that external source of information. I can feel my body, but a coach can see what I’m doing. I might not realize that I’m not getting enough snap in my wrist. I might not realize that my elbow position is right. I might not realize that when I’m defensively moving, I don’t have an open enough stance to move quickly. I might have naturally found myself adopting a certain pattern of movement and go no farther than to watch weekend runners around a lake, and you will see there is a diversity of patterns, even what we generally call running. Same thing in all skills. Once someone’s reached that generalized pattern, then we have an opportunity to call their attention to aspects of it that they otherwise were not attuned to or aware of.
That’s the purpose of a coach. I don’t think that’s trivial because what it starts to do is say, okay, actually, this is why we’re even a port. we’re able to give the athlete information they cannot access themselves. I’m going to say that one more time because it’s important. We can give the athlete information that they cannot otherwise access themselves. Now, that’s actually an important soundbite here because especially in a sport like basketball, where there is so much direct feedback on the most important thing, i.e., did the ball go through the net or not, coaches have to be careful not to be overly redundant, and we see this in coaching the world over at Sport Over in giving feedback that the athlete is already aware of.
And so this is one important soundbite. As best we can, we want coaches to focus on giving athletes bits of information, cues, and insights that they otherwise could not access of their own accord. Usually, how do you know that? When you’re watching an athlete perform a drill, perform a skill, play the game, and they keep making the same mistake again and again. The same pattern of movement, call it a signature. We have a shooting signature, we have a defensive slide signature, we have a passing signature, and we can do that for all sports and all movement skills. Once I know your signature, I’m observing it consistently expressed, now I know where you are, you’re A, and now I know where I want you to be. This is where I now need to intervene.
How does a coach intervene? At the end of the day, a coach is not a puppet master. The athlete doesn’t have little strings on them that I can go diddly-dobbly-do and have them move in an exact way. It’d be much easier that way. It’s not the way it works. And so I have to find a mechanism to get the knowledge that’s inside of my head in terms of what I see, where you are, where I want you to be, into your body. This is a really important thing.
Nick Winkelman 26:55
Yes, I need you to understand what I’m saying, but more importantly than understand what I’m saying, I need you to feel me. I need you to feel what I am saying, because ultimately, it is not a written exam that the athlete is going to be asked to do.
They have to physically demonstrate that understanding. So how do we go about doing that? When it comes to motor learning, there’s an aspect of it that we typically call skill acquisition, very fancy term, and it literally is what it says. It’s how one acquires a skill. Okay, how do we do that? Well, there’s two main ways that we influence an athlete. I like to keep it very simple here, verbally and non-verbally. Non-verbal, I’m going to argue, many, many coaches are familiar. Non-verbal is drills. You use a physical drill to increase, I like to use this term, increase the sensory signal on the aspect of the movement they’re currently not executing correctly. So for example, coaches might use cones to decrease the amount of space somebody has or increase the speed in which they’re moving side to side between the cones. They might have you mirror somebody or react to an individual, or they might have you run through a specific channel or around a certain cone or implement or opponent. And all of these various drills that are oftentimes in motor learning called constraints means you are restricting something to make something else possible or something else happen. So here’s a really simple example we use in my world, strength and conditioning. If you’re watching someone squat and do a bodyweight squat, let’s say, every single time they squat, their knees go in. The question you have to ask yourself as a coach is clearly they’re not aware that this is happening, otherwise they wouldn’t do it. And it looks like an awkward, uncomfortable position. So the question I then ask myself is, how do I make the error, the issue obvious to the person? I can even tell them, hey, your knees are going in, even that might not work. Okay. So what we do in strength and conditioning, and you see this actually in basketball all the time, especially for taller individuals, is you take a little rubber band, usually called the mini band, you put it around the knees. That mini band literally pulls the knees in, and pulling the knees in, it increases the volume on a radio, increases the sensory signal of the knees being in, thus are more naturally aware of this position. It no longer feels natural, it no longer feels comfortable, and guess what they automatically do? They push into the band, and all of a sudden, their knees get aligned over their toes, better squat position, better health of the knees. That’s a very direct, simple, obvious example, but that’s what constraints are. You’re trying to make some change in the environment that forces the athlete, forces the player to get into contact with the error, we feel they need to correct.
Nick Winkelman 29:55
And the thing that we have to extend to the athlete is this, if the error was obvious and uncomfortable to them, they would change it. But if they’re not changing it, clearly that’s not happening so let’s not get frustrated with them they’re not doing it on purpose it’s kind of a treasure hunt we’re trying to find the hidden treasure that’s going to unlock their ability to perform correctly now in a game like basketball you can’t have cones all over the floor all the time you can’t have dummies and bands and all sorts of different gizmos and gadgets we see it in golf we see it across sport so for me the thing that is ultimately transferable if that’s the non-verbal approach well there’s also a verbal approach where i can now offer you a coaching cue and when we think of a coaching cue think of it as a lens or a prescription lens glasses so to speak and each time i give you a new coaching cue i am giving you a different lens with which to look at and explore the expression of this movement so if you can let me linger on this for a moment let me give you and your audience a thought experiment to help illustrate this and then we can unpack it so the thought experiment goes something like this you imagine you’re in vegas you’re in the mgm grand or pick your favorite vegas hotel and you see let’s make a bet you’re like okay you walk in you see this big hall and to the right side you see a track okay and to the left you see an attendant you’re like this is interesting i’m an athlete let me go have a chat here i’m like what’s this about you talk to the attendant and they say very simple here’s a piece of paper on this piece of paper there are three different coaching cues what we want you to do is read the three coaching cues and pick the one that you think would allow you to run the fastest 10 yard or 10 meter time you’re like okay that that’s pretty interesting and then what we’re going to have you do is we’re going to have you come over to this track here and we’re going to have you run three repetitions each time with a different mental cue and we’ll actually see which one allows you to run the fastest time and see if you made the right bet and let’s imagine we can control for fatigue and that you actually did focus on this little bit of biological pixie dust okay we got that so here are the three cues you read the card cue number one the task is to sprint 10 yards as fast as humanly possible cue number one is a focus on rapidly extending your knees okay i’m running okay rapidly extend my knees okay i can imagine i can feel i can simulate what that’s like then you read the second cue focus on rapidly driving the ground back okay that kind of sounds similar but then when you think about it folks are rapidly driving the ground back you notice that that feels a little bit different now already for you data patrick i’m sure you’ve already made your bet if i just stopped there a versus b rapidly extend your knees rapidly drive the ground back you probably have your choice and then you get to see and he says okay i want you to imagine now that there is a rattlesnake right behind you and i want you to beat the bite so very quickly you have an immediate physical emotional response to all three of those some more than others so dan patrick which one are you making the bet on which one do you think allows you to run the fastest time
Pat 33:09
Rattlesnake for me. I think I respond more to the B pushing the ground away
Nick Winkelman 33:15
Okay, so in an unpublished work that I have with some colleagues, we asked both athletes and non athletes, basically that scenario for a whole host of different physical and sporting skills. And that’s what we find, that greater than 80% of individuals is going to have a preference towards the B and the C type answers. So when we look at this, well, what’s going on here? And how will it apply to basketball? I’m sure we can get there.
When I tell you to rapidly extend your knees, I’m asking you to look at part of the body, right? Rather than the whole body. We refer to that as an internal cue, because you know that to sprint, it’s more than just your knees or your hips or your back, but it’s just asking that one little part, like telling someone just to snap their wrist when they’re trying to learn how to shoot a basketball. Whereas when I tell you to push the ground away, that’s treating the body like an orchestra, saying each joint, each muscle is like a musical instrument. And I am going to conduct that entire symphony into one thought by centering it on this idea of pushing the ground away with the hopes that if my energy is on pushing the ground away, that is going to most positively lead to the outcome of running fast.
I can then take that a step further and say, what is an emotional scenario that is going to not only encourage the, so to speak, push the ground away, but encourage you to do it with the energy output and mindset that will allow you to express that as fast as possible, which obviously in the case of running is what we’re wanting. And thus we introduce an animal, let alone a poisonous one that humans naturally have a very negative get away reactive response to. And where I place that snake is really important in that analogy. And so ultimately, those last two cues are what we refer to as an analogy and an external cue.
The difference between B and C and A is in A I’m thinking about part of the body, right? Whereas in B and C, the whole body is implied in the thinking itself. And so ultimately that is to say we have different phrases, cues we can offer an athlete to put a different lens that is going to have a more positive or negative impact on their ability to learn the movement. The reason that’s important is both of those cues act as what I refer to as a mental constraint. Move as if the beauty is I don’t need a cone. I don’t need a dummy. I don’t need a band. I can bring it to life real life and ultimately change the way someone thinks while they move to move better.
Dan 35:47
When a coach is thinking about what kinds of cues to give to an athlete, maybe for basketball purposes, I’m thinking of a layup or a shot where a coach might say, hey, focus on your follow through or follow through as a cue versus hit the square as an external cue or something else as an analogy. And how coaches can think about the right type of cue and analogy for the skill desired, because there are certain skills, like you just mentioned, which is like an explosive run fast type skill, but there’s other skills for basketball where it’s a more controlled type of skill you’re hoping for and how that goes together.
Nick Winkelman 36:24
Let’s use a few different examples that are live examples that I use with our under-14s. The first thing we have to recognize is the thought experiment we went through, if you would, was a bit of the menu. It was the sampling platter, as I refer to as the continuum of cues we can use. So a coach can either zoom in to the micro, which is to say, give a very technical cue about a specific joint or body position. And we refer to those as internal cues, literally because you are referencing something inside the body.
The second we leave the perimeter of the body and we start orienting the whole system around some external focus, for example, we might say during a layup, hey, I want you to put the ball on the top right corner, focus on the top right corner, or tap the corner, touch the corner, whatever it is. Now what I’m doing is I’m putting the whole energy of the system. The whole symphony is being conducted or oriented towards this single external point. The coach’s expertise comes in as to understanding that if I put my attention on that external point, all the steps prior to that are going to have to be done correctly. I’m going to have to get a good angle of attack. I’m going to have to jump early enough. I’m going to have to reach high enough and I’m going to have to extend and elevate to get the ball to that top right corner and make the layup. So there’s an assumption that the first 10 dominoes need the fall for that 11 domino to fall. So I focus on the 11th domino. Everything else, by a matter of course, is going to occur as a byproduct of that focus.
So we call that an external cue, and I’ll give some examples in a moment. And then the third category is the use of an analogy, where an analogy is still an external cue, but it invites you to imagine or visualize a scenario that, if real, would encourage you to move in a certain way. So quite literally, if there was a rattlesnake behind you, it would literally encourage you to go forward as fast as you can. So in that case, even though it’s not real, I can move as if or move like. When we talk about the benefit of an external cue, an analogy, oftentimes they’re synonymous. What I want to point a coach’s attention to is this. When you give an internal cue, let’s say we were talking about wrist position or wrist motion in shooting a basketball. The second you offer that cue, if that cue doesn’t work, you have hit cue bedrock. There is no deeper you can go because there is only one wrist involved in shooting that basketball.
So where are you going to go? Even as we’re talking, you might have the blood pressure of some of the listeners going up like, is this dude about to say, I can’t talk about the body? And let me be clear. No, we’re going to talk about how all these things harmonize together. But I want to point that out that if that doesn’t work, where else do you go? Okay, so the next thing I can go is to an external cue. And if we stick with the shooting example, let’s have a person that doesn’t have the right arc on the ball. So with the kids, we might say arc. Maybe they don’t know what an arc is. They make it like a bridge. Well, what kind of bridge? No, a bridge is have an arc to them. But what if I say, hey, I need a little bit of a bigger rainbow on that? Ah, all of a sudden I can have a big rainbow. I can have a small rainbow. Even if they don’t know what an arc is, they can visualize it.
No, especially in Ireland, because we get a lot of them here, right? I can say, put it in the pot of gold. I can play off this analogy. I can riff with it. I got jazz going now with my analogy. I use this rainbow example. And guess what? To get that ball to follow an arc, to follow a rainbow, to be in a straight line, certain physical things need to happen. So to the technical-minded person, they might be like, well, what about this? And what about that? I’m still observing all of those technical changes, but in service of the outcome, ultimately. Because even if they have the wonkiest shot in the world, if it ultimately is allowing them to consistently make a bucket, we’re not going to change that.
The only reason, if you can humor me for a moment, we get fixated on technique is because there is an average. Not an only, but an average technique in most skills that increase the odds of success, but do not absolutely determine it. In every sport, again, the world over, you will find exceptions to the rule. Let’s not always assume that the technical rule applies to all, because it doesn’t. That’s a red herring for coaches. And so for me, we start with the generalized model of how we want them to move, but then we’ve got to be able to riff off and see how they adapt.
So the point in the case of the external cue there is it allows that body to adapt in time. And so the analogy ultimately gives me that capacity, an infinite capacity to play with what ifs and as ifs and likes and brings that in. I can bring the entire matrix simulator to bear right on my basketball court. and ultimately start to create frames of reference that are going to allow them to move better. So example, when I have players shoot, I talk about a rainbow. The coach I work with talks about the ball being an eye, and that eye should be able to look right inside the bucket when it goes down. And so we’ll give them all sorts of different analogies to help them formulate that movement. When we’re teaching a layup, I could give an internal cue like, hey, I need them off the inside leg, outside leg up, outside leg up. But do you know what I started doing with the girls that works much better? I initially said, get your outside leg up. And then I said, that’s your shield. Get your shield up. I need you to protect the ball. It works much better.
And so to summarize here, we find that we can go internal cues, external cues and analogies. Most of us have a natural gravitation to the simplicity and the intrigue and the interest of external cues and analogies. The evidence would suggest that people learn better, both in the moment and in terms of the retained expression of that learning, with external cues and analogies. So both our intuition and the evidence points in the same direction. External cues and analogies also have a much wider menu of things coaches can say, a much wider menu to adopt the same meaning through different words and examples to meet where you’re at, decreasing the odds of misunderstanding.
So how does it all go together? For me, internal cues explain what to do. I need your elbow up. I need your wrist to snap. I need you to come off the inside leg. I need your outside leg up. I need you to put your arm nice and high and elevate. Great. That explains what to do.
The external cue and the analogy brings it to life, tells you how to do it. It explains in simple language what otherwise can’t be explained. How do you explain the energy and the flow into a layup where I go fast, I then explode vertical, and then I arrest that speed to have a nice soft touch off the backboard. Do you know how difficult that is for a kid to learn? To go full speed in a breakaway, all of a sudden explode off the ground, but then everything has to be light as if they’re catching a baby bird. But I can say that I want it to be as light as catching a baby bird. And even without explaining that, I can feel that. And that is the beauty of an external cue and analogy. I can say with words what otherwise can’t be said effectively with words. And that’s the irony and the beauty in it.
Pat 43:57
Nick, I’d like to ask about the frequency of using cues and is the goal eventually with the cue to remove it or, and conversely, is there ever the possibility where the athlete becomes so dependent on the cue that they can’t perform whatever you’re asking them to do movement-wise without it?
Nick Winkelman 44:17
There’s no hard and fast rules here. But I think to answer the question, let’s take a famous basketball coach. What did Mr. Wooden say? He said, I have not taught until they have learned. To really appreciate what that means, you need to have a common definition of learning. What do we mean when we say someone’s learned? That means that someone can take something that we taught them that has improved some aspect of their skill in the moment of the teaching. And they are able at some future moment to express that without reminder, prompt, or feedback. Which means they literally, as I like to say, have OTC, they have owned the change. That is the goal.
The goal is that whatever coaching practice we use through drills, constraints, and cues, that ultimately leaves the athlete, the player, better than when they came in. And better in this case is not just better in our presence, in the backdrop and support of our voice, but better in their ability to express, ideally in the context of playing a game, this skill change without reminder, prompt, or feedback. Does that mean to your question, Patrick, I can give one cue one time and it’s magic pixie dust silver bullet stuff? Absolutely not. Now, like anything, we have to practice. We need repetition, and that repetition most certainly is going to need to be supported by coaching cues and effective drills. But I think the measure of an effective drill and the measure of an effective coaching cue is how rapidly it results in the athlete’s ability to own the change. Now, for both of you, when you’re coaching basketball players, or even if you remember back to when you were being coached, presumably as player, did you ever have a coach, or have you ever given an athlete a cue where the second you heard it, it transformed you, or it transformed an aspect of you? Where the second you heard it, you felt what the cue meant and you knew it was gonna work. Have you ever had that experience?
Pat 46:28
Yeah, I would say so.
Dan 46:28
Yeah
Nick Winkelman 46:30
Have you ever had that with an athlete you were working with? You kind of saw their eyes widened, right?
They stood a little bit taller, they nodded, and it’s almost like they couldn’t wait to give that a go. Have you ever had that experience?
Dan 46:42
Yes
Pat 46:42
I would hope so.
Nick Winkelman 46:44
So, this is really important. It’s interesting. Both of you, like there was a reaction even from both of you as I’m asking you to think about that. And that in fact is the reaction that we get when there is an aha moment from a queue. And this is what I mean with I can give you a coaching queue that you can intellectually understand. But that is very different than a coaching queue that you physically understand. That all of a sudden resonates with your body as if it spoke directly to your nervous system. The electricity of your system said, yes, I get that. And if you will, it’s knowing without the ability to verbalize that knowing. It’s a felt intuitive sense.
And so for me, that’s the goal of the fact of queuing. And so when you’re doing that or when you have a drill that is really well designed, it will tend to give them that change rapidly. And so I have, like yourselves, had days where I co-create or come up with a coaching queue or even the athlete comes up with a coaching queue that makes the change immediately and it sticks. And the key thing for this is if they have the ability to do it, if there’s no physical reason they can’t, it’s just a matter of they’ve never had the right frame of reference to bring that aspect of their movement to life, to waken up that aspect of their physical ability. Once that queue is there, it’s like a key and it unlocks the door to that feature of the movement. The door is open. Once the door is open, it might take a little bit of reminder here and there, but ultimately it’s going to stay. And the inverse of that is if you’re given a coaching queue over and over again, if you have to constantly remind them, even if the queue in the moment works, even if when I remind them, hey, give me a bigger rainbow, now all of a sudden they start making their free throws, but they never do it in a game, something about that queue isn’t sticking.
They require the reminder prompt and feedback, but the queue still leaves clues. The arc, the rainbow idea resonates with them. Otherwise it wouldn’t work, but maybe I can invite them. Hey, what does that mean to you? Is there a way that you put that in your own words? So I invite then the athlete into the discussion and that’s what I call the process of refining a queue. An initial queue is like a raw diamond. When I start to bring you into the conversation, especially if I’m starting to make progress with you, now we can start to shine and shape it. So inevitably now you have a frame of reference and especially something like free throw, it might turn into one word. You’re able to say for yourself in your physical ritual before you shoot, it constantly keeps you in that state of mind.
Dan 49:25
My fault with the queuing and all that has to do with, because you know, my reaction was when you ask that question, I guess more like tactical or strategic, where like in a group setting, there’s certain cues that as a coach, we’ve either given or had that when the group hears it, there’s like a change in the group. And so that’s why my question and my follow-up was about group queuing or as coaches, we’re always trying to help our team in game with verbiage or vocabulary that helps them play a certain way or have strategic advantages and like how that plays into this as well. We’ve been talking a lot about body movement, skill, all that kind of stuff, motor learning. But now tactical, is there a space for that too within the queuing?
Nick Winkelman 50:09
percent, what is a cue? A cue is a clue. That’s all it is.
It’s a clue. That’s also what we call them cue cards, in acting and whatnot. Think about the nature of what the word is. We’re trying to, when it comes to tactics, whether it’s what you call a play, what you call the certain shape, a defensive tactic, whatever it is, I think there’s a couple things that great coaches naturally do well, whether or not they’re familiar with this. One, they try to use very simple language. They try to use, let’s say, generational, age, athlete-specific, oriented categories of language. For example, you can imagine a coach that used entire video game language to name all of their plays and all of their orientation. What that means is, if I have a bunch of players that love video games and they have a very familiar vocabulary, vernacular, what they’re doing all the time, I can actually leverage that by way of analogy and utilize those examples to ultimately name the certain features of the tactics that are important. That’s just pulling out one example. I know in rugby, for example, there’s a lot of kicking of the ball. Each kick is given the name of a different bird, what birds fly. They’re trying to make that kind of association. All cues and clues are, in this case, is word association. You’re trying to make an association that is so strong nearly off the first syllable of the word, they immediately know what you want nearly instinctively. For me, if I’m a coach, one, I need to understand my game plan completely. I need to ideally make it as simple as humanly possible and as limited as humanly possible. Each coach would decide what that is. Once I now have the shape of that, I know what things need and require names. Many coaches will have legacy names for all their things. They use it and they teach that. That’s fine. If you take the time to do that, there’s no fault of that. I know other coaches who will really take time to think about their athlete, the age group, and they might rename things and from time to time evolve that naming blueprint to be strongly associated with the interests of the group and make sure that that language is also naturally related to what we’re teaching.
Pat 53:47
If we jump back to technical queuing, how does it change, maybe in terms of how a coach should use the queue when in a training environment versus in the competition?
Nick Winkelman 53:59
If you go back to the three cues I gave you in the thought experiment, if I was to ask coaches who know something about sprinting, I would say, which of those cues is the most technical or biomechanically clear? And they would say, oh, rapidly extend your knees or rapidly extend your hips. Okay, cool. But which of those cues would you want someone thinking about in a race? And they’d say, B, but probably C.
It’s okay. So ultimately, to play a sport, well, you have to play the sport, and that needs to be authentic. So why then would we coach our athletes to occupy a mindset that we might call A, but in reality, we want them to play with a mindset that is more like that B or that C example. And so we forget that the way we coach using language is ultimately informing the way they think and their state of mind while they play. That state of mind is going to develop, mature, and be learned in the same way the physical consequence of what that mind is doing. So in this regard, we want to inevitably be adopting coaching language that mirrors the mental state we want our athletes in when they’re playing their game. We’ll stop. And we want that mental state to be one that promotes performance, calmness, and a high capacity for good decision making and attention.
And so the more we give athletes internal cues to think about while they move, the more noise and brain fog and mental pollution we create. To the degree that we know that your reaction time is slower when your brain is occupied with an internal cue versus an external cue. Why is that? It’s quite simple. If I’m teaching someone to shoot and I’m talking heavily about elbow position, for example, is the elbow the only thing involved in shooting? No, it is not. So with the best will in the world, if I draw your attention to your elbow, I’m saying I need you to focus on your elbow while thinking about your whole body. And even though you didn’t say think about the whole body, the whole body is still involved ultimately in shooting a jump shot. And so I actually am drawing your attention like a kid flicking a light on and off rapidly to go from elbow to outcome, elbow to outcome, elbow to outcome. I can’t think about both simultaneously. It’s impossible. I can switch my attention rapidly. And so most athletes ultimately will abandon that altogether because it’s just not a practical way to use your mind when you’re trying to perform a skill.
So either people will fully only think about their elbow or they’ll abandon it altogether. And so this is where, as I said earlier, internal cues and external cues can live on the same block, but they shouldn’t live in the same house. And so if I’m teaching someone how to do a layup, like with the girls, it’s okay, on the right side, I want to see you come off your left leg, I want to see your right leg come up. And I want to see your right arm come up. That is not a very interesting way to cue an under 14 player. Okay, but that is technically what one to right hand right leg. And I say if you imagine you’re like a puppet and there’s a string from your wrist to your knee, that knee should go up. That helps them. But ultimately, I say, Hey, I need your shield up. I need you to elevate. I’ll say video game mode. Okay, I’ll use like a Mario Brothers. A type example, when they hit, I need to see you go game mode on this cheat code, I’ll use video game analogies with them.
And so ultimately, I explain what I want. Technically, usually most coaches want to do that, especially early on, no problem. But then ultimately to do that, insert external cue, insert analogy here. And so that’s how the two things occupy together. And so when they’re sitting there listening, they’re getting the internal cue, when they’re moving, when they’re moving, when they’re actually physically learning the skill, it is always coupled with a mental state that is what we would call external, environmentally focused or analogy, which still keeps them out in the present, running just kind of this light mental simulation, as if I think the matrix is a great example where you are here, and there’s this other light sense of something else in the same presence of you.
Pat 58:13
What was in basketball with like complex movements or movements are kinda sequential and i think the beauty if i’m understanding like of the analogy is you can use one analogy to kill it. What can’t come up with a good analogy can you have multiple external cues to execute a desirable action.
Nick Winkelman 58:30
Let’s go through it, Patrick. Give me an example of a movement. Let’s see if we can riff on this real time.
Pat 58:34
You want your athlete to set a basketball screen and force like the over so you want to sprint into the screen you want to find the proper angle and make contact and be in a certain stands feet wide let’s say how do you do that.
Nick Winkelman 58:49
Yeah. I think when it comes to the screen, you are right. There’s a number of different things, but the big thing that I’m doing with this is giving them where we want to target. We’re trying to give them a physical orientation point. We want you to target the side of the defender. We want you to target, for example, let’s say you didn’t want to be right on the side. You wanted them to be slightly back. I might say, I want you to target the back pocket of the defender. Literally, basketball shorts usually don’t have pockets, but hey, I want you to target the back pocket like in a pair of jeans of the defender. I might use that as an orientation type cue.
I want you to be a stone soldier when you come in. I want you to be immovable.
Those kind of things to give their body a physical sense of the position I want you to be. I want you to stop on a cliff’s edge. I want you to stop on a knife’s edge. They hit you, you don’t hit them. Or you hit them, they don’t hit you. They’re all strictly speaking external cues because I’m not talking about your body per se in one aspect.
What I’m trying to impart here is we’ve done three things there. The target the back pocket is a spatial cue. It’s targeting the orientation of you to them. If I find that my player is not coming at the right angle, I’m trying to think of what’s a spatial cue that can get them in the right position. So, I might say, let’s say I want them right on the side, stay in the hallway, or hit them in the hallway, square in, hit them in the hallway. Mind you, all the while for people, we’re demonstrating this while it’s happened. I’m not just sitting there silently yelling these words out to them. I am bringing that language to life with my demonstration.
In my book, when I talk about this, it’s describe, it is demonstrate, it is cue. Describe it, demonstrate it, cue it. These are all working together. Stay in the hallway, target the back pocket. Those are spatial. If I find someone is weak in body posture, I might say stone soldier. I might say root in. I might say be tall. I might say be a pillar. I need you to fill from floor to ceiling. We just keep going on here. Now, those are what I would call your physical or your postural or your structural cues.
So the problem might not be, hey, you’re getting in the right position, but once you’re there, you’re too weak in the body posture. Let’s say you have someone that keeps getting fouls because they’re hitting the person. They hit you, you don’t hit them. Absorb like a sponge, take it, but don’t move.
This is just word play at the end of the day. It’s word play that isn’t memorable. They hit you, you don’t hit them. They hit you, you can say that, hey, take it. They never take it. That might be it. I like to bring in alliteration and rhyme with these things. It might be stop and stick. So we can play around with different things, and I’m sure people listening who are coaching these skills more often will have a broader associative network in their mind.
Nick Winkelman 01:01:47
They’re basketball coaches. They’re doing it more than I am, even though I do it a fair bit.
And so in this case, what I’m trying to do is where does the error come from, Patrick? Where is the primary area? That’s what I think, if we’re going to give a point here, is it that they’re targeting the wrong position? Are they not getting there fast enough? I need you to close the space early. I need you to get there quicker. I might make a joke. Rattlesnake, beat the bite.
Because you see that idea of beat the bite, I can actually import that into all of my quickness analogies. They beat you on the inside defensively, beat the bite. You see how I can do that? I can actually use that. And so analogies are, they’re like Bitcoin. They’re a highly transferable currency. Once I give an analogy that is imparting something about spatial movement, about speed of movement, about verticality, I can actually reuse that analogy for anything in my program of work that has to do with how quickly I close space, how quickly I hold body posture, how quickly I go vertical. And so this is where a good analogy found in one context, coaches should open their mind.
Actually, there’s different ways I could finesse and use that. The rainbow, that rainbow was too big. It wasn’t raining that hard, ladies. Bring the rainbow down. I can actually morph this thing. And if people are listening, one, I think most humans have enough experience with communicating and realizing that when people use analogy, metaphor, and story, it’s easier to understand. It’s more emotionally engaging. It’s more memorable. So I don’t think you have to convince most people. I think people are scared because they’ve never had to do it by design.
And so what I would encourage people to do though, I wasn’t good at this when I started, but now I’ve conditioned my mind to always look for real world associations with movements I’m teaching. And I’m thinking, okay, what in the real world would this kid be familiar with? That if real in this moment, I know Kung Fu as Neo says, what could I import into the mind state of this person? So if they’re moving all over the place, I’m using hallway examples. If they’re too high, I’m bringing the roof down on them. If they’re not hitting the ground in the right way, I might say things like, you’re letting the ground hit you, you hit the ground, the ground doesn’t hit you. Spring off the ground, heavy legs, more snap, bring oneness. There’s just so many different ways you can go about it. But one thing is important, Patrick, I don’t think I finished answering your question earlier on how often. You do need to create, unlike this podcast for me, you need to create some breathing room for them to process, for them to understand. I don’t talk this much when I’m coaching, believe me. But I figure people can replay this, you can’t do that when you’re coaching.
Nick Winkelman 01:04:22
When we’re coaching, I need to offer the cue up. I need to have some mechanism to make sure it landed, and then I need to let them run with it for a little while. You know what I mean? If we’re doing shooting, I might give them a cue and then let them take 10, 15, 20 shots and watch the cue go to work. Now, if the thing backfires immediately, okay, I might intervene sooner. But what I call the flicker effect, if you remember as a kid or if you have kids, what do kids love to do, especially when they’re younger? They like to go up to a light switch and they’re like, that’s what a good cue should do. You should see them in real time go through, I said this in a podcast the other day, go through strategic struggle, where it looks like the movement’s flicking on and off, on and off, they’re starting to get the concept. Have you guys ever seen that when you’re teaching, where they’ll start to get it? I call that the flicker effect. And so if a cue is starting to get you some flickering, if not a full-blown change, sometimes it works immediately, but at the very least a flicker, let it flicker. Because what’ll happen is if they’re getting it, stay out of their way.
Let them keep running with it. Might do a little bit of seasoning here and reinforcing it, say, yep, that’s it. That’s what we’re looking for. Keep going, keep searching, stay with it. Love that. And then inevitably after a block of work and it kind of stabilizes, we’ll say, OK, how did that go? What did you feel? Here’s what I saw. And then we might reinforce it. We might refine it. We might repeat it. Or you might retire it. It’s like, this thing ain’t working right now. And so ultimately, people will talk about giving cues on 50% of reps for 75%, 100%. I wouldn’t give a hard and fast rule. I would say this. You want to keep working through your cues until you find one that works or at least flickers and then step back. You be the judge of it. Once it’s marinated and you think you’ve gotten all out of it, you can’t, then you step back in and intervene. For those that are thinking, Nick, I never work with one-on-one, neither do I. And so what I do in that case is I always come up with global cues for everybody that I know work. I pull from a pretty deep bank. I’m observing. I’m seeing what’s landing, what’s not changing it as we go. And then as a session flows, those that are going well, I’m reinforcing positively from across the court happy days. For those where it’s not, when it’s not their turn, I might go, because I’m the assistant coach, I might go and have a quick word with them. Try this next time. Or it’s a 30-second timeout. Try this next time. And over the course of days and months, you’re able to get to everybody. You go global, local, global, local. And that’s how you make sure that you get the most coaching good and you’re not treating everyone as a one-size-fits-all.
But inevitably, I think people that take the kind of approach in the way we’re articulating it, usually will find themselves saying less. Now, does that mean you stop talking? No. What it means is a lot of what you’re saying is positive reinforcement, not new information.
Nick Winkelman 01:07:18
It’s like background noise. So I’m still coaching. I’m still talking. I’m still energizing. But I’m not giving unique morsels of new technical thought that often. I’m protecting those moments.
I’m reviewing those moments and making sure that me and the athlete are very clear, this is what I want thinking about. That sounds too controlling. This is the lens. This is the state of buying we want to be in when we’re doing this. And over time, we will work together to evolve that, until which time, like a banana, you can throw away the peel. The words are gone. All that is left is the feeling and the action that comes as a consequence, which we would call skill.
Dan 01:08:01
Awesome. Nick, this has been great. Thank you so much for all your thoughts.
We actually want to close the show with a question that we ask all our guests, which is, what’s the best investment that you’ve made in your career?
Nick Winkelman 01:08:14
I would say this, there are so many different ways to invest in yourself, but I would say the number one for me has come in the form of self-reflection, but the specific variety of self-reflection of seeking feedback. And what I mean by that is there is no greater gift as a coach than having somebody watch you coach. And to be the kind of person in every one of those moments who invites and is open to and preemptively even encourages, I don’t care if they’re an intern and they’ve never coached in their life, or they’re a 30-year coach and you’re kind of on an apprentice program to give you feedback. To be the kind of person, the kind of predisposition that is open to getting better.
And in the absence of that, every one of your athletes can be that source of feedback. And the way you gain that source of feedback, yes, you can ask them, hey, how am I doing? But sometimes that can inadvertently negatively impact the coach athlete dynamic. But if I invite my athlete’s opinion and perspective on, hey, what I just said to you, what did that mean to you? Or if that doesn’t make sense, how about you put it in your own words? If I involve my athlete in this coaching process, that by its very nature is a source of feedback on what they get, what they like, what they don’t like, and what works. And so to summarize that, it’s being utterly open and seeking of feedback on your actual craft at the source. And you can cash that check at any bank I’d say.