How Coaching Works

I love this, it kind of puts the process in a nutshell for me!! It is based on the emerging 'life-coaching' industry but it isn't hard to see the parallels between this and the work that we all do. It does make you think whether you effectively go through this process with every player you work with though!!

What does a coach make?

We are lucky as coaches that we we are seen in relatively high esteem by the public...Teachers have somehow gone down in people's estimation even though what they do is so important to the future of our society.

Coaches play an important role in kids lives too...anybody want to have a go at writing something like this for coaches?

Want to develop skill? Define your own performance measures!!

More stuff from the Talent Code Blog....

Instant proverb of the day:
You are what you count.


Many of the talent hotbeds I visited for the book don’t rely on conventional performance yardsticks. Instead, they design their own.
The other day I met Graham Walker and Steve Robinson, who coach many of England’s fast-rising crop of junior golfers. Their most important teaching tool? A long piece of rope, which they use to mark off distances for accuracy-improving games they’ve designed. For instance, players make a series of wedge shots from 10, 20, and 30 yards, marking each result on specially designed scorecards.
Or there’s the technique of Pinchas Zuckerman, the great Israeli violinist, whose practice method consisted of a two jars and a bunch of marbles. Each time he played a piece perfectly, Zuckerman transferred a single marble from one jar to the other. When the second jar was full, he was ready.
In both cases, the strategy is the same: to realize that conventional measures (scoreboards, for instance, or hours of practice time) are far too loose and vague, while homemade yardsticks connect to real practice goals — improving accuracy or perfect repetition. All well-designed yardsticks share a few common features:

• Clarity. There are no gray areas; just cool, inarguable, trackable numbers.
• Stretchiness. A well-designed yardstick can accomodate a variety of abilities, and there’s an improvement ladder implicitly built in.
• Ownability. Feedback is direct, not filtered through a higher authority.

It’s not just what you keep track of — it’s also what you don’t keep track of. Unlike virtually every other company in the world,  dot-com shoe company Zappos doesn’t keep track of how long its employees talk to each customer. Instead, it actively encourages its employees to spend as much phone time as they need to make their customers happy — even to the point of helping arrange a pizza delivery to a hungry customer. The longest call so far? Four hours

Thoughts from The EGU Director of Coaching on County Coaching networks

Hi all, 


I thought I would share these thoughts from Peter Mattsson the EGU Director of Coaching with you all. He was invited to deliver a session for the coaches in Sussex and this is what he had to say afterwards...


"Last night I did a session for the so called Sussex County Coaches network. This network is part of the initiatives supported by the County Golf Partnership which in turn is supported by funding from Sport England through the England Golf Partnership. Pretty much each county that has formed a partnership should have one of these networks, designed to train, educate and develop the coaches and the coaching that operate within the county. What last night’s session made me realise is what a complete paradigm shift this is. Coach education has always been considered the job of the PGA by the amateur bodies. Even though it still is, these amateur bodies like the county unions and the national unions are now starting to realise that if we want the world’s best players, we will need the world’s best coaches. What I found last night was a group of young, aspiring, motivated and willing to learn people that almost without exception work full time in coaching. The times of the pro running the pro shop and giving lessons for a few hours per week are gone, at least if you really want to get into coaching. Coaching is a full time job that requires specialist training!"


I couldn't agree more!!

Subtle ways we can create and nurture talent

You might want to check out this link from the Talent Code website. Daniel has an interesting take on how talent is inspired and nurtured and I think it points to ways in which we can do the same.

Lighting Fires � The Talent Code