Great video explaining Carol Dweck's Growth and Fixed mindset concept

Hi all,

I found this great video which explains Carol Dweck's concept of a 'Growth Mindset' and thought I would share it with you.

I think that this aspect of developing young sports participants is the bit that I see being missed so often. Everywhere you go in kids sports there are people who are bombarding them with external influences that foster a fixed mindset. The way we praise, the fact that it is always about winning and losing, the things shouted by parents from the sideline all drive children into having fixed mindsets.

Anyway I will let you take a look for yourself.

Golf Boys 2.Oh!

Some of you might remember the original 'Golf Boys' video when Hunter Mahan, Ricky Fowler, Ben Crane and Bubba Watson got together to produce a spoof music video called 'Oh, Oh, Oh' which went viral and got over 6.5 Million views. If you missed it here it is below...it is also worth watching the 'making of' series which is just as hilarious.



Well they are back with Golf Boys '2.Oh!' this is really slick and the lyrics are really clever.

Enjoy and share

Rudy Duran - A master coach in every sense of the word, the ultimate unsung hero

I was once fortunate enough to be given the opportunity to listen to a gentleman called Rudy Duran talk about his coaching. You maybe forgiven for not knowing who Rudy Duran is as not many people have heard of him, he was Tiger Wood's golf coach from the age of 4 to 10. Firstly, I have to say that you can not imagine a more self effacing, humble and genuine person. Rudy was honest and open and prepared to admit the mistakes he made as much as the good things he did. In many ways he underplayed his involvement in Tiger's development often just suggesting that all he did was get out of the way of a genius being nurtured. For me he played an absolutely critical role in enabling Woods, who was undoubtedly well above average in his golfing abilities as a four year old (much of this can be put down to his early experiences with his father who was a recent convert to golf and a total golf nut) as Rudy recalls, "not many 4 year olds can read their own putts".The amazing thing is that I'm not even sure if Rudy himself, fully appreciates the role he played.To me the story is a fascinating one because, as with most stories about exceptional talent or outliers there are so many aspects that contribute to the development of Woods. It is my belief that Rudy Duran was at heart of many of them, I will try to list them as best I can below:

1. Rudy's coaching philosophy is based on the fact that he believes golf is a pretty easy game to play. With a little time and practice most people will improve quickly. The game is very hard at the elite level with tiny margins deciding success and failure but the key for Rudy is to let people experience the joy of the game so that they develop a love for the activity which will then drive them into lifelong participation. The rest takes care of itself. - Rudy wants his pupils to fall in love with the game - a critical ingredient to intrinsically motivated future improvement. 

2. Rudy was the owner operator of an 18 hole par 3 public golf facility in southern calafornia, as such he had complete control over timetabling of the course and was so committed to junior golf that he would block out the 1st tee on a Saturday morning for junior competitions even though he could have sold the green fees to adult players 3 times over. As the owner operator his income was mostly derived from green fees, coaching was a sideline and something he did mostly for fun. In this respect taking 2 hours or so at a time to coach Tiger and play golf with him was no problem and meant that Tiger had a unique  opportunity to play alongside his coach, observe, experiment and explore. Rudy had such freedom that he would often play games with Tiger that involved curving the ball around the club house or hitting a shot under a picnic table! -How many kids get the opportunity to play games with their coach and to have the freedom to experiment with a guide at their side? 

3. Rudy's coaching took place 85% of the time on the golf course and 15% away from the course on the practice areas. On the infrequent occassions when they were on the range they would be going through all aspects of the game working backwards from the putting green to the full swing. . - Tiger learned to play the game and to develop his own solutions to getting the ball in the hole, he learned this before he tried to refine his technique and as such he developed the ability to score and play instead if just learning skills outside of the context of the game which can often be the experience of many youngsters.

4. Tiger, his father and Rudy would spend about an hour after each session chatting about the session and Tiger's game. These post game chats were also described by Rudy as 'brainstorming' sessions where they would create practice programme designed to enable Tiger to play his best in competitions. There were typically 5 or 6 sessions per month sometimes more if Tiger was leading to one of the major junior tournaments which were 8 to 10 a year. - Rudy ensured that Tiger took his learning away with him and work on things when Tiger was at home. This way he was able to guide the Tiger's practice time between coaching sessions and make that practice time more deliberate. 

5. Rudy said that his coaching was based on challenging Tiger to achieve certain goals. An example of this was the way Rudy created Tiger's 'personal par' where Tiger would be trying to play a hole in less shots than the number set for him by Rudy. Rudy says that the biggest difficulty for him in this was to kep coming up with things that pushed Tiger enough to maintain his interest. - By setting challenges and obstacles for Tiger to overcome he maintained his motivation and also allowed him to develop skill more rapidly through guided experimentation.

6. Rudy describes his coaching style as "waiting for the coachable moments" where he would wait for Tiger to stumble at something and then ask him questions about how what he could do to acheive the goal. - this questioning approach has been shown to be a route to giving the player/athlete ownership of their development which means that they learn new tactics and skills and they reatin the knowledge much more effectively than if they are merely told how to solve the problem. 

To me, so much of what Rudy Duran explained about the way he approached coaching Tiger Woods points to him being a highly accomplished coach of children as well as being a high performing coach of talent. I find it difficult to imagine that these early experiences did not provide the foundations for Tiger's future development and gave him a major headstart over so many of his contemporaries. I often wonder what might have happened if Tiger hadn't found Rudy. 

When is a coach a good coach? When they talk less....

Those of you who follow my posts will know that I coach a hockey team as well as work with performance golfers. Well this season my team has been struggling...well by struggling I mean we are rock bottom of the league. I have been busy with work and haven't really been able to do enough with them or be focussed enough to get them to understand what needs to be done. They are talented but young and  inexperienced and we are losing games that we should be winning because they are not really able to execute game plans effectively. Anyway, I haven't been doing the rounds of the blogs that I follow very much recently and I have been missing out on some really good bits of information consequently.

Here is another great nugget from Dan Coyle author of The Talent Code on how great coaches communicate. http://thetalentcode.com/2011/11/08/a-word-of-coaching-advice-talk-less-matter-more/

I know I am going to be applying this from now on and hopefully our fortunes might change around.

Happy reading. 

PDS Performance Coach Training - Amazing coach development

I have been doing some personal development recently and I am 2/5 of the way through the Performance Coach course run by Mark Bennett MBE from Performance Development Systems and I have to say that it is one of the most transformational coach development experiences I have had to date.

The focus of the PDS programme is all about the human aspect of coaching and really looks in depth at the interaction between the coach and the participant. One of the main drivers behind the programme is getting people to take action and to get them motivated to take action, by utilising a number of highly skilful communication tools and by exploring how and when to use these tools most effectively I have found that my coaching is now 100% better than it was previously. I thought I was a good communicator and considered this to be one of my strengths, through this course and through watching Mark at work I have discovered that I am about 20% of where I should be in order to be truly effective.

I know that in the past I have looked for the technical or tactical or physical aspects when looking at coach development options. I realise now that I should have spent much more time on how I engage with the players I work with as the results I am getting now are so much better than previously.

It is truly powerful stuff and something that I would recommend to any coach looking to develop themselves and to work with high performance players.

The EGU has formed a partnership with PDS to enable coaches working in the England Talent Pathway (county academy, county, regional, national) to access the course at a 40% discount. Courses are running at the end of October, go to the PDS website to find out when the next course is running near you.

look at the skill of these guys!!

This is really good to see and shows just how skilful these guys are. Watch how close they are on so many of the shots...

The W.I.G. Game

Here is a practice game I got from Dave Alred (www.davealred.com or www.performingunderpressure.com) at a seminar recently. For those of you who don't know Dave he is Johnny Wilkinson's kicking coach and since he has stopped working with England Rugby full time he has become a free lancer working with quite a few performance athletes including a couple of performance golfers. Dave is also a part of the British Olympic Association elite coaching team that is headed by Clive Woodward...they did some pilot work with one of our leading amateurs Melissa Reid who has since gone on to turn professional and is having a lot of success on the LET.

Dave says that he designed the WIG game (which stands for 'WOW I'm Good') as a game which helps players learn what they are capable of and develops their belief in themselves. In the WIG game the player has an allocated number of attempts at each shot (in this case 3). The player takes their tee shot and ask themselves if they could play that shot any better, if the answer is yes they put an X on their scorecard and try again, if they think  they could improve on that they record another X and try again, the 3rd shot they must take the result of regardless.

The player continues like this for the entire round recording the Xs as they go.

Having 3 attempts at each shot means that players are likely to record a pretty good score which builds confidence and belief. The player works to improve by reducing the number of Xs on their card over time and getting into a state when they can hit the right shot first time.

Good luck with it and enjoy.