Hi Coach,
Before you dive in, two quick notes:
Join the Community: It’s a free place for coaches to connect, share ideas, and learn from one another. We’ve also consolidated all our free coaching resources there. Click HERE to join 500+ other coaches!
Join our NIKE Basketball/Volleyball Camps Staff: We’re recruiting coaches to join our staff for our NIKE Basketball Camps and NIKE Volleyball Camps. If you’re interested in working a camp, learn more or fill out the form HERE.
In today’s issue…
Applying the N.E.A.T. model to help athletes regain confidence and handle emotions
What players are actually looking for from their coach
And more…
🗣️ QUOTE
“How you tell the story of your failure determines whether you succumb to pressure or grow from it.”
📝 NEWSLETTER
Navigating our own emotions in coaching can be extremely challenging.
On top of that, coaches are tasked with helping their athletes on an individual level and their team on a group level navigate their emotions.
We’ve all coached athletes or teams who struggled to handle hard well.
Adversity hits. Emotions rise. Confidence dips. Performance suffers.
We try to help them navigate the emotional storm they often find themselves in, but it can be hard for them (and us as coaches) to get out of it.
My friend Alan Keane, co-founder of MVMT Sports and National Team coach for Great Britain Basketball, shared a framework with me for helping athletes handle emotions and regain confidence that I found really helpful.
The N.E.A.T. model:
N - Normalize: Acknowledge that lacking confidence or feeling emotion is normal.
E - Expect: Expect to respond with emotion; it's part of being human.
A - Accept: Accept the current state without judgment. Name it to tame it. Saying, “I’m feeling ___,” goes a long way toward helping athletes (or coaches) regulate.
T - Take Care: Take care of the next play. Make a plan to move forward. Put attention on what can be controlled in the present moment.
This model is a helpful place to start with players or coaches around emotional regulation and responding to dips in confidence.
The next phase for athletes and coaches in handling these emotions and dips in confidence is to begin to reframe the internal narratives we tell ourselves.
Steve Magness (a guest on episodes 88-89 of the podcast) recently shared some fascinating findings from a research study looking at athletes who identified as “choking-prone.”
The study found that the fear of failure wasn’t what produce the “choking,” it was the internal self-criticism that was ongoing after mistakes.
Athletes begin to tell themselves stories like…
“I always do this.”
“I’ll never be good at X.”
“I just can’t handle Y.”
“I’m a choker.”
These self-criticisms focus on “stable, internal causes,” as opposed to “unstable, controllable causes.”
Stable, internal cause = “I’m not clutch.”
Unstable, controllable cause = “I didn’t prepare enough for that situation.”
Helping athletes learn how to explain their failures better actually leads to increases in confidence and lower levels of self-criticism and fear of failure.
Magness shares three tips for how we can tell better failure stories to our athletes and help them do the same:
Make it specific - Avoid global feedback like “I choked,” and instead focus on the specific action that needs to be improved, For example, “I took a highly-contested shot.”
Make it unstable - Avoid words like always and never. Talk about what happened today or in the moment.
Make it controllable - Avoid identity statements like, “I’m not clutch,” and shift to statements that focus on what can be controlled and improved upon. For example, “I need to practice shooting contested shots with little time left on the shot clock.”
We often tell athletes…
“Be confident”
“Relax”
“Stay calm”
“Don’t be afraid of mistakes”
Our intentions are good, but the advice falls short.
We need to teach athletes how to acknowledge and accept their emotions (using something like the N.E.A.T. model), then we need to help them learn how to tell themselves a better story about their failures.
“How you tell the story of your failure determines whether you succumb to pressure or grow from it.” — Steve Magness
🧠 COACHING APPLICATION
Two ideas for how this could apply in your coaching context…
Share the N.E.A.T. model with your team or coaching staff. Take 10-15 minutes to discuss some potential scenarios with coaches and/or players that might impact confidence and/or emotions during practices or games. Discuss your ideal response to these situations and how you will Accept and Take Care the next time you’re in the situation.
Share and discuss the post from Steve Magness with your coaching staff and/or team. Spend a few minutes having coaches and/or players write down the story of an individual or team failure using the three tips (specific, unstable, controllable) Magness shares.
🎧 PODCAST EPISODE
Topics include:
What players want from their coach
The one simple skill every coach needs to master
Why coaches should use less praise
Takeaways:
Affirmation has a greater impact on players than praise
Use a model like N.E.A.T. to help player handle and respond to emotions
Know the motivations of the athletes you’re leading
Noticing is one of the most important things we do as a coach
📝 Download the Notes (located inside the free Community) 👉 Free PDF
👋 CLOSING
Thanks for reading, I hope this serves you on your journey.
To your growth,
Luke Gromer, RYG Athletics | A NIKE Sports Camp Provider
P.S. We’re recruiting coaches to join our staffs for our NIKE Basketball Camps and NIKE Volleyball Camps. If you’re interested in working a camp, learn more or fill out the form HERE.
📈 COACHING RESOURCES
Here are a few ways we can help you grow as a coach.
#1: COMMUNITY 🫱🏻🫲🏽
Join the Better Coaching Community to connect with and learn from 500+ other like-minded coaches!
#2: PODCAST 🎧
Listen to any of the 130+ episodes of The Better Coaching Podcast.
#3: PODCAST NOTES & FREE RESOURCES 📝
Get detailed notes on every episode of the Better Coaching Podcast and other free coaching resources.