Coaches Corner

For years it has frustrated me that I don't know how to code.  I understand (I think) some of the basic concepts but don't know the mechanics of it.  What difference does this make to coaching?    Well, I can't speak for all coaches but running a program means I have a lot of different files with different names all about the same or similar things.  Coding will (I hope) help me manage my files and information.  Once this happens I will be able to link the data together to, hopefully, develop a deeper knowledge .  And once this happens I will be able to coach more effectively and efficiently.  In theory I can already do this but every time I try I spent 2 hours looking through old files to work out what is in them before realising I've done nothing constructive for the past 2 hours. I spotted this link about a free online coding course on Stephen Downes' website which got me excited, so I'm going to start my Code Year today. Wish me luck.

ReadWriteWeb is an interesting blog as it has a lot of information on tech/web, but also a lot on how to develop a company.   This book review of Tribal Leadership  is a good example. As always, discussions about team culture in business resonate with my experiences with sport over the years.  There are numerous 'stages of cultural development' books and blogs and all have aspects which make sense, even though not all coaches are interested.   Some coaches still ascribe to the "I'm a coach, not a psychologist", which is fine if you are only ever coaching a team for an 8 month season of the year (and are likely to have a huge turnover of players the following year). The problem with a lot of business views on leadership and teamwork are that, in some cases, the leaders of this area are partly responsible for the Global Financial Crisis (or, at least, some of the more spectacular business failures recently).   Gladwell's article on McKinsey springs

I found  this article yesterday and found it pretty interesting.  I t's worth a read but basically there are a few take aways:  Behaviour is a combination of motivation and ability with a trigger to set it off. If you are very motivated to do something but you have low ability (i.e. it's hard) then you are unlikely to perform the behaviour and to create a new habit.  If your ability is high (i.e. it's easy) but your motivation is low then it's equally unlikely you are going to do the behaviour and create a new habit.  His point is that we spend all our time trying to move the motivation part of the equation which is very hard, especially when trying to change it in other people. Maybe we should look at moving the ability i.e. making it easy.  So he advocates finding the minimum enjoyable action. what is the smallest, literally laughable thing you can do in the area you are focussing on. i've been playing around with it a bit. so my desk is always

I stumbled upon this article which i found fascinating.  I  never even realised that this is a problem, the way my mind works is to think about ways to exploit any system. doing this creates a whole lot of unintended effects. the answer is to change the rules of the system or the system itself but keeping perspective on the purpose of the system is the key.  The a link from one of the comments went to this blog post on 'playing to win' .  It's related to computer games and i'm only part of the way through but from what i've read so far it's pretty interesting.