Transcript

CHRIS CUSHION

As you see, we can use the data as feedback. So we can give the coaches information back, we can reinforce the type of behaviours that we want, and we can make recommendations for practise. That's a really useful device, starting with what coaches do. So this research has been going on, as I say, since the '70s in coaching. And there are some implications from it. And I'll just quickly skip over those.

Number one, the most important thing that we find again and again and again, everyone talks a great game. But when we actually observe them, we find low self-awareness. So if we get 10 coaches in a room and ask them to explain their behaviour to us, only two of them will get it right. Eight of them will get it wrong. So 80% of coaches probably don't understand their own coaching behaviour, and it's a pretty consistent finding when we start looking at objective measures of coaching behaviour. Interestingly, if we ask the athletes the data switches, so if we get 10 athletes and ask them to describe their coach's behaviour, eight of them get it right and only two of them get it wrong.

So if I want to know about you as a coach, yeah, I ain't talking to you, I'm going to go and talk to your athletes, because they will give me a better and more accurate description of what you do as a coach than you will. OK, so that's quite important. So that self-awareness is really interesting and important. It happens again and again and again. There's a huge consistency in the data. So just an example here-- I use a lot of questioning, so I tend to spend about a week with a coach if they're full time, maybe a bit longer to get that baseline analysis. One coach in particular, tell me about your coaching. Oh, yeah, I used to be really directed, but now I use a lot of questioning. A great quote-- I use a lot of questioning. At the end of the week, his questioning behaviour was 3.4% of his overall profile. So 96% point something of his behaviour wasn't questioning. So that, to me, isn't I use a lot of questioning. That's something else. That's something else.