Quentin A Four-Minute Diagnostic To Help Work from The Inside Out Issue 150- Jason Payne, CMPC You know your team’s win-loss record from last season. You can probably tell me who led your team in scoring, in rebounds, in assists. You have scouting reports for every athlete you have ever coached, whether you kept them formally or in your head. The ones who improved or plateaued. The player you knew was going to become something more than the version who walked into your gym at the start of...
12 days ago • 4 min read
Quentin Something I've Been Writing For Six Years and Thinking About For Twenty-Five Issue 149- Jason Payne, CMPC Somewhere in the last twelve months, you have probably had this thought. Maybe it hit after a bad game that left you drained of energy like you had played instead of coached. Perhaps it arrived on a Sunday afternoon when you realized there was a part of you dreading practice on Monday. Or it was the exhaustion you felt in every cell of your body the day after your season...
19 days ago • 5 min read
Quentin The Version of You That Athletes See That You Don’t Issue 148- Jason Payne, CMPC Somewhere around my tenth or eleventh year of coaching, an athlete of mine told me something that was hard to hear, but true. Fortunately, it has shaped my coaching ever since. He was a senior. Our program was struggling that season. It was late February, and his career was winding down. We had a practice coming up in an hour. He was hanging around the office after his class, and casually he said that, as...
26 days ago • 6 min read
Quentin What You Can Borrow From the NFL to Keep Your Culture Alive During the Season's First 10 Days. Issue 147- Jason Payne, CMPC NFL training camps open this weekend. The football fan in me can't wait. However, I love summer and can't believe that we are already talking about football. The World Cup hasn't even ended yet. Regardless, the NFL season is inevitable, and by the end of next week, the culture of thirty-two football seasons will already be set. Not the schemes or the depth...
about 1 month ago • 8 min read
Quentin What Champions Do Between Points. Issue 146- Jason Payne, CMPC Wimbledon is in the second week. If you have watched any of it, you have watched the most-studied twenty seconds in performance psychology, whether you knew it or not. The camera cuts to the server as they walk back to the baseline. Their eyes go down. They bounce the ball three times, or four, or some specific number they have used since they were fifteen. They breathe. Then they serve. Twenty seconds. Between every...
about 1 month ago • 7 min read
Quentin The Coach on the Sideline is Either the Thermometer or the Thermostat Issue 145- Jason Payne, CMPC The Coach on the Touchline The camera cuts to the manager twenty times a game. Maybe more in this World Cup. FIFA loves the super-slow-motion shots of fans and managers. Some project calm. Even though they aren't calm. They handle the ups and downs of the game evenly. They sense the emotional temperature of their team and adjust accordingly. Others give off very frenetic energy. Everyone...
about 2 months ago • 5 min read
Quentin Joy is a Non-Negotiable Issue 144- Jason Payne, CMPC A few years ago, I was brought in midseason to consult with a team in crisis. 25 percent of its roster walked away from the sport mid-season. I made assumptions about what I would find when I started working with the team. I expected a toxic environment that left these young athletes little choice. I was wrong. The culture was relatively healthy, although morale was low. Athletes weren't leaving due to injury. They weren’t being...
about 2 months ago • 6 min read
Quentin The Psychology of the Knicks Historic Comeback Issue 143- Jason Payne, CMPC The Knicks came back from twenty-nine points down in Game 4 of the NBA Finals, and the coverage you saw probably focused on the run. The shots that fell. Wemby's missed free throw (you could see the tension he felt), OG's block of a questionable Fox layup. OG's amazing tip-in of the Brunson miss to win the game. That is the obvious story. But there is another story that coaches can learn more from. The...
2 months ago • 6 min read
Quentin Your Bench Is Breathing Different Air Than Your Starters Issue 142- Jason Payne, CMPC When Amy Edmondson coined the term "psychological safety" in 1999, she administered her survey to individuals in a work setting. Not teams. That detail is easy to miss, and it changes the conversation. What Edmondson found, and what Google’s Project Aristotle reaffirmed a decade later in its five-year study of 180 teams, was that two people on the same team would routinely give wildly different...
2 months ago • 5 min read