The Practice That Will Change Your Coaching More Than Any Clinic.

Issue 160- Jason Payne, CMPC.

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Most coaches have a rough version of a philosophy rattling around in their head. It remains there as most have never formally written it down.

That isn't a criticism. It's a reality, partly because most coaches favor action over reflection and because of the busy environment they work in.

Like most coaches, you have a pile of implicit beliefs about how practice should run, what matters, how athletes learn, what a program should feel like, what your standards are, and how your culture can live above the line of those standards. You have never written any of them down. You have absorbed them from mentors, lived some of them in your own playing career, picked up others at clinics, inherited a few from a coach who happened to be the voice in your head the day you took your first head job.

You have never actually sorted through all of this information and decided what aligns with who you are.

Coaches who haven't sorted their beliefs end up channeling whatever belief is loudest in the moment. In the fourth quarter of a close game, you'd seldom make the same decision if you were reflecting with a cup of coffee and a notebook in your living room. Coaches with unexamined philosophies coach reactively. They often know something isn't quite right. They just can't name it. They know they are drifting away from who they authentically are. But they don't know how to fix it.

I spent years in that exact same place.

I was obsessive about learning; I attended clinics, read piles of books, and watched instructional DVDs from the best in the game. I had too much going on in my head. So many ideas that worked for others. I hadn't taken the time to articulate my own ideas. When someone asked me what my coaching philosophy was, I used coach-speak and gave them a version that I thought sounded impressive. Then I would move the conversation along as fast as possible before they asked for more detail.

Then I started writing.

Not a book. That wasn't on my radar at all. Not even a weekly newsletter; my thoughts weren't organized enough to be helpful to anyone. I started writing because of a podcast. Oddly, I think it was a fantasy football podcast. Seattle Seahawks coach Pete Carroll was a guest promoting his excellent book, Win Forever: Live, Work, and Play Like a Champion. In the book, Carroll explains how formalizing his philosophy profoundly changed his coaching. He ended the interview by challenging leaders and coaches to commit their philosophy to paper. I started writing that week, and I haven't really stopped

There are two lessons from this. The first is as close to a universal law as exists in my life: if you promote your book on a podcast, I am likely to buy it immediately. I am not complaining, just sharing a fact.

The second was how badly I needed Carroll's message at that point of my coaching journey. Carroll's underlying message was that every coach needs a philosophy that everyone in the organization can articulate. I couldn't even articulate my philosophy, let alone expect the people I coached and coached with to explain it.

He ended the interview by challenging leaders and coaches to commit their philosophy to paper. So I sat down one Sunday morning, while the rest of my house slept in, and put a pen to paper. I haven't stopped since. What I discovered in this practice is the thing I want to share today.

Writing is the practice that clarifies your thinking.

Reflection and talking through your ideas with someone you trust matter, but they still involve someone else's opinions and thoughts. Writing. The specific discipline of putting a sentence on a page and then asking whether you actually believe it. This allows you to gain real clarity of thought.

Here is what happens. You start writing on, say, how you want to respond when your athletes make mistakes. You write the sentence you think you believe. You read it back. You immediately feel that something is slightly off. The sentence does not match how you responded last week to the exact scenario. So you rewrite, and you discover the belief you actually hold, which was underneath the surface of what you thought you believed.

This is how you get clarity. It happens every time I sit down to write. The chapters I spent the most time revising are the ones where the writing process changed my mind about what I had been doing on the floor for a decade. The more I write, the clearer I get about what is really important to me as a coach.

The plan. One hour. Once a week.

You do not need to write a book or even a newsletter. Ninety-five percent of what you learn by writing one is available in a much lighter practice.

The practice: one hour, once a week, writing one sentence at a time about something you believe about coaching, until you figure out whether you actually believe it.

That is it. No audience required. No publication required. No one has to see it but you.

Three prompts to start with this week:

I am at my best during games when....

The thing I want every athlete to leave my program with is...

The reason I coach is...

Write for one hour. Do not stop to edit. No one else needs to read it; you are the target audience. Don't stop to make it sound professional. Just put sentences down, read them back, and keep going until you find the ones you actually believe.

What happens when you don't?

Coaches who do not do this work keep coaching from inherited beliefs they have never examined. They burn out earlier than the coaches who do. They lose athletes they could have kept, because the gap between what the program says it stands for and what it actually enforces keeps widening. They drift from the coach they meant to become into the coach the season has reduced them to.

I know this one. It was me for far too long.

What happens if you do?

You arrive at practice with clarity. The hard conversations get easier because you know what you stand for. Decisions get easier because you know what you value. Your athletes feel the coherence. Your family feels you more present at home because the work is less confusing when you leave the gym.

This is what alignment actually is in practice. Coaching from a philosophy you have examined, named, and chosen

But if you take nothing else from this newsletter this week, experiment and write on those three prompts

Sit down for one hour. Write one sentence at a time. Figure out what you actually believe.

That hour is the single best thing you can do for your coaching between now and the end of the season.

— Jason​
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P.S. Two quick things.

The Aligned Coach Scorecard is at 109 coaches now. The diagnostic maps the same four cornerstones this formula sits inside.

Kindle pre-order for ALIGNED: The Inside Out Path to Coaching Excellence is live on Amazon. Twenty-five days to launch. Every pre-order between now and October 27 helps the book find coaches beyond my list. The Paperback will be available for Pre-order this week.

Enjoy your week.