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...
13 days ago • 5 min read
Quentin Focus isn't a Trait; it's a Performance Enhancer. How to Improve Your Athletes' Focus. Issue 141- Jason Payne CMPC I start every practice with three minutes of silence. No music, drills, bouncing balls, random shots or chatter. The athletes find a comfortable place and focus on their breath. When their attention wanders, and it does, they bring it back without judgment. I felt ridiculous the first week. I worried about how they would react, what a parent would think if they walked in...
20 days ago • 7 min read
Quentin "I Am So Tired"- What You can Learn from the Burnout of the World's best coaches. Issue 140- Jason Payne CMPC Pep Guardiola broke down in tears after Manchester City’s final game of the season, a 2-1 defeat to Aston Villa. A few days later, he stepped in front of a press conference and gave coaches everywhere the most honest thing any manager has said in a long time. “I am so tired. Seriously, I am so tired.” He had a year left on his contract. Twenty major trophies in ten years at...
27 days ago • 8 min read
Quentin The Story Athletes Tell Themselves: Coaching Confidence by Embracing the Hero's Story AI believes that Jeff Probst has got ups. Issue 139- Jason Payne CMPC I have been a fan of Survivor since the show debuted in 2000. I never miss an episode. The social and psychological experiment that unfolds each week is always entertaining. It has kept my attention for 25 years. Season 50 wrapped up this week, and it was a fun season with twists and turns. During the finale, Christian, a member of...
about 1 month ago • 6 min read
Quentin Your Most Committed Athletes Are Often Your Most Fragile Issue 138- Jason Payne CMPC Every coach has one or two of them. The athlete who arrives first to practice and leaves last. Who treats a missed shot like a personal failing. Who can’t take a Sunday off without anxiety creeping in? Who takes every piece of feedback as a personal attack on who they are. What you’re watching isn’t elite commitment. Though many coaches believe it is. It’s actually identity foreclosure, and it’s one...
about 1 month ago • 5 min read
Quentin For The All Blacks, The Mission Became Bigger than Winning Issue 137- Jason Payne C.M.P.C. In 2007, the New Zealand All Blacks lost in the quarter-finals of the Rugby World Cup. To France, on French soil. The country treated it like a national disaster. This was a team that had never lost at the quarter-final stage of a World Cup. A program with a 76 percent all-time winning percentage going back to 1903. A nation of five million people that had punched above its weight in rugby for a...
about 2 months ago • 6 min read
Quentin High Standards without Psychological Safety Don't Build Champions, They Break Them. Issue 136- Jason Payne CMPC. At the start of my career, I believed that holding high standards meant being a hardline, no-nonsense coach. I thought my job was to be intense, the voice that didn't let things slide, catching the half-effort rep, and the voice that reminded everyone the bar didn't move, because there were consequences. I played for coaches who modelled it that way, and I learned their...
about 2 months ago • 6 min read
Quentin The Steps I Took To Stop Burning Out Every Season. Issue #135- Jason Payne C.M.P.C For the first decade of my coaching career, I hit the wall in February. Usually not lightly, but more like a young Wil E. Coyote, full speed every time. Appearing like the annual holiday you hate. And like Wile E., it looked the same every year. By late January, the season I’d been excited about in October had quietly become something I was surviving. I arrived early. I stayed late. I broke down film...
2 months ago • 7 min read
Quentin Why Finding Your Why isn't Enough. Issue 134- by Jason Payne C.M.P.C. Why "Find Your Why" Isn't Enough For the last decade, "find your why" has been a widely forwarded piece of advice in coaching and leadership development. You've heard it in clinics, on podcasts, from the assistant who read the book on a plane. It's on a sticky note on somebody's office wall right now. It is held as the northstar of leading from a place of meaning. It's good advice. It's also not enough. Here's the...
2 months ago • 4 min read