The Coach: Leadership for Excellence /The Successful Coach, an Exploration

Designed/Produced by Peregrine Press for Amateur Softball Association

Author: Dr. Peter S. Pierro

The Challenge - Being Your Best

Success #2

"Success is the progressive realization of worthwhile, pre-determined personal goals.”

Paul J. Meyer

Success is personal; it is the result of reaching your goal. It is goal oriented; if you aspire to be a realtor, being a bank teller is not being successful. For someone else with the goal to become a bank teller, becoming a bank teller is success. Paul J. Meyer goes on to point out that this must be worthwhile; it must be aligned with your value system. The goals must be acceptable to your attitudes about yourself and your perception of the world around you.

Goal setting and reaching, therefore, are extremely important. To become a success in your own mind, you must set goals that are meaningful to you, that will, when reached, enable you to feel successful.

I am currently reading a biography of one of my favorite sports figures; Vince Lombardi. Was Vince Lombardi successful? I don't know. I don't know what his goals were. From our point of view, he was a great success as a football player and as a coach, but that is our perception. What were his dreams, his visions, his life-goals? Only he and to some degree those who were close to him and who loved him knew his own personal marks of success. I have the strong feeling from what I have read and heard of Lombardi that he felt that he was a successful player and coach, father and husband, religious person and all-around human being.

A good indirect way of considering his success achievement is to examine his ability to inspire his football players. He was an excellent model. He inspired them to heights they had not  been aware were accessible to them.

Inspiration is at the highest level of motivation. How do we motivate our players? How do we inspire them? We motivate and we inspire only when we, ourselves, care enough to do whatever is necessary to reach our own dreams.

Positive Expectancy

The Self-fulfilling Prophecy simply means that people tend to do what they are expected to do, and this is even more true when we are dealing with children. The famous Hawthorne Studies showed that workers will improve on their performance if they believe that their bosses are interested in their welfare.

The most famous of the positive expectancy research with children is documented in the book, Pygmalion in the Classroom. The authors, Rosenthal and Jacobson, conducted a simple, and beautiful, study. In the Spring of 1964, they administered a group scholastic aptitude test to a number of children in grades one through five. At random, they selected about 20 percent of the children and labeled them 'potential academic spurters'. In an informal way, at the pre-school workshops and in chance meetings in the halls, they informed the teachers of the chosen 'spurters' that these children could be expected to show unusual intellectual gains in the year ahead.

At the end of the year, the selected children showed a significantly higher achievement growth than the non-selected children. In addition, the teachers described the selected children as having a better chance of being successful later in life, as being happier, more curious and more interesting than the other children.

The evaluation of the program indicated that the teachers did not spend more time with the selected children, nor did they talk more with them. The explanation seemed to lie in the quality of the relationship between the teacher and the individual child. By voice, touch, facial expression, and posture, the teacher communicated the expectation to be successful to the child, who in turn, seemed to have gained a more positive self-image and a higher expectation of being successful in the learning tasks.

Players’ Expectations

Have you ever watched a great coach in action? They expect excellence and they get it. Of course, they also operate in an excellent fashion. We did an informal survey and asked players what qualities that they considered to be the marks of a good coach. Here's a brief summary:

Good coaches expect us to do our best.

Good coaches are interested in us as people, not just as players.

Good coaches have their own goals and share them with us.

Good coaches are fair; they don't have favorites.

Good coaches are learners, too; they know the rules, the skills and how to teach us how to play well.

Good coaches think well of themselves.  That means that they can like us.

Good coaches communicate well, including listening to us.

Good coaches are models; they just don't tell us what to do, they show us what to do.

Good coaches have a sense of humor; they can laugh and have fun and they can even laugh at themselves.

Good coaches love the game that they are coaching and they love being a coach.

That makes it simple, follow that advice and you will be a smash success. Well, at least you and your players will have a good experience.