Coaches are very busy and their time is a precious commodity. Managing their time is one of the key components to their success. Here are 7 benefits to being committed to better time management.

This post was provided  Busy.Coach, a site designed to help coaches manage their time and be more productive.

By Mandy Green,

I know that I am probably preaching to the choir by sending this information to a group of coaches who have committed already to reading a newsletter about productivity for coaches.

I really appreciate that you read my newsletter, I do.  Having said that, just know that I mean this question with no disrespect, “How good are you at actually applying the information you get from me every Sunday?”

I ask this because as I continue to train coaches on how to manage their time better so they can perform at the highest level for their career, their team, and for their family, I’m finding more and more how many coaches actually hate this topic . . . at first.

These are pretty common responses I get all the time when I tell coaches or business professionals that I can help them get higher quality work done in less time with less effort:

“There is no way I can manage my day any better than I already am because I have so many things to do.”

“I am being interrupted all of the time or I have all of these obligations.”

“It is hard to believe that I could actually have harmony in my life, so why even bother trying to do better with my scheduling each day?”

This is my typical response when I hear these things-

“If you don’t have a high level of focus or discipline to work on the right things, you are wasting time and things are taking longer to finish so as a program, you are probably working a lot more hours than you need to, which is taking away your free time to spend at home with family and friends.”

As we head into 2018 tomorrow, I wanted to give you 7 good reasons you should focus on learning to manage your time more of a priority this year:

You can accomplish more with less effort

Better time management can help you do more of what you have to do – faster. This doesn’t mean cutting corners or a decrease in quality. You just do what you have to do quicker (office paperwork) so you can do what you want to do sooner (coaching your sport or going home to spend more time with your family).

You feel calmer and more in control

When you don’t have control of your time, it’s easy to end up feeling rushed and overwhelmed with all there is to do. And when that happens, coaches tend to work harder and longer which leads to burnout and fatigue.  Once you learn how to manage your time, you no longer subject yourself to that level of stress. Besides it being better for your health, you have a clearer picture of the demands on your time.

Free time is necessary

Everyone needs time to relax and unwind. Unfortunately, though, many of us don’t get enough of it. Between office responsibilities, recruiting, family responsibilities, errands, and upkeep on the house and the yard, most of us are hard-pressed to find even 10 minutes to sit and do nothing.

Having good time management skills helps you find that time. When you’re more structured, focused, and disciplined to get the right things done, you’re going to get more done in less time. You accumulate extra time throughout your day that you can use later to relax, unwind, and prepare for a good night’s sleep.

You have more energy

Your ability to manage time has a direct effect on your energy levels.  Strange but true — the act of finishing tasks often brings a level of satisfaction and energy that makes you feel good. The importance of time management here? It will help you do more of those endorphin releasing activities.

Become more successful in your career

Time management is the key to success. It allows you to take control of your life and career rather than following the flow of others. As you accomplish more each day, make more sound decisions, and feel more in control, people notice. Your team will notice that you are more organized and have more energy to lead and run your practices.  Your administration will notice that you are happier, more organized, and will see it in your team’s results.

You enjoy your life more

After all, that’s what it’s about, isn’t it? What’s the importance of time management in your life? The more value you put on your time, the greater your ability to learn how to do what matters so you can enjoy life more.

Managing how you use your time is a means to an end, but it brings enjoyment and satisfaction in its own right as well.

Accomplish your vision and goals

Time management is ultimately about working a vision backwards into strategic and scheduled chunks of time and tasks.  If you are not being strategic about what you want to accomplish in your life or with your program, then I feel you are just kind of doing random tasks each day and you find yourself doing busy work instead of work what is going to move your life, career, or program forward.

Time management is not just about improving your efficiency at work. The efficient utilization of time gives you as a coach the opportunity to maximize your potential to do what it is you want to do with your time. The efficient utilization of your time improves efficiency, productivity, and personal satisfaction. Learning to manage your time, will greatly improve your coaching life quality by whatever definition you choose.  Commit to making time management a high priority for 2018. Good luck and as always, let me know if there is anything I can do to help

Do you love volleyball? Do you love coaching young people? Do you love your job? If the answer is yes, then show it. Here are three reasons that enthusiasm will make you a better coach.

By Dawn Redd-Kelly

John Wooden is a coaching rock star and legend.   So I thought, what better gift to give my readers during my blog vacay than a series on Wooden’s Pyramid of Success? Join me for a series of posts that will delve into both the foundation and apex of his Pyramid and examine Wooden’s thoughts on Industriousness, Enthusiasm, Friendship, Loyalty, Cooperation, Competitive Greatness, and finally, Faith & Patience.

Enthusiasm

So I think the fact that I have a coaching blog and a Twitter account devoted to coaching shows that I’m pretty passionate about coaching in general…and volleyball in particular.  But even before all of that, I made sure that every team that I coached understood how much I loved the sport.  On that first day of practice, I would sit them down and tell them the ways that I love volleyball…I love the way the ball sounds as it’s being passed, I love the sound of the gym when everyone’s talking and playing hard, I love the cheers at the end of plays, and on and on I would go so that they understood that their coach was crazy about the sport.  Let’s look at ways that coaches can create an atmosphere of enthusiasm on their teams and in their gyms.

3 ways to make your enthusiasm for your sport and job contagious

“You have to like what you’re doing, your heart must be in it.”
I love volleyball and I love coaching.  It’s one of the first things that I say to recruits and at the beginning of each season.  Whenever folks ask me what I’d do if I were a multi-millionaire…and I always say: coach volleyball.  I love the sport and find it amazing that someone’s actually willing to pay me to do the one thing that I love and am good at!  Because of my love of the sport, I believe that I’ve always attracted athletes of a similar mindset to whatever program I’m coaching…ladies who love to work the sport, learn about the sport, and get better at the sport.

“Enthusiasm brushes off on those with whom you come into contact.”
After you’ve been coaching at a program for a while, your athletes seem like they start to act like you a little, don’t they?  And I think that’s because your love of the sport is brushing off on them.  Your seniors will have had four years to bask in how fired up you are about coaching your sport, your juniors will feel the seniors’ love, while your underclassmen will assume that they’re supposed to love the sport because they’re following along with what your upperclassmen are doing.  As a coach, you have the opportunity to create an environment where your players love the sport and love working hard at the sport.

“Leaders must always generate enthusiasm if they wish to bring out the best in themselves and those under their supervision.”
Our job, as coaches, is to lead people and inspire them to be greater and better than they ever thought that they could be.  Our players should be able to look at us and know that we love what we do, we’re good at what we do, and we have their best interests at heart.  Enthusiasm in those three areas will pay off dividends as we ask them to sacrifice their minds, bodies, and time.  And taking the step just beyond that, we have the marvelous opportunity to model leadership to our student-athletes…to show them what true enthusiasm for your sport and craft looks like.  I hope that none of us take that responsibility lightly.

Enthusiasm and Industriousness are the cornerstones of Wooden’s Pyramid…meaning that everything else stems from those two things.  That’s good news because both of those things are completely within our control!  Next up:  Friendship.

 

 

Are you tired of walking into practice and seeing lackluster effort from your players?  Have you had it with trying to get your female athletes to care about the team as much as you do??

Click here to find out more about Coach Dawn’s eBook: Motivating Female Athletes

Comes with a FREE PowerPoint presentation called Guarantee Your Success: Using John Wooden’s Pyramid of Success To Increase Your Team’s Cohesion.

This article was provided by Coaches Network

Too much emphasis on winning can distract from the true value of sports. Winning is just a by-product of this commitment to positive values and embracing the challenge of competition.

Longtime soccer coach and internationally known speaker Reed Maltbie explains why it’s important to develop what he calls a “warrior” culture as opposed to a winning culture.

Coaches can often become blinded by the desire to win. This single-minded focus forces people to sacrifice their values and can hurt the growth of young athletes. But as Maltbie explains in an article on Changingthegameproject.com, the goal should be to achieve excellence. Winning is just a by-product of this commitment to positive values and embracing the challenge of competition.

“In a values-based, purpose-driven team or mindset winning is not the focus, but the expectedly pleasant by-product. It is not ‘wanted’ as the main desire but simply expected as something that may happen if things are done right,” Maltbie writes. “Winning and losing are both mere waypoints on the journey and both should be viewed with the same desire to learn from and grow from them.”

Like many coaches, Maltbie struggled with this approach when he started out over 20 years ago. He had winning mentality and all he cared about was acquiring as many trophies and accolades as possible, often bragging about not having a losing season as a major part of his success. But after seeing the way that this mentality left him feeling empty and took away from the experience of his players, he began to change his approach.

What he discovered was this: “All warriors are winners, but not all winners are warriors. The simple commitment to personal excellence, high standards, and an ethereal quest to be better than the day before makes a warrior a winner.”

With this mentality he stopped treating winning as the ultimate goal and started treating it as a simple step on the path to excellence. Since then his goal has been to help athletes develop into “warriors.” He does this by encouraging athletes to live by unbending values, strive for improvement every day, take challenges head on, and respect the nature of competition.

Here is his guide for changing your focus from winning trophies to striving for excellence:

• “Warriors are purpose-driven WHILE winners are trophy-driven.” Winning a competition is a fleeting moment. What lasts longer is developing the desire and drive to always do your best and to seek excellence everyday. This motivation goes far beyond the pursuit of a piece of metal.

• “Warriors are internally motivated WHILE winners are externally motivated.” When you focus on being the master of yourself, true excellence can be achieved. Competing for the sake of winning is an external motivation that relies on comparing yourself to others rather than seeking self-improvement.

• “Warriors have a growth mindset WHILE winners have a fixed mindset.” People focused solely on winning often think they are entitled to the trophy, while those with a growth mindset understand how much work it takes to get there. Even when the competition doesn’t go your way, the value lies in the opportunity to learn and grow.

• “Warriors are process-oriented WHILE winners are outcome-oriented.” Instead of worrying about the endgame, stay in the moment and enjoy the journey. When you always have your eye on the goal, it can be easy to miss what’s going on around you.

• “Warriors are values-based WHILE winners are glory-based.” It’s important to develop the values that you want to fight for and then to instill these values in your athletes. When acquiring trophies is the focus, you are looking to boost your own ego rather than create a legacy of excellence.

“We have a chance to teach our children and our athletes the awesome joy of being a warrior. Of seeking challenge, battling for personal excellence, of striving to be a better person each day, and living and playing with a purpose and embedded in values,” Maltbie writes. “They have the opportunity to experience deep satisfaction in mastering the game, enjoying the journey, and being part of something bigger than themselves. We make this choice to create warriors not winners and we may not fill our mantle with trophies, but we will fill the world with happy, resilient, purposeful people who will make an impact beyond the game.”

Click here to read the full article.

Self-reflection is necessary if you want to continually improve at anything. Coaching is no different. Here are 4 questions you should ask your self each season.

This article was contributed by Coaches Network

Coaching can be very time-consuming, leaving few opportunities to stand back and reflect on how things are going. Yet, this self-reflection is essential if you want to become better at what you do. Try to set aside time every season to ask yourself some important questions about what type of coach you are and want to become.

When you do have an opportunity to do some reflecting and self-evaluation, there are some specific strategies that will help identify where you might need to improve. In Joe Ehrmann’s book Inside Out Coaching, How Sports Can Transform Lives, Ehrmann lists four essential questions that coaches should ask themselves. These include:

1. Why do I coach?
2. Why do I coach the way that I do?
3. How does it feel to be coached by me?
4. How do I define success?

Start by answering these questions on your own. Write your answers down, read them over, and keep them in mind throughout the season. Some of these questions are difficult to answer, but that’s because they are meant to challenge you and help you develop your coaching identity.

“I have always believed that the most challenging of these questions is to answer how it feels to be coached by me,” writes Matt Percival in an article the Inside Out Coaching website. “First, it causes all of us to really examine the impact we have had on each athlete throughout the course of the season and secondly, it challenges us to come up with a way to really get honest feedback.”

In order to get this honest feedback, you will need to pose the question “How does it feel to be coached by me?” to those around you. Ask your fellow coaches and athletes to answer this question so that you can truly understand how others perceive your coaching style. You may have your own idea of what it’s like to be coached by you, but others may have a different perspective, and it’s essential that you hear their side.

This can be difficult, and you may not always like what you hear, but if you are going to become a better coach you will need to be able to accept the criticism of your athletes and coaches. Once you have heard what others have to say, the next step is to put this feedback into action. Identify any areas of weakness and develop a plan for strengthening them.

“Great coaches take the time to not only ask for feedback from a variety of sources, but they then put together an effective action plan to address the areas in greatest need of improvement,” writes Percival. “More important than the method is what each coach does with the feedback they receive. Specific action plans with measurable goals and objectives have proven to be very beneficial to many successful coaches.”

Percival suggests using a variety of methods in order to improve. These range from surveys, one-on-one meetings, small group discussions, exit interviews, and reviewing video of yourself during practices and games. He also recommends asking for feedback from sources outside of your program, such as game officials, athletic trainers, opposing coaches, coaches from other sports, athletic administrators, and parents. There is no single formula that works for everybody, but if you try these different methods you will find what works best for you.

Click here to read the full article.