by Mandy Green, Busy Coach
I was listening to Darren Hardy, who is the editor of Success magazine, on the Darren Daily emails that I get and it made me think of how college coaches make their jobs as a coach 10x harder than it needs to be.
He shared an interesting study. In the 1980s psychologist Mickey Chi investigated what caused individuals to succeed or fail in a difficult problem-solving and high pressure situations. She gave a basic set of physics problems to PHD students and then the same set of questions to undergrad students who had only completed one semester of physics. Not surprisingly, the Ph.D. students performed much better than the undergrad students. The surprising finding was why. She found the success of the Ph.D students came because of their approach.
- Before putting their pens to paper, the PHD’s paused to think about the problem and the underlying principles.
- The undergrad students simply jumped into the problem without mulling it over and that caused them to get distracted and stressed over irrelevant details and then often directly caused them to create incorrect answers.
You see, too often we do the same thing and act like the undergrads in this study as coaches when we get into the office. We often walk into the office without a plan, sit down and just start working. We work and work and are busy all day doing little things, but we leave the day feeling like we didn’t get any significant work done to build our programs.
We just see a problem and jump right into it without much planning or thought before engaging. Then we find ourselves overwhelmed and stressed and distracted by irrelevant details which causes us to deliver poor performances in almost every thing that we do.
Your performance as a coach will go up, significantly in fact, when you just slow down.
I know most coaches are stuck in the mode of not wanting to change how they are currently working because “we’ve always done it this way.”
Have you ever thought to stop for a minute to actually think about the process you go through to complete a repeatable task? I’d be willing to bet that if we were working together I had you break down all of the tasks you do that are repeatable, we would find that a lot of time is being wasted on tasks that aren’t giving you a good ROI.
For now, I want to encourage you, day by day, before you jump into something, take a few seconds to think about the desired objective that you want and how you want to perform before engaging in the activity. This could be a 30 second mental mulling over, or a 30 minute planning session depending on the importance of the engagement.
In order to go faster with the development of your team and recruiting, sometimes you need to slow down to speed up. Take 30 seconds to mull over before jumping into situations like this-
- Have a clear objective before you pick up the phone and start a phone call.
- Decide on your agenda before you start a meeting
- Think before mindlessly sending off a quick response to an email
- Before entering a room with your team, think about how you want to show up and engage with them.
- Design a plan for each day
Today, slow down so that you can go faster and with better quality.
Want one-on-one help from Mandy Green to make you and your staff more organized and effective in your job as a college coach? Email her at mandy@dantudor.com.