Believe in Themselves

“Outstanding leaders go out of the way to boost the self-esteem of their personnel. If people believe in themselves, it’s amazing what they can accomplish.” - Sam Walton, founder of Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club

I wonder how much as coaches we think about boosting the self-esteem of our personnel. Research has shown one of the most powerful motivating factors for leaders is to show your team that you are a fan. That you believe in them. Yet most traditional coaching approaches don’t prioritize encouragement or positive reinforcement.

Often we look at coaching through the wrong lens, one where we think our job is just to point out mistakes and change that behavior. Coaching is really about making your players and your team better, and while that does involve pointing out and correcting mistakes, the way you go about it can make a big difference in how much and how quickly your players improve.

Our job is to create the best environment for our teams to improve. Positive encouragement goes a long way towards establishing that environment. Our job isn’t so much to point out the mistakes and correct them, as it is showing them how to figure out the mistakes and how to get better from them. They have to know how to make the adjustments to get better, and we have to teach them that. Simply pointing out the mistakes and making them repeat the task falls short.

It’s easy to get so caught up in the intensity, the energy and the pace of coaching, where we feel a ton of pressure and never have enough practice time to get things done. We can become taskmasters, where we simply point out the negative and stay on it until they get it right. We often lose sight of the tone of practice, and ultimately what our players need from us to be really successful.

Go out of your way to boost the self-esteem of your players. If you take that approach my guess is you’ll get better long-term results.