Saturday, July 10, 2010

Coaching

This is something with multiple meanings for me.

I do it for a living in a manner, both directly on a 1:>20 basis and indirectly through materials, media and so forth to help people become more effective in their roles.

I also do it on a volunteer basis for 13 & 14 year olds as they learn the game of rugby.

There are some parallels as you might imagine, and some great business lessons that flow from working with young people. Allow me share some truisms that I see.

Lesson 1: Whether you consciously admit this or not, you have roughly 30 seconds to get your core message across, so think about it carefully, and nail it.

Little kids have grass to throw, flies to catch, a neighbor to poke and a giggle to make every time you say "ball or ruck". Big kids have blackberries to vibrate, emails to answer, spouses to think about and bosses to please. Each of them will only give you so much attention before drifting off

Lesson 2: Learning is only properly reinforced by doing.

You could lecture a 13 year old boy for an entire practice session about the way to run onto a passed ball, or crouch and wrap while engaging a tackle, but the only way to get it to stick is to get them to do it - apply the words, turn them into actions and feel it for themselves. Big kids can be given powerpoints and the theory behind "how to sell" all day long, but until they start to create their own plans, with their own live, real-world data, they don't really 'get it'.

Lesson 3: Half the battle is over-coming your fear of being able to do it

Tackling another person is scary, they're bigger often and you could hurt yourself. Our primal instincts tell us to avoid this action. Asking someone for their business is scary as well. They judge you and new salespeople want to run from this kind of confrontation. In neither situation, can you successfully fake it.

Lesson 4: Reinforcement is key

With adults, it's very easy to acknowledge that there's a smarter way, but we all tend to fall back into established patterns to try to accomplish a task. Golf lessons are a classic example, but so sadly is training to be more effective in sales. (This isn't conjecture, this is proven). With kids, they also need to keep focused and keep coming to practice. If they don't practice, they tend to forget how to play the game.

In rugby as in life, there's some wonderful rules as well that we can apply to our daily business lives:
  • Support each other, it isn't a one person game, it's a team sport
  • Communicate. If you don't talk to one another, how are you supposed to understand what to do ?
  • You can't score unless you have ball possession, so don't always play defense.
Both are games worth playing, and both are rewarding when you do well.

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