Identity to Behavior to Identity

From negative to neutral to positive

This one will be a little quicker than some of the longer stuff I’ve been writing the past few weeks.

In Summer School Part 5 I talked about when to be more in Directive mode and when to be more in Reflective mode when interacting with your athletes. I talked about Affirmations in that article:

Affirmations - Affirmations are a way of using vocabulary to help turn action into identity. For example:

Coach: “Those two little drop tips in game 3 were sweet.”
Athlete: “Yeah, I just thought they would be open.”
Coach: “That took creativity.”

Repeated over time, these interactions might allow the athlete to build an identity as a Creative Player. Eventually, this leads to behavior change because an athlete will start having (usually subconscious) feelings to behave like a Creative Player would.

And then I also shared some hypothetical conversations using Affirmations in the recent 5-Convo Friday article.

I want to hone in on this idea of identity a little bit and the role that we play as coaches in building that for players.

General v Specific and Fixed v Growth

As a rule-of-thumb, I like to keep feedback targeted at specific behaviors. Rather than “oh you’re so great,” we want to focus on a specific play. And even more than just, “great hit!” we’d like to reinforce something that connects to what we’ve been working on. “Way to be on your 2nd-step!” etc. So I like being specific rather than general and I like praising specific things that players have control over rather than things they have less control over.

If the majority of your coaching is specific and oriented toward growth, I think you’re in a good shape. But, there’s also some opportunities to go beyond that. I want to look at the top-right corner there which is the General-Growth cell in that little 2 x 2 matrix.

Identity Shaping

One of the impacts a coach can make is to “see more in a player than he sees in himself.”¹ Aristotle says that we are what we do. In this way, our identity is shaped by our behaviors. However, our behaviors also reflect our self-identity. A player who sees themselves as a loser isn’t going to put out extra effort to come to practice early or to work out. Why? That’s not what a loser would do. One of the benefits I see constantly for players who go to successful programs is the idea of that’s just what we do here. “Oh okay, I guess I get to practice early and start getting passing reps, I guess that’s what we do here.”

A lot of your players have negative identities:

• They’re not athletic

• They’re shy

• They’re new/inexperienced

• They’re just kids

• For some of them being a girl is a negative athletic identity

I think combating any of these negative identities with “nuh uh” is not a recipe for success as a coach. Instead, you help players build a body of evidence via behavior that informs a new identity. We are what we do.

I shared some speed training results in a previous article. A couple players on my club team who already had identities as being fast or athletic found those identities strengthened by being the fastest on the team and/or seeing their speed improve. But what’s also cool is that a few other players started to change out of some negative identities. “Hmm… maybe I’m not big and slow.” “Hmm… I guess I can hit kinda hard.”

Identity - Behavior - Identity

The general model I have for this is: