Summer School Part 5

Directive/Reflective

Previous articles in this series:
Summer School Part 1
Summer School Part 2
Summer School Part 3
Summer School Part 4

In the gym, we often operate in two modes.

There’s Directive mode: clear, crisp cueing. Feedback with a purpose. It’s not necessarily that the coach is driving, it’s that both coach and athlete know where they’re going. You might have arrived there through Direct Instruction, Guided Discovery, or Mutual Exploration, but you’re aligned. The goal is shared. You’re coaching to a known endpoint.

Then there’s Reflective mode: open-ended, athlete-centered conversation. You’re not trying to drive anywhere. You’re asking, “Where do you want to go?” You enter with genuine curiosity—ready to learn as much as the athlete is.

The DDCDD loop touched on this. Cueing (whether from the coach or the athletes self-cues) is more Directive. Discussions can be more Reflective, but not always. For example, a Discussion might involve video feedback for you to show an athlete 2 examples where they pivoted and squared to the target and 2 examples where they didn’t. That’s a Directive Discussion. And sometimes Cueing can be open-ended, “what did you feel there?”

So this article is to help you differentiate when you want to be more Directive in your interactions with your athletes and when you want to be more Reflective.

Recap: Tools in the Toolbox

Here’s some previous articles you want to be familiar with:

Goal-Intention-Cue
DDCDD
Strength Lens
Affirmations

These are all about interaction. We’ve spent a lot of time on cues and teaching. How do we get an athlete to pass more accurately or to just-stay-in-middle-middle-for-the-love-of-God. But keep in mind that not every problem is mechanical or tactical. Sometimes the problem is with athlete motivation or engagement. Sometimes the problem is… sometimes we don’t even know what the problem is!

I’ve touched on the Motivation Interviewing framework (see Strength Lens above) before. Let’s go a little deeper now and figure out when and how we can use in the gym.

Motivational Interviewing: A Framework for Dialogue

In Coaching Athletes to Be Their Best, Rollnick, Fader, and co introduce the Motivational Interviewing (MI) framework as a way to help athletes own their growth.

There’s 4 key MI skills we want to be aware of:

Open-Ended Questions - Yes/no questions or questions that can be “fact-checked” make it difficult for an athlete to open up. Open-ended questions allow the athlete to steer the conversation. There’s a lot of talk in the coaching community about open-ended questions and I actually don’t want to emphasize these today. Open-ended questions can be part of a good MI conversation but they are actually less effective than the next 3 skills because they too often activate the athletes desire to give the “correct” answer.

(Weirdly, open-ended questions work great in a Directive context. When a coach says, “What did you feel there” after a passing rep, that can be very helpful in the context of Direction because you and the athlete are both trying to figure out the best way to pass the ball to the target. We’re looking to go one step back from those conversations.)

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.

Reflective Listening - When athletes hear their own words, it gives them a chance to strengthen and confirm or to readjust and steer the conversation in a slightly different direction. In its simplest form, Reflective Listening is literally repeating the athlete’s words back to them.

Coach: “Wow, that last dig was awesome!”
Player: “I just wanted to keep the ball off the floor.”
Coach: “You just wanted to keep it up.”
Player: “I mean, I knew she hit hard so I figured just let it hit me.”
Coach: “You just let it hit you.”

Your body language and tone do a lot of the lifting in these conversations. Improv comedians talk about the Yes, And rule which basically means that contradiction kills conversations. Reflective listening is the ultimate Yes, And because you’re literally repeating what they say. Don’t be afraid to repeat almost verbatim what athletes say, especially when they very emotional (happy or sad) because what you are basically saying is, “yes, I couldn’t have put it any better myself.”

It’s also okay to paraphrase, especially with athletes who older, more sophisticated, and/or less emotionally-charged.

Coach: “Your setting choices were on-point that last match.”
Player: “Well, I just remembered the scouting report on how the middle would follow the ball.”
Coach: “You had that scouting report dialed”
Player: “Yeah, I just knew she would follow and then I could reverse the ball.”
Coach: “You had her tendencies down and you knew what was open.”
Player: “It felt so good, like I was in command of the match.”
Coach: “Yeah it was like you were in total control out there just pulling the strings.”
Player: “I want to feel like that every time we play.”
Coach: “That would feel so awesome to be in command like that every time.”
Player: “That scouting report was so helpful, can we do that every match?”
Coach [internally]: “I LITERALLY GIVE YOU THAT SAME SCOUTING REPORT EVERY SINGLE MATCH!! YOU FELL ASLEEP TWO WEEKS AGO!!”
Coach [out loud]: “Definitely, let’s do it!”

I lengthened this idealized conversation to get to the Change Statement, as MI calls it. Did you see it? Click this footnote to see it.¹

Notice that Reflective Listening is the tool that draws out a Change Statement.

Summarizing - To me Reflective Listening and Summarizing are the simile and metaphor of MI. They accomplish similar things but a slightly different format. When you Summarize, you often say that you’re summarizing.

“Okay, just so I’m hearing you right: you think you can earn the libero spot, you need to get more comfortable defending in zone 6, and you want some more opportunities to get better there.”

These MI tools can be used when things are going good and you want the player to build identity around those positive actions, or when things aren’t going good and need a change. In both cases, the key here is that MI conversations, and in particular this idea of a Reflective interaction, are about getting to the point when a player can state what change they want. Then you can use whichever tool you think appropriate to start making that change happen.

When To Direct

Here’s the times when you’re not going to be in Reflective mode: