What we want to hear and what we need to hear do not always match up. Indeed in some instances they are distinctly different things! On the youth sports journey the performer will encounter numerous trials and situations that offer abundant lessons. The conversations with those around them are an integral part of how the performer makes sense of events, puzzles things through and elucidates what lessons to take. As the grown ups, it follows that coaches and parents alike have a duty to help performers be objective and uncover the insights to make the best use of these experiences. To that end, there is an onus on us to ensure that the performer maintains a healthy relationship with the truth and remains in touch with reality.
UNDERSTANDING THE MISSION…
The quest faced by the performer embarking on the youth sports journey is to remain attentive and seek to make use of each experience in service of their future self. Realising the value of each experience depends on how adept the performer proves at identifying the salient lessons and acting on them to better prepare themselves when facing similar scenarios in the future.
Presenting the endeavour to the performer in these terms in itself has value. Beyond that, a key role and responsibility of those around young athletes is assisting them in the ongoing journey of discovery that provides the clues on what steps they must take to progress.
Clearly one of the ways we can serve performers is by lending some objectivity to their subjective experience. The value and utility derived from the trials that all young performers go through does depend upon the extent to which their perceptions and reflections after the event are grounded in reality.
THE VALUE OF CANDOUR…
The terms radical honesty and radical candour have become popularised, which implies that honesty and candour are now deemed to be radical acts! The motivation for being less than truthful with another person is often to spare their feelings. Whilst this seems laudable on the surface, when we consider the longer term consequences it becomes less so. It is also worth considering the possibility that another reason we spare the other person from telling them the truth might be that it is easier for us!
A vital and often overlooked aspect of tough love is the second part; it takes somebody who respects and cares about a person enough to tell them the truth regardless of what their reaction might be and the blow-back that might ensue. Clearly it is far easier and poses much less personal cost to simply go along with what the other person is saying and play along even if we know it to be false or misguided.
Everybody involved needs to be clear that telling the performer truths that might be unwelcome or prompting them to confront the reality of the situation is a sign of respect and care, as opposed to being interpreted as being harsh or mean. Author Kim Scott describes a quadrant for feedback that has care for the other individual on one axis and readiness to challenge them on the other. What she terms radical candor falls in the high care and high readiness to challenge quadrant. Conversely the trap that many parents and coaches fall into is the high care/low readiness to directly challenge quadrant, which spares the performer’s feeling in the short-term but ultimately does not serve them or the mission.
SHORT-TERM EASY; LONG-TERM HARD…
What is expedient in the moment is sometimes at odds with what will actually serve the long-term mission. There is always a temptation for the performer to make things easy on themselves and ignore troubling facts, just as it is far easier to omit the truth to avoid the other person taking offence or becoming upset with us.
“We optimise for short-term ego protection over long-term happiness”
Ultimately, avoiding uncomfortable truths and choosing to overlook the reality of the situation only delays the inevitable moment of reckoning. Seeking to protect somebody from reality in many ways sets them up for a bigger fall when the mighty wave of reality that has been temporarily held back or steadfastly ignored comes crashing down. Rather than putting things off until to a point that it overwhelms them, it is far kinder and serves the performer far better to deal with reality in manageable doses on a regular basis.
PSYCHOLOGICAL SAFETY VERSUS ‘SAFE SPACES’…
Psychological safety is an important concept for talent development and youth sports - performers should have a forum for expressing opinions, concerns and feedback to coaches and others without fear of reproach. However, somehow this concept has become misconstrued and has morphed into the idea of ‘safe spaces’, which bears very little resemblance to the original idea.
There is presently an odd preoccupation with subjectivity even when it comes to ‘truth’. Such strange societal trends have led to a reticence to challenge or even question a person’s beliefs on the grounds that their truth is valid and beyond reproach. In this climate, ‘safe spaces’ describes a forum where the individual can be assured that their views can be expressed and accepted without any risk of being challenged. Unfortunately, objective reality does exist and it cares little about our feelings or the particulars of the version of reality that exists in our own heads.
Such thinking has erroneously made a virtue of affirming somebody’s mistaken beliefs or flawed interpretation of events as if doing so is somehow honouring the individual. On the contrary, this is not in their best interests at all. Whilst this might all be motivated by good intentions it is also entirely misguided. As the grown ups that performers look to for guidance we are failing in our duty of care when we allow the performer to delude themselves, or worse still participate in reinforcing the delusion.
To reiterate, psychological safety is important when it comes to having the opportunity to provide candid feedback to the grown ups involved in the confidence that it will be heard and there will not be any adverse consequences to doing so. Equally, this has to be a two-way commitment. Performers also need to voluntarily commit to receiving candid and honest feedback in turn, even if it might bruise their feelings.
Where the safe space idea does apply in talent development is creating and maintaining an environment where the performer has the freedom to try things, take risks and to make errors. Equally even in this case they will nevertheless benefit from being challenged and receiving honest feedback.
TERMS OF REFERENCE…
From a development perspective clearly it is critical that both the performer and those who support them commit to prioritising long-term growth over short-term indulgence. Ego protection is arguably the biggest barrier to change and obstacle to future development. It is essential that not only the performer understands this; the grown ups around them also need to have this realisation. A major tell that a performer or indeed a coach is heading for a fall is when they make public statements that indicate they are lying to themselves. This also suggests that those in the inner circle are failing to disabuse them of false notions, or else they are no longer paying attention to those around them.
Critical feedback is of course not easy to hear (albeit it does become easier with practice). It is however necessary if the performer wants to continue to develop and improve. It is also true that the hardest lessons have the most resonance and tend to prove pivotal in the performer’s journey, albeit they need to be ready to heed them.
Success in this endeavour relies on clear expectations from the outset, which in turn requires explicit agreement from all parties with their fully informed consent. There need to be clear terms of reference for the mission and clear terms of engagement between each respective party (parent, coaches, performer) and each person needs to be comfortable that they have entered into this arrangement willingly (reserving the right to withdraw at a later date). A high degree of trust is required, which naturally takes time to develop.
IN CLOSING: TIME AND PLACE…
It is important that coaches and parents exercise sound judgement in what they choose to share and when. Clearly there is a time and a place. We should be considered and selective in sharing only what might be useful or helpful for them to hear in the context of the situation. There are also frequent occasions where the best approach is to remain silent and give the performer the space and opportunity to fix things for themselves. But whatever we choose to share should be grounded in truth. If what we are telling them does not reflect reality then we are only setting them up for more pain down the road.
The utility of an experience likewise depends on the performer’s ability to acknowledge and understand the essence of what occurred as they reflect on events, such that they are able to identify the salient lessons. To that end, there will be a need to parse the causal factors and attribute responsibility. Humans generally suffer from attribution bias, which makes us quick to accept credit when things go well, whereas we are more reticent to accept blame when things go awry. When the performer’s first instinct is to blame others or cite external factors when things go wrong this should prompt those around them to step in and call them on it. The debrief that follows a competition and teachable moments in general should be conducted with frank honesty.
We need to be able to specify the problem in order to set about solving it. Vague criticism is unhelpful from this perspective. Feedback must be specific in order to direct the performer towards what steps they need to take. Given the object of the exercise is to better equip the performer for future scenarios it follows we need to provide clarity on what specific actions and improvements are necessary.
Cover photo credit: Photo by Alliance Football Club on Unsplash
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Thanks also to all those who have shared feedback on the recent release Prepared: Unlocking Human Performance with Lessons from Elite Sport (click on the image below for details).