Your team meetings tune the car, but practice is the road.
JP Nerbun, Betsy Butterick, and Nate Sanderson take on a question a coach brought to JP: what do you do when there is almost no time to build culture outside of practice? Their answer is that practice is where athletes experience culture most and where a coach can push hardest on it. You will hear how to move values from the wall into the practice plan, why going hard is a skill you teach, a four step cycle for giving athletes reps at the behaviors you want, and what changes when you start from where your players actually are.
If your values live on a wall and you are not sure they live in your gym, this conversation gives you a place to start tomorrow.
3 Quotes | 2 Questions | 1 Resource
Your fast-track to the episode's most actionable ideas.
"A lot of times the way that we've used some of those classroom times or those team meeting times, or those connection times is really like pulling into the pit stop and tuning up the car, but then we're putting it back out on the road. And practice is really the road."
Nate Sanderson
"The standard isn't a standard until we start actually holding that standard with our players, and the majority of those standards are being held within practice."
J.P. Nerbun
"It doesn't help them to tell them what they're not doing. It does help them to make them aware of the opportunities they have, to signal an opportunity before they're in it."
Betsy Butterick
Q1: Where in our practice plan do our team values actually show up, and where do they only live on the wall?
Q2: What part of practice makes you feel like you are getting better, and what part leaves you wondering why we are doing it?
The Gap and the Gain by Dan Sullivan and Dr. Benjamin Hardy
JP brought this book into the conversation. It separates measuring yourself against an ideal from measuring against where you started, a useful lens for any coach who catches themselves saying their team should be much further along.
Find the book here
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Better Coaches. Better Leaders. Better Culture.