As a coach, you’ve got a LOT to manage. You have a community of swimmers, parents, and coaches relying on your leadership, and committees, administration, sponsors, and many more requesting your time and attention. Not to mention your inbox is inundated with messages from people seeking your help and guidance.
Coaching is a relationship business as much as it is a performance business. You spend your time driving the team towards fast swims and triumphs while simultaneously overseeing program development and meeting the needs of many individuals and families. You probably even have a family of your own to care for when you get home.
While others may have high expectations of you, you definitely have high expectations of yourself. You are responsible for producing results and navigating many relationships! And that can be a lot to lead.
So what’s the solution to performing and producing results amongst so much inner noise and external demand? The solution is in the questions you ask yourself and others.
You might be saying, “I have so much on my plate already, I don’t have time to brainstorm ‘better’ questions.”
As coaches, we don’t have time to not ask better questions.
We ask our athletes questions all the time to improve self-awareness, inspire change and produce results – but we often fail to do the same for ourselves. We’ve got to be our own coach. Here are a few common questions.
- “What am I forgetting?”
- “What do I have to do today?”
- “What are our goals?”
- “How can we get our kids to swim faster?”
These are important questions for any leader but the first question we ask doesn’t always produce the results we want.
Would you ask questions differently if the quality of your questions had a direct impact on the quality of your results?
Let’s peel these same questions back a layer:
- “How can I create a system of organization that doesn’t require me to rely solely on my memory?”
- “How can I wake up already knowing what I need to accomplish?”
- “What goals would reflect the direction we want to go?”
- “What if we asked our swimmers for feedback on what we need more of in practice?”
That last one I personally ask my swimmers often and the responses are eye-opening. By peeling a question back we can discover a more useful one that opens up mental or conversational space to discover how to effectively solve or change the issue at hand.
Why Questions Are So Powerful
Questions tap into our inexhaustible well of curiosity and creativity. We seem to generate solutions as if out of thin air. “Ask and you shall receive.” As leaders, it would be in our best interest to ask more effective questions.
How many times have you been asked a question and not answered it? Probably few. It’s almost impossible to ignore a question. Modern neuroscience has debunked the concept of multitasking, showing that we can really only focus on one idea at a time. Asking a question doesn’t just focus our attention, it hijacks our brain to focus solely on that question or idea through a process called ‘instinctive elaboration’. This simple idea has profound implications for the coach and swimmer.
Our Questions Impact Who We Are and How We Lead
The question-asking and solution-generating process can greatly influence our choices and inspire changes in our behavior, both of which affect our performance as leaders. Leadership is about BEING. And Being is about Becoming, or growing. Questions are one of the most powerful ways to encourage growth.
We’ve never fully arrived as a leader, but we can always grow into our potential, just as our swimmers do. To help us have the greatest impact on our team and drive the greatest results, we must ask ourselves more effective questions that target specific aspects who we are as coaches that we wish to change or transform. For example, by asking, “What behavior or habit, if removed, would have the greatest impact on my team’s performance?”, we could potentially alter the course of our life and our team’s results.
Takeaway #1: Spend an extra minute peeling back your questions.
Takeaway #2: Design your questions intentionally to have the impact on your leadership and your results that you want
Here’s a question for the coach:
If your team (group) is a reflection of you…what would you want to change?