Today I read a great article from Crucial Conversations. Having been to the training several times and even accepted a job offer to facilitate here in Alberta, I am obviously bias toward the program. That being said the training has lots of great methods and techniques for handling tricky situations.
I used this particular method a couple days ago with my football team. Last Saturday we played Claresholm. The final score was 36-6 for us. Our boys had a message to send after last year’s allegations of having over aged players on our team. Perhaps because we were so hyped up, or perhaps because I am so new at all this – during the game I lost my temper with a couple players. Nothing serious, but I felt horrible about it for days after. I decided I need to confront this situation at practice.
Following the skills I learned from Crucial Conversations I started by stating facts: “You were playing the guitar in the changing room while I was trying to talk about team strategy and improvements”, “I did not play everyone on the defense”, “I screamed at you and told you to go look up how to play football on Youtube”, and so on. After stating the facts I tried to establish a new context for our relationship. I committed to being more prepared. I also committed to training how I want the rotation to work. Finally I told my players that they can expect me to be more level headed and clear on my expectations of them.
Now that I’ve established this new context, my players don’t have to guess whether Coach Toone is just pretending to be level headed and will snap again if mistakes are made.
The Crucial Conversation book is worth the investment. I highly recommend it.
Cheers,
Cody
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