Episode 3 in our Good to GREAT series! This is a great short lesson for any athletic coach or player to think about your team. Are you playing for the better of the team or are you playing for yourself? Together you can accomplish more than you can by yourself.
I want to share an experience with you that I had last week.
I had the great honor of sitting down with a well-known coach around Las Vegas, who has an amazing reputation and we were talking about psychology, mindset and how he coaches his athletes and about how I coach my athletes and we're coming up with best practices and he says something that really catches my attention.
I've never heard it said like this before and when he said it I absolutely fell in love with it.
He says, "James you want to know what I asked my athletes?" I said, "what's that?" He said, "I asked him are you playing for the front of the jersey or for the back?"
When he said that I was it clicked in my head. Are you playing for the front? Are you playing for your team, the bigger picture? Or are you playing for yourself and playing selfish? Because selfish teams only go so far, we're as selfless teams go the distance.
When I started thinking about all the teams that I've worked with, that have been successful and why and this common thread kept coming up of being together, of working together and being selfless; no ego on the team.
And I was like okay well, what professional team really emulates that? What teams represents that and the first thing that came to mind was the Golden State Warriors.
Take a look (at the video) at the way they pass the ball, the way that it just flows. It's very fluid like and it's so fun to watch them because they don't care who scores; their objective is just to score so if you're open they're passing it to you regardless if you missed the last shot, they have complete trust in each other. Everyone's involved; there's no ego, there's no "I have to have the ball" or "I have to close" or "I got to score the last point".
There's no Kevin Durant's team. No Steph Curry's team. It's the Golden State Warriors!
So the culture that they've been able to build there is amazing, right? That's just a fantastic example.
I remember last year when traveling to San Diego with my brothers and a couple friends and we're sitting on the beach talking about life (as we tend to do) and all of a sudden we look up and a flock of geese just fly by here's the clip (in the video) in the V formation.
Look at that way it's so seamless. They just glide through the air with perfection and symmetry and they're all communicating with one another. It's perfect and. I remember getting caught on that for 30 seconds and afterwards I did some research on why geese fly in the V formation and it turns out that that increases their flying range by 71%!! They are way more effective when they fly in a V shape together than when they fly on their own.
When they fly on their own they're taking all the wind resistance, they're expending so much more energy than they have to if they just flew together. So not only will they save energy they'll get there faster. When one bird gets tired another one fills in so you have this this great chemistry between them and they just "talk" to each other and communicate.
I thought what better example do you need?
So that reminded me of a quote that Michael Jordan said. He said, Talent wins games, teamwork wins championships.
My question to you is, what is your team doing? What's the chemistry like? Are they playing selfishly or are they playing selflessly?
For this video I've included a Downloadable PDF and I want you to download it for free and it's going to really help you really uncover where your team is and this is an exercise that I use in teams, in the corporate world and in the sports world and I've seen amazing results with this. It always gets people to bond, become closer, create that chemistry and to really understand where each athlete or each team members coming from.
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Until next week!
- James Silvas
Peak Performance Coach