The Power of Soft Skills in Coaching

Today’s show is with Nick Winkelman.  Nick is the head of athletic performance & science for the Irish Rugby Football Union. Prior to working for Irish Rugby, Nick was the director of education for EXOS.  Nick is an internationally recognized speaker on human performance and coaching science, and is the author of the book, “The Language of Coaching”.  Nick previously appeared on episode 193 of the podcast where he went in detail on internal and external cues, analogies, and what it takes to make cues more effective. One of the major shifts in my coaching career and personal movement/training practice has been understanding the “art” of coaching on the levels of psychology, motor learning, and how we actually go about instructing athletes in the course of the training session.  As coaches, we all tend to start out with a combination of what we did ourselves as athlete, and then whatever training frameworks we learned in our education process. When we look at any training session, whether it is sport skill or gym work, it’s par for the course to look at it on the level of tactics, sets and reps, which drills to use, or x’s and o’s.  It’s far more rare to look at the session on the level of meaning and engagement, and how we can work cohesively with athletes to better communicate with them, direct their attention, and allow them to understand, on a deeper level, what improving their sport technique feels like (and not to just intellectualize the process).  Improving one’s ability in this “soft” side of the coaching equation will help improve the long term success and sustainability of the training process. On the show today, Nick speaks on principles of attentional focus, and how factors such as motivation and novelty can direct an athlete’s attentional focus in training.  Nick will discuss cueing dynamics on a level of meaningfulness and embodiment to the athlete, moving past simply intellectualizing instruction (and how we can improve our dialogue in that process).  Finally, Nick will give his take on how coaches can become better story-tellers to their athletes in communicating ideas and instruction. Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster and Lost Empire Herbs. For 15% off your Lost Empire Herbs order, head to lostempireherbs.com/justfly. View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage. Timestamps and Main Points 5:03 – Why Nick believes that the “soft” practices in athletics (communication/cueing/motor learning/etc.) are less-traveled in the process of performance training 2:19 – Dynamics of attention, motivation and novelty in athletic performance 29:03 – “Survival” oriented coaching situations as a means to gain the attention of athletes 31:41 – How to go through the process of making coaching and cueing more meaningful to the athlete through listening to the athlete 43:14 – How the shortcoming of internal cues can teach us more about how we learn and function as humans, and how cues and attention placed external to the body can help the “one-ness” of movement fully form 52:12 – Nick’s take on the place and context of internal cueing in the process of coaching athletes 57:33 – How “noticing”/awareness of one’s body in the midst of movement fits in with the cueing eco-system 1:01:28 – Nick’s take on personal practices for coaches that can help them paint better pictures with their words when they are actually coaching “Over time, every coach who is attentive and self-aware to the journey, starts to pick up on “a weak signal”, and they start to realize, that “hold on… not everyone responds to programming the same way, so I might have to individualize… and not everyone responds to the same communication style” “What are we trying to get people to do: We are trying to get people to focus their attention on the right things, in the right way, at the right time” “Attention is like a spotlight, and we can’t actually increase the size of the spot...