The Best Coaches In The World Do THIS
The Amplified Impact Podcast
August 5th, 2023
Today’s episode is a game-changer, whether you’re a coach, a manager, or anyone guiding others to success.
So I used to coach rock climbing to aspiring athletes, some reaching the Olympics.
One game-changing concept emerged that transformed my coaching approach and it can revolutionize your mentorship, relationships, and management style.
Let’s talk about “Coaching the Positive.”
What’s the flip side of this? It’s called “Coaching the Negative.” It’s the default mode most of us unknowingly use.
When coaching the negative, you point out what’s wrong…”Don’t put your foot there,” “Don’t do this.” Sounds familiar?
Sure, it’s easier to identify what something isn’t than what it is.
But here’s where the magic happens: Instead of telling someone what not to do, show them what to do. That’s coaching the positive.
And this approach isn’t limited to coaching.
In life, many scenarios have two sides…fear and courage.
Instead of saying, “Don’t be afraid,” embrace fear and focus on courage. It’s about moving forward despite fear.
So, remember, it’s not about eliminating negatives, but about embracing positives. It’s about guiding, supporting, and encouraging by showing the way forward.
TWEETABLE QUOTE:
“The goal is not to be not afraid. The goal is just to be the type of person who moves forward with courage despite the fear.”- Anthony Vicino
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Episode Transcript:
Anthony Vicino:
Alright? So in a past life, I was a rock climbing coach. I worked with youth. I worked with adults who had some kind of ambition to go on and compete at a high level. These weren’t just I did coach the kids teams with the kids that just wanted to come in and have fun on school nights. But I also, I primarily worked with the really serious athletes, the ones that wanted to go and be national or Olympic caliber athletes. And one of our athletes that we worked with from the time that she was just a little girl all the way till the time she was a badass, full blown woman. She went on to be one of the two women that went to the Olympics and competed in rock climbing for the first time back in Tokyo a couple years ago. And that was very, very exciting for us to have been able to be part of her journey in a small way.
Anthony Vicino:
Don’t want to claim any kind of credit or anything like that for her accomplishments, but I share all that so that you have some understanding that I came from a world of deep domain experience coaching. I was the head coach of multiple programs where we would build up other coaches to implement the structure and the programming for the athletes. And in that process, we uncovered possibly the most impactful coaching hack. It was just a simple mindset shift or perspective. And I want to share it with you guys because it wasn’t just useful in coaching athletes. I found it incredibly useful as a teacher or coach of my teams and my businesses and whether you’re a manager of other people. This one idea has I don’t know, it’s really hard to quantify how impactful it’s been. So I’ll just leave it off by saying very this is potentially my number one coaching piece of coaching advice.
Anthony Vicino:
And it’s this don’t coach the negative. Okay, so what does that mean? What does it mean to coach the negative? Well, interestingly, you might not be familiar with this idea of coaching the negatives. It might be the first time you’ve ever heard this concept. And yet it’s probably what most of you do right now when you’re coaching somebody else. It’s the methodology that we almost all universally default to. What it is is coaching the negative is to tell somebody what not to do. And this is so prevalent. Think about when somebody is like hitting a tennis ball.
Anthony Vicino:
They’re climbing the wall and they do something wrong. It’s very, very easy to point out you did this wrong. Here’s what you did wrong. You put your foot in the wrong position, your body, whatever. Okay? Now, the reason we do this is because, as Naseem Taleb says through his framework of via negativa, it’s often easier to know a thing by pointing out what that thing is not than by pointing out what the thing is. Okay? That’s kind of an abstract way of putting up it. Let’s try a different way. It’s easier to know what God is not than it is to know what God is.
Anthony Vicino:
So if I was to ask you, what is God? It’d be very hard for you to list out all the things that God is. But you could relatively easily point out what God is not, right? Like, God is not weak, god is probably not petty. God is not this tiny, inconsequential thing. Right? It’s easier to know a thing based off of what it is not. And so another way of thinking about this is if you wanted to live a healthy life, instead of figuring out, okay, what do I need to do to live a healthy life? Which can be hard if you don’t know. You could just reverse that and you could say, what would it look like to live a not healthy life? Well, I would eat too much. I would eat bad stuff. I’d eat too much sugar.
Anthony Vicino:
I would never move from my couch. I wouldn’t work out ever. Right? You could start to tick off the things. Once you had that list of things that would lead to a not healthy life, you can just invert that list, which is something that came from the mathematician Jacoby Invert. Always invert. So now that we have our via negativa, we invert it. Now, the reason this is so impactful for coaching is because when we coach the negative, we are, by definition, using this via negativa process, which I love. I love it.
Anthony Vicino:
However, it does not help. It’s not helpful for the person in the moment who’s fucking up the thing, and you’re trying to coach them on how to do it better, especially when that person’s a kid or a novice, and they just don’t have enough context yet to be able to self correct themselves. And this is where most people get really frustrated because you tell them what not to do. You point out the things that they’re fucking up. That because they’re new, they’re novice, they don’t have the context yet. They’re like, I don’t know what to do, how to do this better. I get that I’m doing it wrong, but I don’t know what to do better. So one of the things that we were very adamant about when working with our athletes is that we never coach the negative.
Anthony Vicino:
We never point out what they’re doing wrong. We do point out what they’re doing wrong, but we never do that without pointing out what they need to do correctly, how to do it correctly. And so we started calling this coaching the positive. So instead of don’t put your foot there, don’t do this, we would say, put your foot there. Do this. Right? So now I’m giving you the solution. Instead of just pointing out that you’re doing it wrong and that don’t do that thing. That’s not the solution.
Anthony Vicino:
That’s not the path forward. Right. Instead, my job as your coach is to point out the thing that you need to do correctly. Right? And it’s so interesting when you’re coaching a kid, somebody on the wall who’s 20 30ft above you, and it’s so easy to default to coaching the negative and pointing out what they’re doing wrong rather than helping them in the moment by pointing out what they should do. Now, one of the most powerful manifestations of this that we ever saw was around the idea of fear. And the reason this is so powerful, especially in rock climbing, is because rock climbing is a very foreign activity for most people. If most humans are deathly afraid of heights and it’s an evolutionary development, it makes sense. All of us have this fear.
Anthony Vicino:
And to be an effective climber doesn’t mean that you aren’t afraid. It means that you move forward in spite of that fear, that you learn how to control it. And one of the things that you will see with kids when they’re climbing, or even adults, is that you can see the fear mounting in them. And you can see these moments as the fear starts to grip them and overwhelm them, the body starts to react in a very predictable way, and you can see this happening. And what I would notice most people when they’re coaching or trying to be supportive of that person, what they will tell them is something like, don’t be afraid. Go for it. You can do this, like encouragement and positivity. But it’s that first part, don’t be afraid.
Anthony Vicino:
So what is that? That’s coaching the negative. It’s telling them what not to do. And that’s not helpful because when you’re in that moment and you’re gripped by fear and somebody tells you, don’t be afraid, you’re like, Fuck you. I am afraid. What are you talking about? I can’t just shut that off. It’s a biological reaction to my situation. I can’t just stop being afraid. And when working with kids, we found it much more impactful to help them understand that you are going to be afraid, that we are not going to remove that.
Anthony Vicino:
The goal is to continue moving forward with poise despite the fear. And that’s what courage is. If you really boil it down, you can’t be courageous without fear. To be courageous, you need a certain amount of fear to be able to move in spite of it. Right? So these are two sides of the coin. When you have fear, it means you also have the opportunity for courage. So when it comes to coaching, which one is more advantageous? To say don’t be afraid to coach the negative or to turn it around and say, this is your opportunity to be brave, to coach the positive? And everything in life, everything in life has this kind of yin and yang, two sides of the coin situation. And the more that you can focus on the positive, on the side that you can control and what you are going to do when this thing inevitably occurs and you make this mistake.
Anthony Vicino:
That is where the path of progress and growth actually occurs. So I encourage you think about this with your teams, with your family, your kids, your relationships, whatever. Any place that you have some kind of position of coaching or mentorship, some sort of authority in the relationship to use this technique of coaching the positive, rather than pointing out the things that people are doing wrong and what they should have, pointing out and saying, don’t do that thing right. Point out what they should do instead and take away from this the idea that if nothing else, move forward with courage. That the goal is not to be not afraid. The goal is just to be the type of person who moves forward with courage despite the fear. So hope this brings you guys some value as always. Really psyched to have you guys here.
Anthony Vicino:
Truly, it means a lot to me. I’ll catch you back around these parts tomorrow. But until then, stay hyper focused, my friend.
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