BEHAVIOR CHANGE - Mental Performance for Coaches (2 of 2)

There's a fascinating book that you guys may have seen from, I think it's, like, Duncan, Hubble, and, and Miller, and it's basically called, like, What Works in Psychotherapy.

And it comes across this thing called common factors model, and it's, it's awesome because this idea of what works in psychotherapy has started to broaden to all aspects of helper-helpee relationships.

So they're now using it in teaching, they're using it in medicine, they're using it with personal trainers and clients.

They're, they're using it with, um, coaches and athletes.

So they're starting to see that this helper-helpee relationship, there are these common factors that are super important regardless of, um, context or, or field.

And, and the first one...

Like, I guess if you would think about, like, positive change as a pie graph, and if I wa- want a person to have, like, a positive change experience, you want that pie to equal to 100%, like, if I have 100% success.

Um, 40% of that pie, that 40% slice is the athlete's personality and readiness to make the change.

Like, if they're not ready and we don't understand their personality that they're bringing to this attempt, they're already 40%...

The best they can hope for is a 60, a D in, in, you know, school grades.

And it's interesting because we look at, like, is the person ready to make a change? Do they wanna make a change? Do they have the personality that's going to facilitate that or get in the way? You know, there are a lot of things, I think, in terms of what CC said, meeting them where they are.

And as a coach, it's really hard to meet a person where they are sometimes if they have some, some gristly personality qualities.

Um, agreeableness is one of those qualities that's a personality characteristic.

How agreeable are you? And some people, as an athlete, when you talk to them, they're like, "Oh, Coach, I'm all in.

Here we go." And they've got a very high agreeableness to their personality.

Other athletes are very low agreeable, and they're gonna wanna fight and argue w- with you on every- everything, and that will be a part of their personality is they've got a sort of low agreeableness.

And knowing that that's a part of their personality, that's gonna be 40% of their success is can I meet them where they are and engage them with their personality that they're bringing to this change efforts? You know, there was a pitcher, I'm not gonna mention his name, but he was extremely low agreeable.

Extremely talented, elite pitcher in Major League Baseball.

Lowest of low agreeable person you're ever gonna meet, and you knew when you were gonna talk to him, everything you encouraged him to try was gonna be a major fight.

It was gonna be a fistfight.

Why it wouldn't work, why he doesn't do it that way, why his way is better than your way, why you don't know what you're talking about and he does, and you just had to be ready to engage in that fight because that's part of the personality he's bringing to his change effort.

Um, introvert/extrovert is another personality quality you see, and you know that if you're asking an introvert to change, you're probably gonna have to do more of the proactiveness in getting that jump-started, whereas if a person's an extrovert, as a coach you could probably back off a little bit and let certain contexts like failure prompt him or her to, to pr- to seek you out.

Um, but what's interesting is 40% had to do with their readiness regardless of where you were and what you wanted as a coach.

They had to be ready, and how do we help get them ready? And I think, uh, both CC and Zach have talked about different ways where we can help a person get ready to change without forcing it onto them.

But just to kind of close the loop on this idea of common factors, what these scientists found was that there are these common factors in all helping professions that mattered more than the technique itself, and Zach was talking about the technique.