Humbly, here are three recommendations for you to ponder.
First is one of the best coaching books to come out in some time. Doug Lemov is a teacher of teachers and has written extensively on the subject of teaching more efficiently and successfully. In December he released a book for coaches called "The Coaches Guide to Teaching." Upon the books release and promotion, COVID forced teachers to change how they taught and Lemov pivoted and focused his energies on students learning from Zoom and video and the hybrid styles of learning that teachers were being forced into. In some ways, this may have cost Lemov some readers but this book is invaluable.
Most coaching books talk about many of the same things, just with different acronyms and stories that sell the same ideas. In Lemov's journey, he touches on things that many of us don't think about. For example, there is a significant number of pages dedicated to forgetting. The idea of your athlete taking in everything you said at practice and implementing it at the next one is, in a word, absurd. He candidly talks about how much we all forget and how to help teach after the forgetting happens.
Lemov dives into this idea of learning and focuses much of his book on Coaches becoming better teachers, and uses both field and classroom examples you can pull up on YouTube as a companion to the point he is making.
The book is practical, well written and devoid of fluff. Every coach should look into Lemov's ideas to become a better teacher and this book is a valuable asset in that journey.
Another less obvious choice for coaches this summer is a play turned into a streaming movie. Illusionist, card shark and memorist Derek Delgaudio's one man show, called "In & Of Itself" was recommended by Coaching Guru John Kessel.
Delgaudio forces viewers into the notion that too often, we see people how we want to see them and often how they want to be seen. But in a thoughtful progression of stories and audience participation, we realize that we are not just one thing. We are so many things and in an extraordinary exercise midway through the film, we see the transformation of people before your very eyes.
Think of how many times we have looked at an athlete and branded them with our perception? "She is slow," or "He is lazy," or "She will never be a setter!" Who gives us the right? More importantly, why should that athlete be boxed into someone else's perception?
Delgaudio forces you to look at how we put people into categories and how we can upend those ideas with a little more effort., kindness and opening of our minds.
The film is riveting, funny, irreverent and will have you thinking about it for days after.
Finally, while many of you probably already subscribe to this podcast, Ryan Holiday's "The Daily Stoic" is a quick and rich daily thought about the ideas of stoicism in your busy life.
Holiday has taken the tenets of Stoicism and put them into several best selling books that are often sprinkled on a coaches shelf. Those include, "Ego is the Enemy," "The Obstacle is the Way" and "Stillness is the Key."
In this 3-4 minute podcast, Holiday takes an idea from the Ancient Stoic's writings and philosophy and helps you implement those ideas into your daily rigor. The four ideas of what they called virtue: wisdom, justice, temperance and courage and sifting them into your coaching practices may help you cement your coaching philosophy going forward.
Holiday's podcast also offers many in depth interviews with a range of people, from authors and athletes to scholars and historians. But the three to four minutes spent with Stoic philosophy can help open your mind to a better athlete centered coaching style.
If you have some recommendations like these, please share with us and the other coaches.
