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Slappin' Glass sits down this week with the Director of Mental Performance for the Philadelphia Phillies, Ceci Craft! In this highly insightful conversation the trio dive into the areas of performance under stress and pressure, "balance vs. priorities" in coaching, and discuss promoting confidence in players, and the art of giving feedback during the always fun "Start, Sub, or Sit?!"
To join coaches and championship winning staffs from the NBA to High School from over 60 different countries taking advantage of an SG Plus membership, visit HERE!
We'd love to hear from you! Send us a text!
Slappin' Glass sits down this week with the Director of Mental Performance for the Philadelphia Phillies, Ceci Craft! In this highly insightful conversation the trio dive into the areas of performance under stress and pressure, "balance vs. priorities" in coaching, and discuss promoting confidence in players, and the art of giving feedback during the always fun "Start, Sub, or Sit?!"
To join coaches and championship winning staffs from the NBA to High School from over 60 different countries taking advantage of an SG Plus membership, visit HERE!
I think one of the things that I've seen that's really interesting is if you create space for yourself to understand how the athlete sees themselves and then you stop and say, okay, how do I want to see them, and are those calibrated, or are those actually two very different visions? I can't do this to the player. I think sometimes we try to do the coaching to the player. I just need him to do this or her to do this, especially as players get older. Really doesn't work, and the best players have a filter system. They actually have some tough mindedness of who they are and how they want to do things, and so you actually have to work with them. You have to find the calibration. You have to find shared vision and a reasonable negotiation about what the next advancement is and how you guys are going to work together on it what the next advancement is and how you guys are going to work together on it.
Dan Krikorian:Hi, I'm Dan Krikorian, and I'm Patrick Carney, and welcome to Slappin' Glass exploring basketball's best ideas, strategies and coaches from around the world. Today we're excited to welcome Director of Mental Performance for the Philadelphia Phillies, cece Craft. Cece is here today to discuss mental toolkits for coaches and high performers, especially under stress and pressure, the unhealthy parts of coaching. And we talk confidence in players and the whens, hows and who's of giving great feedback during the always fun start, sub or sit. Unique and absolute must the most helpful and highest quality coaching content anywhere. These are some of the comments coaches are using to describe their experience with SG Plus.
Dan Krikorian:From NBA and NCAA championship coaching staffs to all levels of international and high school basketball, SG Plus is designed to help curious coaches discover, explore and understand the what, why and hows of what the best in the world are doing Through our easily searchable 750 plus video archive on SGTV to our live coaches social in Las Vegas. Sg Plus is the assistant you would hire if your athletic director didn't already give this stipend to football. And now, please enjoy our conversation with CeCi Craft. One of the things that we wanted to start the show with is talking about sort of a mental toolkit for coaches when it comes to handling pressure and handling stress and all that goes into it Wins, losses, managing a team, traveling and things that a coach can do to really help keep a balance or to continue to show up every day with a positive mindset. Coach, a team, and so things that you think about when you're helping coaches with that mental toolkit.
Ceci Craft:I think a big piece is the coach knowing what their underlying philosophy is or what's most important for them to accomplish. I think even as we get to pro sports or big programs, we naturally know that the winning is important, but how do they intend to win? I think that's a huge central theme that's going to dictate and inform every decision they make from there on out is what they value and what their methodology is going to be, and that can vary widely from coach to coach. I think if you even look through the history of different coaches, I know, almost like parenting in different decades we would popularize different things. But there's been coaches that are micromanagers, that are going to tell you exactly how to tie your shoe, and there's going to be other coaches that encourage mindfulness, and there's going to be other coaches that encourage huge amounts of autonomy and choice in a Socratic method of coaching. What's yours? And I don't think that there's a right or wrong answer, as long as you're going to be consistent with how you stick to that. You mentioned the word balance. I hate the word balance. I don't think in the sport world there is balance and I think it's kind of a myth that we've perpetuated because it's healthy, and so maybe I'll kick off by disrupting a lot of thoughts.
Ceci Craft:High performance oftentimes isn't particularly healthy, and I think we need to let go of that idea if that's truly what we're after Now. If you're a rec coach, health should be part of what you consider that's really appropriate. But if you're trying to coach in an incredibly elite setting or the best of the best, some of the choices you're going to make about how you allocate time and what you ask people to do and what you ask them to sacrifice are not always healthy. They're high performing, and so I think that's another piece sometimes for coaches where we wrestle with it.
Ceci Craft:My husband and I talk all the time about what baseball demands and how a season works and spring training when we're in Florida for six weeks, and it's a really unique lifestyle and it offers my family some really neat things, and there's also parts of it that I don't think are very healthy and I don't think it works to pretend that they are. I also think, as a coach, you understanding why you coach, which is different from your coaching methodology what it does for you, what it does for people around you and how you want to do that and what that investment looks like. I think one of the best things you can do for people that love you is be honest about what that investment is going to be and what recharges you and sometimes work is what recharges us, and acknowledging that helps too.
Patrick Carney:Cece, if we can just kind of hang on the unhealthy parts of high-performance coaching. You mentioned a little bit of kind of coming to grips and communicating the sacrifices or what comes with this. But what other ways are you helping coaches to understand and manage the unhealthy part of being a coach?
Ceci Craft:There was a really interesting study that was done. There was a book that was written called the Talent Lab, and the Talent Lab is kind of a it's not the same as the talent Code though I love Dan Quills but it came out of UK research where they were looking at what they called super elites, and super elites were people that meddled multiple times in Olympic cycles or across Olympic cycles and they found some really interesting stuff. A lot of those athletes were unhappy and part of the reason they were unhappy is because their expectations were incredibly high. They were very self-critical and the minute they won one medal, the joy was fleeting right. They like stood on the podium, they got their medal and then it was like, okay, what do I need to do for next year? And they almost hated to lose more than they loved to win, because when they won it was okay. Now what's next? And I think there's a piece.
Ceci Craft:When you get around, really you know whether we call them like type A or high functioning or lead or pro coaches or athletes that we see mindsets that can be irregular and they can be different. They feel different, right? You notice high self-criticism from the coaches. You know I could have done this in that game, okay, well, was that actually in your control or not? In that? Well, not fully, but if I had prepped this way, that would have happened. I think there's a space oftentimes when high performers or high level coaches even get around each other where they can almost commiserate and they realize other people think this way too.
Ceci Craft:I think one of the pieces for coaches is I always ask what's functional? So when you think about how you're processing games, or how you're setting up and preparing for games, or the lifestyle you've chosen to live, or if you're getting a workout in four in the morning or two in the morning because that's the only time you get it, or why you do what you do, is that functional towards your performance? If we treat the coach like their own high performer and if it is okay, it may or may not be healthy, but it may be high performing and if that's what you want to do right now, if that's the deliberate choice you're making, that's okay, right, like permission to be high performing and weird with our players, with affiliates, we talk about a bell curve of normalcy, right, and we talk about how you actually don't want to be normal. You don't want to fall in where most people are. You would not be a professional baseball player if you did. You actually want to be weird and strange and outlierish, and that means your behaviors are weird and outlierish.
Ceci Craft:Most people don't work the way our players work. That means your eating behaviors are going to be outlierish. That means your mindset should be outlierish. You're going to be weird by definition, right. You're not like everyone else, and so for coaches, I think when you're an elite coach and you're performing at a high level, you should be weird and it's okay. And then the question is is it functional or dysfunctional? In the way that you're weird If you're so hard on yourself that it's crippling, that's not functional. If you're hard on yourself and that means that you're always searching for the next best thing, which means you're on the cutting edge of coaching your sport, it's highly functional cc, if I could jump in and kind of double on what pat was asking about and this concept of balance and all that.
Dan Krikorian:And pat and I were talking a little bit before the show about balance first, priorities and basically the difference between the two, and that you know we were even saying, you know, balance is probably not something that you're able to do, especially in the coach's life. How do you? You think about priorities and, like you just kind of mentioned a little bit about what each coach is wanting, but what are you optimizing for, I guess, when you talk to these coaches, is it happiness? Is it winning? Is it just high performance? I mean, I'm sure everyone's a little different, but when you have kind of deeper conversations about all this stuff, what is it about?
Ceci Craft:I don't think you can be on the pure search for winning, because I think that in baseball we talk about people that tinker all the time, they can't stick to a methodology, a hitter that's always changing their grip or their stance or the way they're holding the bat. They can't stick to anything, and I think that makes it very hard to win, and winning is a moving target. And so I do think you have to find underlying methodology that you believe in, what you believe leads to winning. I had a hilarious conversation once with a general manager where we were talking about routines and he's, you understand, the only reason we like routines is because we think it leads to winning. Routines in and of themselves are of no value to us, and I was like, yeah, I get it, but we think this increases the chance of high performance, right? So I think you have to have your methodology, but I think you also have to keep an eye on your methodology. You know, I think one of the things that's hard for us as we're coaching and getting older is that methodologies evolve.
Ceci Craft:If I tried to coach soccer, I played soccer like they coached soccer in the eighties and nineties and early two thousands gosh.
Ceci Craft:The coaching evolution, the way they play, the positioning, it's all continued to evolve, and so I think you have to have an underlying core philosophy, but the tactics, the strategy, will evolve. I do think the center of it you're coaching humans. I think that's one of the things I love about what I get to do is, a lot of times I'm working with coaches who have phenomenal tactical and technical knowledge or mechanical knowledge, and sometimes we forget that we're coaching humans. So they'll say, well, I'm basically like I'm telling them, I've told them 10 times, I've transmitted this information, I've coached this information and we'll stop and say, okay, well, who are you coaching and what is your methodology to transmit that information? And the methodology that works with player A may not be the same thing that works with player B. So my hope is that some underlying some of that methodology towards high performance or winning or continued evolution of people is a heavy interest in humans and how they grow, learn, adapt, evolve.
Patrick Carney:On that note, we've had conversations before where you know I've seen young coaches. They come up, they learn a lot, they know all the tactics, they know strategy but, like you said, they struggle maybe with transmitting the information or building the relationship with their players. And, within this methodology conversation and helping coaches discover their methodology how are you helping them understand people that they're coaching and ways that they can build relationships based on understanding of who they are and how their personality connects with other players?
Ceci Craft:I think with a lot of young coaches, we'll see heavy transmission of a huge amount of information. Right, I know all these things and I can't wait to share them for you and I don't want you to make even the mistakes that I made when I played. And I think there are really frustrating components about working with human beings and one of the things is that human beings only evolve and learn and adapt and grow so fast and we generally learn in things that we're interested in, understand or excited about. Right, like that hugely drives our attention and attention is big for learning. So I think there is this interesting piece If you have to capture who you're coaching, you have to capture their interest, attention and belief that this is worth them creating a behavior change. Behavior change isn't easy. We don't love change.
Ceci Craft:I think there's a classic piece of getting to know your players and knowing who they are and where they come from and what matters to them. But I also think there's this piece of how do they see themselves as a performer and as an athlete. As a performer and as an athlete, I think one of the things that I've seen that's really interesting is if you create space for yourself to understand how the athlete sees themselves and then you stop and say, okay, how do I want to see them, and are those calibrated, or are those actually two very different visions? I can't do this to the player. I think sometimes we try to do the coaching to the player. I just need him to do this or her to do this, especially as players get older really doesn't work, and the best players have a filter system. They actually have some tough mindedness of who they are and how they want to do things, and so you actually have to work with them. You have to find the calibration. You have to find shared vision and a reasonable negotiation about, like, what the next advancement is and how you guys are going to work together on it. I think that's humbling right For as much information and knowledge as you have, for as much of it being you know your team, for as much of your job being on the line for how this team performs.
Ceci Craft:You have to work with your players. You guys know I worked at Fort Bragg now Fort Liberty with soldiers and special forces soldiers, or green berets. They have a phrase of working by, with and through populations. They go overseas, they go to work with indigenous populations all around the world, speak the language where they go and they work in and with the population and they don't try to impose, basically, american values. They understand the values they're working with and they try to set up systems that work with that group. I think, as a coach, you're trying to do the same thing. You have to realize who you're working with and you have to work by, with and through them. You don't get to just do it to them.
Dan Krikorian:CC, I wanted to pivot a touch to something I heard you speak about before and I loved and I want to ask you about, which was you were talking about positive mindsets and things like that and the difference between a positive mindset and realistic mindsets, things like that. But you spoke about acceptance and why accepting things that happen to you is better than just trying to be positive all the time, and I wonder if maybe we could go into that a little bit as well and why acceptance is so big and potentially in coaching, especially in these stress pressure situations.
Ceci Craft:Gosh, there's so much there. The first thing I'd say is if we particularly link it to acceptance is so big and potentially in coaching, especially in these stress, pressure situations Gosh, there's so much there. The first thing I'd say is if we particularly link it to pressure. There's been really cool research that when you try to deny nervousness or pressure, basically your performance is going to drop. And acceptance of saying I'm nervous right now, usually as people perform about where they should, about proper to skill level, and people that can acknowledge that, that have the self-awareness to say this is where I am in this moment, function appropriately from that spot. And I think that's really important when you're coaching.
Ceci Craft:Even if we take the whole human as a coach, we're not perfect people.
Ceci Craft:We have our quirks and foibles and so when we accept those and we say, hey, hey, here are some of my strengths as a coach, here are some of my known blind spots, or hey, I may have messed that up yesterday I think we actually function, we perform a lot better because we're working from a real base.
Ceci Craft:When we don't have the acceptance, when we try to kind of pollyanna it or be like hey, it's all going to work out and be okay, I don't think it's very believable. So a lot of the best coaches that I've been around will even sit with players and say, yeah, okay, I'm seeing this issue in your game. You're seeing it too, you're experiencing it, you're running into failure, or gosh, we're coming up against this team and we need to figure out the right strategy for play, and historically we haven't done so well. So this is the growth, or this is the adaptation, or this is the next movement. That's really believable. I really struggle kind of with the positive piece because I think some things are going to be really hard and they're not positive.
Ceci Craft:I was a defender in soccer. If you're going to mark the elite forward on the other team and your job is just to take them out of the game, it's not going to be a fun game for you, it's going to be a lot of work and it's going to be really intense and you're not going to have much offensive opportunity. You're just stuck there and that's going to suck and it's going to suck for 90 minutes. But I'd rather have someone tell me that than say like this is going to be great, you just need to take out their forward and I want you to make their life miserable and you're not going to ever probably take a shot on goal and I really don't want you moving up the field. Just take them out of the game, you know so.
Ceci Craft:I think there's so many pieces around acceptance where sometimes people hear acceptance and they hear giving up, and I would say it's the opposite. Acceptance is setting a really strong foundation where you can plant two feet on that strong foundation and you can go from there. And I think, whether that's handling pressure, acknowledging pressure, I think whether it's acknowledging weaknesses or areas of work or challenges up ahead, just sets you a real place to function from.
Patrick Carney:Cece, you mentioned that you know if you deny nervousness, if you deny pressure, that it's found that performance does actually drop. Can you just elaborate a little bit for, like, what have they found as to why that mindset is kind of counterintuitive?
Ceci Craft:The study that people cite the most is around, like the Olympics, and they asked athletes going into the Olympics for your event, how are you feeling? They were looking at the interpretation of nerves and so players, performers, olympians that were denying any nerves, didn't perform well. Players said, yeah, I'm feeling a bit nervous coming in, did just as they were projected to do in terms of podiuming in the Olympics. And then players that took actually I'm going to counter myself here a positive interpretation said, hey, I'm really excited coming into this event. I'm nervous, that's a good thing, did better than what was projected.
Ceci Craft:And I think there's a piece of when we talk about, interestingly enough, confidence. Interpretation of our physiology is really important. We need to know how to read ourselves is, to me, one of the big takeaways out of that. And when we read ourselves accurately, we actually align to whatever the event is pretty well. When we don't read ourselves accurately, we don't do well.
Ceci Craft:And again, even if we go back to coaching, if you're lucky enough to coach with somebody else and you guys can acknowledge strengths and weaknesses one of you preps really well for games or does really good advanced scouting. One of you runs really good drill work at practice. One of you provides better feedback to players than the other one. If you can acknowledge what those different pieces are and use yourselves wisely or well, I think you set up a really different coaching dynamic.
Ceci Craft:You know, if you feel pressure, that you as the head coach have to do all the things and be the lead person at all times, and you fail to read that you don't provide feedback after a tough game well to your team. The pressure wins, right Like you put yourself in bad situations. So I think there's a huge piece in high performance of self-awareness. I would say, actually to me like the central part of high performance is self-awareness, because you can work through a lot of things if you're actually self-aware. You know strengths, you know weaknesses, you're not scared of them, you're not running away from them, you're not denying them, you're accepting them and working from that point.
Patrick Carney:Cece on that note, with pressure and you started going on self-awareness, when we look at now actually having to perform in a game, how are you helping coaches manage this pressure that comes with the game but in terms of their ability to act and make decisions and clarity of thought and not too overwhelmed by the moment that's being presented in front of them and then kind of losing track of that? They have to obviously coach and lead men or women in this game.
Ceci Craft:Okay, I'll speak to a possibly unpopular opinion off the bat, and this is where I do think experience matters. I really do think that your self-reflection as a coach is huge. So it's studying, it's spending time studying. Are you studying other coaches? Are you studying other games? Are you seeing why they're making decisions, what decisions they're making and how you feel about them? And then, in your own performance as a coach, when those big moments are happening, what drove the process? Did your own antsiness drive the process? Did your lack of faith in a player drive the process? Did the crowd screaming in the background that you need to change something or get someone off the court to make the decision? What is entering into your decision-making space and do you like it and is it what you want entering into that space? And if you could do it again, how would you do it next time?
Ceci Craft:I coached for the cleveland indians now the cleveland guardians, everywhere I worked, is now changing their name and terry francona, his bench coach, was a guy named brad mills. Milsy and tito are just amazing and they have been together since college. God bless milsy's wife and they're amazing. They sit and talk the whole game and they were watching the other dugout and what they were doing and the other coaches and what they were doing and they were watching the game and Tito's decision-making capability and if you watch when he's taken teams to post-season it's amazing. But they have studied and studied and studied the game and they've watched baseball their whole lives and they live it and they drink it and they're just curious about it and they love young players and they're it's just the food that they're constantly eating and reflecting on and then they're chatting with each other and I think that's a piece too is you know, again, we talk about this weird lifestyle that we live in sports. You kind of have to want it to be the thing you eat the most, right like the thing you're like studying and thinking about.
Ceci Craft:Because I think decision making in particular from a psychological space. We have mental models, we have kind of a map in our brain of how we understand things to work and that map informs the decisions that we can make and the more time you spend building out that map and populating it, the more interesting your decisions can become. But that map only gets populated through work, through reflection, through anticipation, through imagery, through what ifs, through watching other games, through wondering why that other coach made that decision through watching maybe even a different sport than yours or the other gender than yours, or whether they're doing it in another country and why they're running a different methodology than yours. Curiosity, I'd say, is the other huge piece on this is can you stay curious as a coach and not get defensive over the decisions you've made, even when they're great ones?
Ceci Craft:Hey, I made that decision. It worked out. I might've been lucky that it worked out. If I made it again, would I make the same one? I may not make the same one. Yes, it led to a win, or maybe I think that you know. Yeah, that helped us in this piece but for failure later.
Dan Krikorian:I think you have to go back and be curious too, cc, within all of this, we've talked about winning and how much that plays into it and kind of like what we're talking about right now. One of the harder moments in any coach's life is right after a loss and we're talking about experience and we're talking about all these things when you sit with a coach or you talk with high performers after tough losses and sometimes a younger coach can want to do big swings and a big change because they overreact to a loss versus maybe more experienced coach understands it's just part of the process. And I guess within all this too, your thoughts on after a loss, you talk about reflection, handling, these things where you kind of come in to maybe help a coach or a performer to move forward.
Ceci Craft:I think we're hearing more and more coaches come out. You know, like Saban or different people have said like hey, I talked to like my sports psychologist or my mental performance coach once a week. I think there's pieces for coaches to realize too. You are performing and you have your own needs and your own desires and your own pieces that are happening. And when you're investing this much time into something, it is the core value or core component of your life and what you're choosing to spend time on. And so, yeah, wins are amazing and losses are hard. Two things I'd say is we go all the way back to the beginning of our conversation about as a coach, you need to have an underlying methodology and it can't be all wins and losses, because that's a moving target. Part of the reason wins and losses cannot be the core piece of feedback for you is because, to your point, then, if you lose the, the want to have a huge knee jerk reaction. Many things need to change. I think is really high. And so if wins confirm everything's right and losses confirm everything is wrong, you have condemned yourself to a life of a roller coaster. If you can pull back and even again self-awareness notice, okay, my emotions are through the roof right now. I need to take a second and a breath and I need to check in when I think about our methodology or what's important for us as a team. Where did we fall on that and why? And if we're way off target, right, if we lost ourselves in this loss, we need to look at what the adjustments are on that and sometimes that is stuff like personnel on your team and how the team actually functions.
Ceci Craft:You know, sometimes it is scary decisions. Sometimes, hey, you ran your methodology and you ran it really well. A phrase that baseball has that I love is sometimes you have to tip your cap. The military has a phrase of the enemy gets a vote right. Sometimes the other people were better that day and you did things as right as you could within reason and you need to tip your cap, I think being able to say to your team we did incredibly well and today that wasn't good enough for the win, and that's today. So I think coaches need to take time to process their wins and losses wins as much as losses. They need to study their successes, they need to study their failures and I think having places and people you do that with whether that's peers that you coach alongside with that you respect, whether that's you have your own mental performance coach that really can understand your space with you and you as a coach, I think coaches are as much a performer as any athlete on the field.
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Ceci Craft:I had a unique experience with the military that I got to work with special forces, or green berets If you look at what they call conventional military, which would have units that are in like the thousands, they need to have very scripted movement. So, to your point, the top down approach of don't do anything that I didn't tell you to do is maybe more especially historically, more conventional military mindset. Green berets their whole selection process is actually around looking at how people perform in the absence of knowledge or the absence of direction, and so they actually train these soldiers to execute with good judgment and with very minimal oversight, and so they are rewarded for creative problem solving and deductive reasoning and innovation. So I got to work with this really crazy cool subsect of wild soldiers that took on problems that people didn't have solutions for yet and solved them. You ever see the movie like 12 strong or horse soldiers same movie, different name. That's Green Berets Really neat.
Ceci Craft:One of the things that I realized was most important actually was training design. I think that when we look at this and we get into coaching nowadays, we're seeing some of this too. Look at this and we get into coaching nowadays, we're seeing some of this too. I think one of the things that I love is that it comes back to a very basic thought that humans actually are built to self-organize, adapt and grow and we like to solve problems. I've got a 16-month-old kid. If you provide him with problem sets, he wants to solve them and he's figured out how to climb things all on his own. I didn't have to teach him to put his left foot up and his right foot up right, like I just put a really interesting structure in front of him and he does things that terrify me. We as humans are the same. So I think when I've watched the military conduct or create really dynamic training environments that are lifelike, we have an opportunity to really build into really interesting training and introduce pressure in really good ways, productive ways, and provide people with tool sets to work with that pressure, but also the ability to reflect and then enter back into a pressure situation again to gain that knowledge and exposure of who they are under pressure.
Ceci Craft:I think one of the things that's really interesting coming into a sports setting is there, especially baseball. There was a historical thought around baseball that the game is a game of failure. You'll hear this around baseball a lot and it really is, especially for hitters, but that the game is so hard at seven o'clock at night that a lot of the stuff early in the day was built to build confidence, and so if you watch batting practice, it's a 55 mile per hour fastball that goes right down the center. Players will even yell at you if you don't throw it accurately and they hit these beautiful home runs. Or like these wonderful hits if you go early to a baseball game, but none of that actually mimics the game or the hard parts of the game, which is when someone's throwing 95 miles per hour and you have no idea where it's going to go. And so one of the things that's been fun in sport is to watch us build better context to introduce pressure in more game-like and real situations, and I think that that's a huge part when we talk about coaching and training.
Ceci Craft:Things is, you have to set up game-like, real situations, and the more you can expose people to that, the more comfort you're going to build.
Ceci Craft:They're properly prepared for what they're going to go do. The example that I used to bring from the military into baseball is okay, we're preparing soldiers for war, so we have two options right. We can expose them to really hard things that are really challenging, and they're going to. We're going to keep them up late at night and we're going to sometimes deprive them of good food and we're going to make them march in the woods and it's going to be cold and they're going to be tired or hot or rainy or whatever, and they're going to do these things and then they're going to go to combat. It's going to be horribly hard, but they're going to have these experiences that they draw back on.
Ceci Craft:Have we been in hard before? Or we could say that combat's really really hard and so we're going to do wonderful things when they're at home, because they really should not experience hard things before they go to combat. It sounds crazy, but sometimes in sports I think we do that right. We're like I'm going to build confidence, so I'm going to make my team do this really easy drill and we're going to build up confidence on this and then they're going to go play this really hard opponent.
Ceci Craft:That doesn't make sense. So I think if you want to play well under pressure, introduce pressure, embrace competition, love building competition into your game right, because at the crux of sport is competition. That's part of what creates pressure. So make that accepted, desired, expected, help your players love competing, love pressure and recognizing that the wonderful part about sport versus the military is when you lose you don't die, you just come back and figure out how to get better.
Dan Krikorian:Absolutely Really well said. Thanks for your thoughts there. We actually want to transition to a segment on the show that we call Start, sub or sit, and so we're going to give you three different options around a topic ask you to start one, sub one and sit one on the bench, and then we'll discuss from there. So, Cece, if you're all set, we'll dive into this first one for you.
Ceci Craft:Okay.
Dan Krikorian:So this first one has to do with providing feedback in a training environment and your thoughts as to what would be most important when providing feedback. We're saying, not in a game, not like a sit down after, but training. And so, simply, the three options are option one is the who giving the feedback to. Option two is when you're giving this feedback. Option three is how you're giving the feedback.
Ceci Craft:That's a really good question. Okay, I'm sitting who. Okay, because I think the first two solve a lot of that.
Dan Krikorian:Okay.
Ceci Craft:I think I'm starting when and then I'm subbing how, and that feels painful to say. I'd love to say it the other way, but I think poorly timed feedback does some atrocious things to performance.
Dan Krikorian:Okay, love the answer. I know we knew this would be a tough one because of how important they all are, obviously. Could you just go a little bit deeper on your start, then, as to why the when is so important?
Ceci Craft:Yeah, I mean, I think for a performer, especially depending on what developmental stage they're at, letting people play is part of, to me, what builds their own strategic knowledge of a game. It's what helps them trust themselves and build confidence. It's well-timed feedback in terms of if you're teaching a new skill, it being on point and consistent and not letting them get poorly done reps. There's just so much in timing that makes it so you can build a skill correctly or where you can demolish a person's ability to think independently as an athlete, and so I just think timing of feedback is crucial, and knowing why you're giving it, the purpose of it and where you want to get to. And so I think timing is the first piece of great feedback. Given at the wrong time is bad feedback, and so your timing has to be purposeful and on point.
Dan Krikorian:In this training environment that we're talking about, like practice or whatever. When you're saying when the timing, are you thinking after the rep, after the game is done, in between, like when?
Ceci Craft:It really depends. So, like, if you're in a skill building phase, if I'm really working with something, with a player, of understanding a specific thing, then we go into like deliberate practice, research, right, like feedback should be high, and feedback might be you as the coach providing feedback. It might be whether or not, like they make a basket or whether they hit the ball in a certain direction, whatever sports you're in, but the feedback should be continuous so they know when they're on it and when they're not. And so in skill development, especially in like specified skill development, feedback should be early and often Don't let them get away with bad reps and it can be very consistent.
Ceci Craft:I got to watch Michael Brantley, an amazing hitter, just retired this past year, in baseball.
Ceci Craft:His dad would sit in the stands or come in and watch him and their feedback was one word or a gesture.
Ceci Craft:He'd be sitting like down the third baseline and Michael would look up in the stands and his dad would make an arm motion and that would be his feedback.
Ceci Craft:And he would do it as a pro player at the height of his career while taking batting practice the batting practice hitter. So I think timing of feedback then too, like as you move into practice of your practice, let's say, progresses into more game-like states later on in practice. You shouldn't then be stopping things constantly to provide feedback, and so now the priority is not on a specific skill. Now the priority is on letting things build into more game-like atmospheres and letting it play and letting your and for you as a coach, to see whether or not there's transfer. You need to step back and not be constantly disrupting the game and providing feedback. You can arguably ruin the confidence or the sense of understanding of you know, strategic knowledge of your players or them seeing the game the way they need to. So I just think, when then instructs how, and if you're doing the first two pretty well, then who isn't as important.
Patrick Carney:If we look at then the how. In this case, you started over the who, so why is how a little bit more important than the who you're going to give it to?
Ceci Craft:I think how feedback is delivered is a really big thing, and I think it's one of the things where there should be trust between athletes and a coach and understanding of how feedback is provided and why it's provided that way. I have six people that work for me on the mental performance side of the house for Philly as mental performance coaches, and one of the things I try to tell them early on is I am very blunt and I am very straightforward. I don't give personal feedback and I give a lot of performance feedback. I do it because I think that's part of how to make people great, but you need to know that that's my feedback style and if at some point you feel like you're hearing an undertone of it, feeling personal, we got to talk about it and I just learned early on people are not used to someone kind of bluntly giving feedback, really candid feedback, and so the first piece that people often went to was oh, she thinks I'm a terrible person and I would be shocked when they would say these things because I had no thought of who they were as a human. In fact, to me, the human was a whole different thing your life, who you are, your kids, where you're from. You can be a wonderful human and you can be messing things up. Those two things can hold true at the exact same time. So I think there was a piece of even me gaining trust with my staff of saying this is how I'm going to provide feedback. This is what it's going to look like. If we need to calibrate at different points, let's talk about it and let's calibrate there, but this is how it's going to look. And so I think for coaches too, how you're going to give feedback when you're going to give it, what's the purpose of it, I think, are huge, especially under pressure.
Ceci Craft:There's a guy named Preston Klein that's done really interesting stuff on communication under pressure and he's looked at heart surgery areas and heart surgeons and found that there's two different ways of communication. They communicate before the surgery and you'll hear them bullshitting about their kids and talking about all the different things, and they went to the park yesterday. And then, all of a sudden, they'll get into surgery and you'll hear, you know, the heart surgeon say, like I need this scalpel. No, that's the wrong scalpel, give me the other scalpel. And you know, a nurse might be offended, a surgical nurse and trying to explain that. That nice chatter that happened before pressure, and then communication style. That happens in critical moments. There are two different types of communication style. They're necessary to have those two different types, and so I think even for a coach to say in game, this is how you're going to hear stuff, or in practice, this is how you're going to hear stuff.
Ceci Craft:Or my thing in practice is that everything's going to be high effort. If your effort is low, this is what it's going to sound like. I'm going to call it out, I'm going to be blunt, you're going to know it, and then the team has expectation around how that's going to happen. That's big. If you're the coach that only says nice things in front of the group and does hard things behind closed doors, stick to that. How that happens matters. The consistency of how that matters happens. If you're always the blunt, straightforward coach and you're doing it with everything, everyone. How that happens matters. The consistency of that matters. Players are looking for that.
Dan Krikorian:CC in all this with your work, the major league level and this coaching staffs have X amount of coaches. I guess the importance of the whole staff having, I guess, a streamlined way to give feedback, like we're mentioning right now about the head coach potentially giving certain types of feedback, but then the importance of the other coaches either giving the same type or slightly different to drive the message home or to create a different relationship, and just your thoughts on other coaches in this.
Ceci Craft:I think other coaches are incredibly powerful and I think each coach is going to have a unique relationship with players. I do think there's a piece where, at the end of the day, the staff has to align on what the goal is, and so where I've seen it go wrong with staffs is that one staff member views themselves as knowing the player better and protecting that player, and so, you know, one coach says, hey, you need to freaking do this. And then another coach grabs them later and says I know that the head coach was really rough with you and, yeah, you do kind of need to do this, but you were doing a lot of things really well too. That's where I see stuff go horribly wrong, and so one of the things we talk about with Philadelphia is you cannot protect players. You can prepare them. Do not try to protect players. You're not doing them any service. They're trying to go play pro sports. Most of our guys, even the minor leagues, won't make it to major leagues. Prepare them. So if they've gotten tough feedback and if you are, you know their person, their position, coach that knows them better than anyone else and they come to you and say Patrick told me that I sucked at life today. How could he do that? He's horrible.
Ceci Craft:Ideally, that assistant coach or that specific coach is able to say I'm hearing you received that really rough. What do you think he was trying to say? I'm pretty sure he wasn't saying you suck. What was he saying? Well, he said I wasn't running hard, were you? Well, no, I guess I wasn't, but you know, I didn't get any sleep last night and I'm going through all this shit and he should know it.
Ceci Craft:Okay, what do we do with that right? And again, it's not taking the player's side or trying to protect them from Patrick. It's instead saying we as a coaching staff have a goal here. A message got delivered. I have a unique relationship with this player. I can help that player get to that goal and I need to back my other coach on that. So I think there's going to be different styles. I think that's phenomenal. Again, I think recognizing strengths and weaknesses helps you as a coaching staff and helps you be more dynamic. You should have that. But you as a coaching staff need to be able to trust that you have each other's back and, at the end of the day, you have the same goal and you're all there to prepare your players to do difficult stuff, not to protect them from hard things.
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Patrick Carney:All right, cc, our last start subset for you has to do with player confidence. So we've been talking a lot about the coach, but now, looking at the player confidence and the three options we're going to give you are what would be the most beneficial, in your opinion, to the player having confidence or the player being confident in themselves? Is it option one, their mindset? You know whether how they've trained their mind, the routines they have from a mental side. Is it their skill level, how they trained, how they prepared within their craft skill level, how they trained how they prepared within their craft, or is it the player-coach relationship and how they view their relationship with the coach at any given moment?
Ceci Craft:Okay, the second piece is skill level talent or skill level, how they work.
Patrick Carney:I would say how they work, how they prepare, if it's batting practice or getting reps.
Ceci Craft:Okay, I'm starting their work, how they work their skill level. I am subbing their mental game and I hate to do this to the coaches, but if somehow you as a coach have created dependency on you for confidence, I'm absolutely sitting you.
Patrick Carney:My first fall is actually with the player coach relationship and I guess we looked at it not in, so their dependency to gain confidence, but the role that a coach can not in, so their dependency to gain confidence, but the role that a coach can have in destroying their, eroding it.
Ceci Craft:yeah, yeah, I'll reverse orders on some set. I think developmentally it depends where the player is. So, a fully established pro player, I would keep the order of events. I think in a developmental stage, when a player hasn't established who they are, I would start the the coach that's such an influential piece in their life and then I would go to skill and then I would go to mental game. I think some of it to me is developmental stage.
Ceci Craft:Even if you're coaching college athletes and you're the person that controls at least 40 hours a week of their life, I think coaches have huge impact on what they allow the player to take pride and build confidence and understand themselves. As I think, when I look at like a major league baseball player or someone that's established in their sport, I do think there's some weird dependent relationships that coaches sometimes have formed with players, but ideally the player has a sense of self that far exceeds any given coach. So if the player is coached by multiple coaches, again I think that the way they work is more important. But if there is a by multiple coaches, again I think that the way they work is more important. But if there is a principal coach in their life that controls their future development. Yeah, that coach is a very big deal.
Patrick Carney:No, that makes a ton of sense. And my other follow-up then is when you look at the mental side of confidence, what actually matters when trying to get players to be confident from a mental standpoint?
Ceci Craft:Part of the reason I went through two. Skill is number two and, you know, at times even the mental side is last is. I'm not a big fan of affirmations and I do think self-talk has its time and its place. I think there are two types of confidence. I think there's junk confidence and healthy confidence. Not all confidence is created equal and both have a sense of I feel great going in. But all confidence is created equal and both have a sense of I feel great going in. But my question is why do you feel great going in? So I can't tell you how many young players that feel like I'm the best out there. I go out there and when I'm pitching I think I'm going to kick everybody's ass and it's like but why? And if? The why underneath that is because I have told myself to. Or if we go to like fixed growth mindset research right Born to do this, my I've told myself to. Or if we go to like fixed growth mindset research right Born to do this. My dad thinks I'm amazing. My mom told me I was wonderful. My coach says I'm the next best thing since sliced bread. I built like Adonis, whatever.
Ceci Craft:If that piece of why you're confident doesn't have foundation below it, then even if you're I'm confident because last time I won this tournament it doesn't matter to today, it has no relevance. And so when you go, try to compete with that confidence. If you hit challenge, it deflates. Now if you hit no challenge, that confidence works. Fine, it's junk. But you'll take your sugar high, it'll go.
Ceci Craft:There's healthy confidence to me that comes from training in difficult ways and knowing you can navigate obstacles, that you know how to grow, you know how to develop, you know how to get through obstacles. And the hard part as a coach is you have to create tough environments and provide honest feedback for healthy confidence to happen. But a little amount of healthy confidence to me is much more dangerous and lethal in a great way than a lot of junk confidence. So when you have a little bit of healthy confidence and someone shoves you down and you end up on your ass, you go all right, fine, I know how to be on my ass, I can get back up and I can kick your butt next time. Right, if you have junk confidence, you end up on your ass. You're not supposed to be there. You don't know what to do when you're there, so you just sit on your butt, I think for confidence.
Ceci Craft:The reason I went to like how you work is for an been mediocre. It's really hard to be confident and I don't care how many affirmations you say If you know your work is extraordinary and you know that you've trained harder than anyone else and you know what people were. Sleeping until 7 am, you got up at five to work. It's really hard to take that from somebody. And so to me, confidence easy come, easy go. Hard to gain, hard to get rid of. That's my piece on mental and skill training.
Dan Krikorian:Love the junk versus the health confidence. Cece. My last follow-up is sometimes, as coaches, the hardest players to coach are the ones that have the junk confidence, and you in a mental performance role and working with staffs. When someone is showing signs of more of the junk confidence, how trying to move them from that to a more healthy confidence can be probably very difficult. Coach is listening right now. We all have someone on our roster too that has a little bit more of the junk and it's not easy. How do you think about trying to move them from one towards the other a little bit.
Ceci Craft:Trevor Reagan, who does the learner lab, put out some really cool stuff recently, actually, on an article that was written on actually handling pressure and nerves, and they did two things to help out players. They taught them about fixed and growth mindset, and so they taught them about the it's okay to make mistakes, it's okay to have failures. And then they also explained why nerves exist and they saw that, with a little bit of psychoeducation and the opportunity that failure isn't the end of the day, that these people far outperformed people that didn't have that type of an education or training I think there's an interesting space here. When you have that person with junk confidence, they have it for a reason. You know. Somewhere they've gotten told that if you don't win today, you're not a winner, and so I think the piece that I pull from Trevor Reagan stuff is make growth mindsets mistake. Make the culture of learning a huge part of your culture, make that desirable so for your player that you know thinks I have to think I'm the best to go win. You've opened up this window to the player that's making a ton of mistakes at practice is actually getting praised because they're working so hard and they're so much on the edge of their capability, that they're making mistakes, and so when they look silly now, they're going to be great tomorrow. That's really interesting. The guy that before thought he had to look pretty the whole time now wonders do I God? That guy's getting a lot of great attention over there. I'd like some of that right. So I think there's a piece of what you make desirable in your environment, in your culture, and I think for the person with junk confidence, they have to be convinced that you're still going to love them when they're not perfect.
Ceci Craft:And I think a huge piece of the junk confidence is I don't think this way, I won't be good enough, and so you have to open up a space, for maybe, if you don't think that way, you still won't be good enough.
Ceci Craft:Maybe you'll be better. There's a lot of fear that functions underneath junk confidence and there's a lot of sometimes poor self-esteem that functions underneath that, and there's a lot of oftentimes external expectation that functions underneath that. And so if you can take some of the wind out of that and instead make it okay to be somewhere else, I think it's almost like the kid that's trying to hide they haven't done their homework. They're going to keep trying to hide that from you until you call them out, and then you can kind of almost see them go like, okay, I got busted, now we can have a real conversation and they stop having to try to hide the thing from you the whole time. It takes a lot of energy to hide, so I think that's the piece too. The kid that has a lot of junk confidence in some ways wants to that when you see them you're still going to love them because you're going to see them now as imperfect.
Patrick Carney:And creating this environment that allows failure and kind of getting rid of this fear of failure. How do you maybe help coaches then who have a fear of failure?
Ceci Craft:Again, we take a lot of our own performance into who we are as coaches, right? And so I think some of it's what do you want to create for your players? And sometimes I think we create better stuff for our players than we would for ourselves. We understand that we can model better for others than we would even do it for our own self. So I think there's a piece of who you want to be for your players, and if it's not okay for you to fail or have quirks or foibles or make mistakes, then that's the message your players are going to get to, and that's a really hard way to play a sport, particularly if they're still at a stage where they need to walk.
Ceci Craft:They're all at a stage where they need to do a lot of growing and learning. So and then I think the other piece there is mistakes should hurt, right? I think one of the things that's really messed up in growth mindset literature is growth mindset. People love making mistakes. No, none of my athletes love making mistakes. They hate it. They just accept that it's part of what has to happen.
Ceci Craft:So, as a coach, you can hate every mistake you make and as coaches, for a lot of us, like the mistakes we've made have cost players opportunities. There's one that has been keeping me up at night the last few nights and good, I hate it and I won't make it again. And it eats at me and I wish I could go back and change it and I can't. But I can learn from it and I think, even with our players, I can be vulnerable enough to say I've messed stuff up and God forbid I do again. I will. It's going to eat at me, it's going to bother me and I'm going to study it, I'm going to reflect on it, I'm going to fix it, I'm going to be better, I'm going to do something to make sure I am better and I don't make the same mistake. It's essential for learning and I do think phrase I loved is I was at a training and they said we expect you to make a mistake every day.
Ceci Craft:You should be training so hard that you make a mistake every day. You just don't keep making the same mistake right. So learning is making a new mistake every day. I loved that Even in the military they were opening up space for you should mess things up. Just mess up new things to show us that you've learned from the old ones. Don't keep making the same mistake.
Dan Krikorian:Cece, great stuff. You're off the start, sub or sit hot seat. Thanks for playing that game with us. That was a lot of fun. We've got one final question as we close the show, but before we do, really thank you again for coming on and being so open with all this stuff. This was really enjoyable for us.
Ceci Craft:So thank you very much today. Thank you, guys. This has been challenging and awesome.
Dan Krikorian:CZ. Our last question that we ask all the guests is what's the best investment that you've made in your career?
Ceci Craft:I think, getting into really uncomfortable spaces when I've been invited in. So a month into my career with the military, I got an opportunity to go train with a unit called Asymmetric Warfare Group and they actually were half people in the military and half contractors, and they would were half people in the military and half contractors, and they would do a retrain for their contractors before they deployed so that to make sure they knew how to work. The latest radios they had shot a gun recently. They understood the newest medicine and blood stopping agents, whatever, and so it was a week long training. My boss at the time, absolutely phenomenal man, decided it'd be really fun to send the girl from Berkeley, california, to this training for a week and I knew nothing about any of it, but it informed how I worked with soldiers for the next seven years.
Ceci Craft:I was super uncomfortable. I was in their space. I had to learn how to shoot a gun and I had to boy. I employed every mental performance skill. I knew I was way out of my depth, but I remembered what it was like to learn. I remembered what it was like to learn. I remembered what it was like to be uncomfortable. It really made me gut check myself and the knowledge of being in that uncomfortable space also again springboarded a lot of my work.
Ceci Craft:I then was really comfortable going out with soldiers in other spaces they were in, I think stepping into baseball.
Ceci Craft:I did not know nearly enough about baseball, grew up as a really casual fan maybe I don't know if fans would even consider me a fan and the GM for the Indians, who's now the president, chris Antonetti, actually had me like sit behind home plate with one of the scouts and just ask him a ton of questions as I was watching the game and Tito opened up a beautiful place too for it to be okay that I didn't know what I didn't know, and so I just learned a ton. I think the best investment in my career has been finding moments where I get to be on the back end of a learning curve and I have a huge amount to learn and just finding those spaces and stepping in them and exploring them, because I think it leads to my innovation. I think it makes me more relatable. I think it's broadened my spectrum of how I think about doing mental performance. It helps me relearn about myself and better define myself but also really see others differently.
Dan Krikorian:Wow, that was awesome. That was one of those ones that you know we're going to be thinking about probably the rest of the day that you and I, just about all the topics and things that CeCe went into. And it's just great having someone come on like her that is deeply in it and works with high-level coaches and athletes and is able to kind of cut through a lot of stuff, and I like that. She was kind of contrary on things too. It's always great to just give opposing opinions on some more popular beliefs on stuff yeah, I mean I'll just kind of dive right into it.
Patrick Carney:She basically said what we're kind of think, or maybe we also know that this profession is weird and unhealthy, but like the acceptance that it's okay, and I mean, basically what she whittled it down to is just knowing what it's functional, though yes, it's weird, it's unhealthy, we talk about it way too much, clearly about it. It's all encompassing and it makes it hard at times to be in that normal bell curve, but it's okay and it's just kind of managing knowing what, then, is functional and allows you to still be functional towards your performance and your methodology, or what your ultimate goals are.
Dan Krikorian:Yeah, I'll double down on that, and that's something you and I talked about beforehand when we were discussing this first bucket of conversation the mental toolkit under stress and pressure and one of the things you just mentioned. She hit on right away. That was deeply interesting to us is the distinction between balance in your life and priorities, and she said it right away that just she doesn't believe in balance and that it's probably not healthy, it's going to be an unhealthy profession at the higher levels in balance, and that it's probably not healthy, it's going to be an unhealthy profession at the higher levels, and I think we all know that. But it was, I guess, nice to hear in a sense because we do have such tough jobs and it's all encompassing you and I for five minutes, before hopping on, we're just talking about how all-encompassing coaching and basketball is and things like that, and for her it's like that's okay, that's part of what she works with every day with high-level coaches and players that you're not going to have a perfect.
Dan Krikorian:25% of your life is this and 25% is that You're all in and that's what makes you great at it and some other things you're not maybe going to be as great at, but, like we talked about. It's like the priority of this is what's most important to me, this is what I'm optimizing for, and it's like the priority of this is what's most important to me, this is what I'm optimizing for, and then these other things can kind of fall into place when they can. And I just think as a coach, you kind of get that intuitively. But she spoke really well about it today.
Patrick Carney:Yeah, we have joked that in the middle of the season it's hard to have a conversation with anyone that's not about basketball and there's like a time limit before your mind just goes back to your team or what you got to do in practice. And then you just you said I thought you just got to kind of have that Oscar play them off music. All right, I'm out of this conversation, Sorry.
Dan Krikorian:Yeah, exactly, I really enjoyed also the talk about within stress and pressure, about accepting things, and it sounds very simple on its face but she got into a little bit like the positive mindset and being overly positive and all that that really it's about. You got to accept whatever it is. That kind of comes your way and that that's what you know as coaches ultimately helps move over those difficult things. And then you know, and how that kind of bleeds into all that we're talking about under stress and under pressure is not denying what just happened in front of you, but accepting it and moving on is, like obviously a major part of coaching under pressure.
Patrick Carney:Another piece that stood out to me that I really enjoyed was when we talked about kind of how coaches go about building relationships with their players and helping them to learn and, obviously, teaching.
Patrick Carney:What stimulated my follow-up was because we had a good conversation with coach Peter Lonergan, who's in charge of developing coaches in Australia, and he mentioned all the young coaches are coming in. They know tactics, they know technology, they watch film, but they really struggle with building relationships or connecting or transmitting. This information probably is more accurate and she brought it up that these coaches or younger coaches have this need to get a heavy transmission and there's just no way they're incapable. As she said, humans just can't retain that much information at one given time. And she talked about what I liked is just understanding. You know you need to capture your players through either what they're interested in, what they're understanding or what they're excited about and trying to play to that, to get your point across or to teach or to get them, whatever your methodology may be, and I like her tips or experience in helping coaches build these relationships to transmit their methodology, transmit whatever it is I mean on the court they're trying to do.
Dan Krikorian:Yeah, I'll just circle to one more point in this first bucket that I liked was when we got onto something you and I were interested in asking her at some point during the show, which was the military versus team background, and she talked about working with the Green Berets and she made a great connection between the kind of bigger I think she called it conventional movement groups within the military where you've got more your thousands of troops and those need to be very top down, very much, do this this way because you have to just coordinate a lot of movement amongst a lot of people.
Dan Krikorian:But getting to where she worked with the Green Berets and wanting to have more autonomy, decision-making skills, creativity and I thought that was just an interesting point and I'll give a real quick miss from my end, not by her but by me really was just, I could have talked about that for a lot longer because I think my thoughts were like well, a lot longer, because I think my thoughts were like well, maybe, at what level, what amount of people does it become where you have to be more top down, like she talked about, thousands of people versus the Green Berets are a very small group and the different sport sizes a basketball team of 15 to 18 versus football teams over a hundred guys sometimes.
Dan Krikorian:When does the mesh where these things come together was one just sort of thing I wish I would have asked her about. Let's move to start sub sit. We got into confidence and feedback and both of these were great in their own right. I want to start with the feedback, and you know it was a tough one to ask her when we talked about the who, the when and the how, because we know that's so important, all of those. But the fun thing about Star Subset is really getting to the meat of what she thought and she started the when and gave some great insight there. But I'll kick it back to you on any first thoughts on the feedback.
Patrick Carney:Yeah, I found it very interesting. I mean, she started the when and she shared some really good thoughts on that. But I thought it was really interesting that she put the how over the who and the importance of the coach understanding how he or she likes to give feedback or is going to give feedback in training or in performance environments, and placing that above. Well, who is it I'm giving feedback to and how does that personality, that characteristic of the athlete, determine how I'm going to give feedback? And to me that was really an interesting conversation.
Dan Krikorian:Yeah, I second that, and I think it was Andy Bass that talked about giving feedback in the middle of a game or in the middle of an action like box out or pass, or you know. He gave some examples on that podcast about I'm going guess. Now to the when and the how a little bit here of like how that actually can restrict thoughts and movement and be more harmful. You know, even though like it feels like we're helping as a coach, to be giving direct instruction in the middle of stuff to make ourselves feel better or whatever helping ourselves, I think, yeah, we are. I mean to make ourselves feel better or whatever, helping ourselves, I think.
Dan Krikorian:Yeah, we are. I mean, it definitely makes ourselves feel better. I'll say that it's my job. Yeah, exactly, but how? The timing of it really is important, and I think that's so tough. I think this is where, too, it is different between sports, because, gosh, basketball's always moving, there's timeouts here and there. There's always moving, there's timeouts here and there, there's free throws. But baseball there's a lot more downtime. Even football, like other sports, there's more downtime where there's just no downtime in basketball. So that is like a tricky part of, I guess, in-game coaching is trying to find the when, because you do need to give some instruction at times, but like, really when is interesting with our sport, you know, as opposed to some others, and coach Cody Toppert, in our podcast with him, gave some excellent thoughts on in-game feedback or when you have to deliver kind of tough feedback, and how he approaches it in the game.
Patrick Carney:And yeah, I thought kind of to her point was really in line and great advice for coaches. With the second start subset on player confidence, I'll throw it to you, dan, on kind of your initial takeaways or first thoughts.
Dan Krikorian:Yeah, well, I'll give you credit. First, because you were the one that were really thinking about this and had initial ideas on wanting to pick her brain on it, and this was really interesting because she did a good job of talking about the different levels a pro versus maybe an amateur and I think she flipped the order based off of pro versus amateur. And I'll go to the amateur for a second, the one that she started for that and sat for the pro, which was the player-coach relationship and something that you and I were talking about beforehand of how a coach can really take a player's confidence away based off of their feedback, how they coach, how, at the lower levels coming up, that can really affect someone's confidence, and I thought that that was a good distinction and something that I took from that first part.
Patrick Carney:I like that distinction she made. It makes a ton of sense too, that kind of these formative years as an athlete, the role that coaches play in the high school, college level, and I mean you see it all the time. We've probably been on teams where we saw it with our teammates where yeah, just yeah, that coach has destroyed that guy. I mean we laugh now, but it's pretty messed up. We still have inside jokes about it with our teammates. But it's intuitive, it makes a lot of sense, and I think it's important as coaches to recognize though, to recognize that power we wield over the amateur athlete and how influential and detrimental it can be at times. So I appreciated her making that super important distinction.
Dan Krikorian:Another thing within all this too I think you're going to mention it too, so I might steal it but was the junk versus healthy confidence and diving into the weeds a little bit about that, and I think I have to follow up about the player who has the junk confidence and how to approach that, because I think we all know that the healthy confidence we have had players like that and it's awesome. Those are the best people to have on your roster but the ones that can cause some of the most issues are the junk confidence when it comes to playing time or shot selection or team dynamics, and that's another miss from my end of just talking more about how to manage those players and how to help them shift a little bit. She did talk about it well, but I could have spent more time on that too.
Patrick Carney:Your follow-up was really good because she got into the underlying reason about why they have this junk food confidence, which they have, this fear of failure. So it's kind of like this protection plan they put in place and the importance of what she went into then. Creating these environments that encourage failure, allow them to fail and recognize that it's going to be okay so then they can start shifting away from this junk food confidence and getting into healthy confidence was the reasoning behind why these players have this junk food confidence and once you know the reasoning, like anything, you can start to solve and hopefully shift their mentality.
Dan Krikorian:Yeah, absolutely. Well, I gave a couple of just kind of misses from my end or things. We wish we would have had more time for Anything else from your end as we kind of start to close the show.
Patrick Carney:I think if I look back at the big book and then once she picked it off with just the unhealthy aspect of coaching and digging more into relationships, and not only relationships with your players, but how you kind of form relationships with people and even people outside of this coaching realm when it's such a weird profession, like how you go about the importance of maybe again, I don't want to say balance but having relationships outside of basketball. But it's interesting because when we talked about decision-making, she said experience and having conversations with coaches and other people, other coaches outside of sports, to help obviously provide your career with success. So I think that was a mess just continuing to dig deeper on the relationship aspect for coaches and not only what they're playing with, just other people for coaches, and not only with their players, with just other people.
Dan Krikorian:Yeah, for sure, and I thought her answer to the best investment was awesome and putting herself in difficult situations to grow was a great answer, and we probably could have kept going on that too, but the music was playing us out, so all right. Well, hey, we appreciate everybody sticking around and listening. We'll see you next time on Slapping Glass. Do we have a name yet for this thing? I have like slapping backboard, slapping glass, slapping glass, that's kind of funny.
Patrick Carney:I like that Slapping glass.