Coaching Tip #43

Tagged – Tip of the Week, Coaching Practice, Practice Management, Player Development, Team Development

Coaches like to explain things.  At its heart, coaching is explaining and it follows that the profession / vocation / avocation self selects those who like to explain things.

Explaining things most often requires the use of words.  And the more debate about a  topic or the more complex the concept requiring explanation the more words are used.

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Normally you would think this is a good, or at worst, neutral thing.  As long as the concept is explained who cares how many words are used to explain it.  But the more words that are used, the more possibility there is to stray from the topic at hand.  The more words that are used the more possibility there is to introduce unhelpful or distracting irrelevancies.  The more words that are used the more likely attention will be lost, making the whole process moot.

In short, there is no concept that is made more understandable by using more words.  The coach must always strive to explain their concepts as easily and as simply as possible.  My rule of thumb for writing blog posts is 500 words is ok.  300 words is better.  200 words is best.  My time is up.

Remember, more words = more confusion.

The collection of Coaching Tips can be found here.

Read about the great new Vyacheslav Platonov coaching book here.