Today I assisted a colleague facilitate a cricket coaching module for up and coming coaches. On my drive home, it really got me thinking about the subject of feedback.
Lots of things went through my mind that gave me a good chance to think about my delivery to these aspiring coaches, my own coaching, how this subject relates to what I do in everyday life and how players learn from feedback.
My initial thoughts from this drive home revolved around the below principles in relation to feedback:
1. You need to be yourself and act natural. It’s important you have your own style and you stay true to who you are. Quite often people are made to change and be something which they are not. Players will sense this and you could come across as giving insincere feedback.
2. The feedback needs to be specific to what you and they are trying to achieve. This insures the player is 100% aware of what areas they have done well in or what areas need to improve in. This helps giving them clarity in their head.
3. By asking questions you get the player to become more self-aware of what they are doing and feeling in relation to the skill. This gives them a best opportunity to learn from doing as opposed to being told what to do. Great source of learning which I term self-discovery learning where the coach facilitates this process through questioning.
4. While the player is still learning the skill then feedback needs to be constant to reinforce the progress of the skill. There is a fine line required between saying too much and not saying enough when going through this learning process. Once the player has nailed the skill they will be more self-sufficient and feedback will not need to be as constant.
5. Most people respond better to positive feedback rather than negative feedback. As much as I think you need to stay as positive as you can sometimes it’s unavoidable to point out the negatives. A good way to go about this is by following point 3 above of asking questions. How do you feel you are progressing? What areas could you improve on? Rate yourself out of 10 and why? What will it take for you to go from good to great? These are a few examples.
Giving feedback is an essential part of successful coaching at any level to insure your players are constantly learning and evolving to meet the challenges they will face in the heat of competition.
These are just a few brief thoughts after having had a few hours to reflect on the subject. I’m sure there are many other techniques and ideas on feedback which I’ve now got the urge to research more about!!
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