Coaching Mastery: The ELM Approach
What is the first question people ask children when they see they're wearing a sports uniform?
"Did you win?"
Our society tends to put scoreboard results ahead of everything else. Responsible Coaches care about the scoreboard, but they care even more deeply about instilling a Mastery approach in their athletes, which will help them win throughout their lives.
A simple way to remember the three keys to the Mastery approach is the acronym, ELM, where ELM stands for Effort, Learning and Mistakes:
- Effort -- always give 100%
- Learning -- improve constantly as you gain more knowledge
- Mistakes are OK -- mistakes are how we learn.
Research shows that when coaches focus solely on the scoreboard, players' anxiety increases. Athletes spend more of their precious emotional energy worrying about whether they will lose. Higher anxiety causes them to make more mistakes because they play tentatively and timidly.
Ultimately, anxiety undercuts self-confidence, which affects performance and takes the joy out of sports.
Why does the focus on the scoreboard increase anxiety? Because players can't control the outcome on the scoreboard! And players become anxious about things that are important to them that they can't control. A win on the scoreboard depends a great deal on the quality of the opponent, which is outside of the control of the athlete or team.
Sports psychology research shows that teams and athletes who take the ELM Mastery approach (giving 100% effort, constantly learning, and bouncing back from mistakes) consistently win more contests. By moving your team's focus off their scoreboard results and on to their effort, you'll have happier, more self- confident players, and the wins will come.
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