Praise Culture

I have severe weaknesses as a coach. One of those is a tendency to focus on the negative. I’m short on butt slaps and heavy on “Fix that!” comments. What’s tricky about me moving in a improved direction as a coach is that positive feedback without justification may feel good, but it doesn’t help anyone. Conversely, we all need to hear some good news, too.

In our culture, we’re sliding more and more into a softness that doesn’t support the realities of failure. We pretend it’s not there, often in the name of feelings. Everyone has feelings and when our first priority is to protect our feelings and those around us we lie. We say things like, “Goooooooooood, Dave. Real good,” when nothing actually “good” earned the remark, for example. We give everyone trophies and so on and so forth.

Given our human tendency towards thinking everyone gets a trophy and my personal tendency to lean heavily on critique, I propose a compromise. I need to communicate the good with the bad, but in exchange let’s agree that athletes get both the positive and negative feedback. Effort, for example, is understood. If you’re coming in here to learn and produce some work, you don’t need to hear about how great you are for completing the task.

You want to do this better, faster, safer, and so do I, so let’s fight tooth and nail to chip away at our mistakes to reveal a masterpiece. Poor movement needs critique. Working hard to make remarkable changes deserves praise.

Simply doing it isn’t something to write home about. Show me how to do it better and we’ll talk about a “Job well done, Dave.”

 

Logan Gelbrich

@functionalcoach