Wayne Goldsmith: Compelling Guidance Coaches and Parents Should NEVER Forget
Sporting parents, coaches and players - today you’re in for a treat! Wayne Goldsmith is an international coaching expert from Australia who has influenced the thinking and teaching of some of the world’s leading athletes, coaching and teams. But if I’m honest that’s not why I was so excited about speaking to Wayne.
The reason I was buzzing to chat with Wayne is because he is my no.1 go to source for wisdom on navigating the challenges of being a sporting parent and a coach too. As you’ll hear, Wayne gets it. I know at times the journey of a sporting parent can be stressful and downright hard. From a coach perspective, it’s sometimes difficult to know what is important and what isn’t.
The approach which Wayne puts forward in his utterly compelling Aussie fashion has helped me as a parent and as a coach and I believe it can help you too. Indeed, I believe you’ll never forget some of his guidance. Enjoy…
Just to give you an idea of Wayne’s compelling approach, here are a handful of the many many amazing quotes in this episode:
‘The things that will convert the talent in to the realisation of potential are for the most part things that are taught and developed and grown by the parents’
‘If I grabbed the top ten coaches in any sport anywhere in the world and said write down a list of the qualities that underpin the success of professional athletes…commitment, dedication, passion, drive, resilience, determination and courage’
‘The way that kids want to receive information and the way they look to us for coaching and leadership and guidance is very different. And the way they don’t want it is to be lectured at, they don’t want the tell and yell from the end of the pool. They don’t want the stand and deliver from the end of the court. They don’t want the punishment for doing the wrong thing. Those days are so over.’
‘My belief is that one of the things we’ve got badly wrong is the performance pathway’
‘I say to coaches, change one word in your coaching language from ‘I coach players’ to ‘I coach with them’
‘The more independent they feel, the more ownership and responsibility they feel for their own destiny, the more likely it is that they convert their talent into something remarkable’
‘Even though I work a lot with professional teams, the most common word that I hear in professional teams is ‘LOVE’…I love this game…They don’t survive long enough…unless they love it’
‘The primary goal of a coach is to make them come back next week’
‘You can have a World Class tennis academy, great strength training, wonderful recovery systems, brilliant gym - all that stuff. The kid hates the sport and stops coming. None of it is worth anything without a love of what they do, so they do what they love.’
‘You’ve popped up and it’s 20 years from now and walking down the street in the opposite direction is your child…What do you want to see? Happy, healthy, smiling. Nobody says grand slam medal…no one say have they got out of a Ferrari…if you strip it all away, you want them to be happy.’
‘What the parents have got to realise is that at (aged) 10 and 11 they can get away with pushing the kids to do twenty hours of training a week. Maybe even 12 or 13. Once they get to 14 or 15 and the kids go ‘I can tell Mum and Dad to shove it’ then most of the time they’ll say ‘shove it’ unless it’s what they love doing in which case they’ll say ‘Mum and Dad will you pay my tennis fees?' It’s such a basic basic concept but it’s really important for every parent to get their head around.’
