[CLOH-News] Motivation -- article following the call to action

[Mark Rauterkus]

Hi ISCA Members,
Are you getting jazzed for the new season and the next cycle now that the
Tokyo Olympics have ended?
This email asks for help in the following article, a new entry into the
Global Library for ISCA Members. Rip it up and offer your feedback or any
extra support and stories that go along with the message -- or counter to
it as well.

https://read.swimisca.org/courses/global-library-for-isca-members/lessons/learning-what-makes-people-tick/

But, as per the article, I'd love to know more about what makes you tick --
and how to motivate you to dive deeper into the Global Library for ISCA
Members.

Are there any sticking points that we can work together on, reveal in the
Library, or bring to that shared resource in the days and weeks to come?

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In other news, I saw that one member asked about an OPEN WATER SWIM
Calendar. Well, ISCA's calendar dates were revealed today on the website.

https://SwimISCA.org/save-the-date/


Mark Rauterkus
Webmaster-Team at SwimISCA.com
218-400-1500

+ + +
Get to know the people you are trying to motivate, otherwise, you won’t
motivate them.

It is that simple. You can’t apply motivational techniques as if they are a
recipe for cooking stew. Besides, even when you cook stew, you often
deviate from the recipe.

You need to get at the heart of who each person is when motivating them.

People are different, and you need to consider those differences. Some
people are driven using high energy techniques whereas others like a
laid-back and subtle approach.
To learn about others, you need to learn more about what they are like on a
personal level.

If you have been avoiding participation in casual conversation after team
activities, you may want to start. This doesn’t mean you need to be overly
social every day. Your team does need to have time and conversations away
from the coaches on occasion. However, you do want to get to know your
athletes in a more relaxed and less formal environments. Be yourself and
have some extra events: Team meals. Team travel. Team outings, especially
for other teams in your community.

It’s not likely that your athletes will open up completely when you are
attending a social event with them. They still have their guards up. You
are the boss and coach after all, and this makes trying to learn about them
more challenging. However, as you continue to interact with them outside of
the workout setting, they naturally open more.
If you negatively use information about the athletes, it is going to
backfire.

If a young person confides in you, and then you turn it against him or her,
you can forget about getting the team to open up to you. News quickly
spreads that you are not to be trusted. Therefore, you need to be careful
what you do with personal and family information. Sometimes, you have no
choice but to use the information. However, don’t take that decision
lightly.
Motivating others is about formulating a plan that aligns their needs with
yours.

When you learn what others are about, you can customize each plan
accordingly. Discussing these plans with your staff and support team is
okay. In fact, it’s great to get their feedback as part of the process. It
affects them too, so they should know.
You can change plans when you find out about new information or
circumstances.

Be willing to make those changes, especially if they are in the best
interests of those in your charge. Listen to what they say and offer to
adjust the plans if it makes sense to do so. They will appreciate you, and
you'll find motivating them will take care of itself.
Motivating Others Takes Practice

If motivating others were easy, everyone would do it. You can’t just read
about a few techniques and implement them, expecting major changes to
happen. It takes practice like anything else worthwhile.

Motivating others requires them to be willing. If someone is hard-set in
not doing something, there is little you can do to change that. You may be
able to force someone, i.e., if you are on an authoritarian trip. However,
that is not the same as motivating them. If you were to leave the scene,
they would revert to their previous behaviors.
Realize that trying a technique only when the mood strikes is not going to
produce results.

You must be dedicated to trying the intrinsic motivational pursuits and
your team systems, and continue doing so, until you see results with the
team's culture take root. However, you also need to determine when
something isn’t working after several tries and seek an alternative
approach. Unfortunately, there is no magic number as to when to make that
determination.
Motivating others is about aligning their goals with yours.

This alignment could require some compromises in the process. For instance,
if you are trying to get one of your athletes to do some additional or
extra training, you need to listen to them if they legitimately say they
have too much other work.

You can’t approach motivation as entirely academic. In other words, if you
read about something and try to implement it, you think it should work. If
it doesn’t, you may blame the people you are trying to motivate and believe
there is something wrong with them. However, some people may be going
through stressful situations and may not able to have full-time focus on
their athletic pursuits. You need to have compassion for them and factor in
human emotions that may be at play.
If your motivating pathway isn’t working, you try to find out why.

It may be something you are doing that needs to be changed.

For instance, are you practicing what you preach?

If you are telling everyone that they must double-down on the weekends, but
you are unwilling to work yourself, then you are going to experience
resistance from your team. You get much better results if you are on the
front lines with your troops.
Motivation is more about communication than barking orders.

Motivation is about getting people to recognize the importance of the work
or task at hand. You must allow them to take the initiative and own the
problem and their solution.
[image: Obstacles and goals]
Increase Trust in Yourself

You may have a difficult time trusting yourself. Don’t despair. You are not
alone. It is something that many people experience, and find difficult to
overcome. When you lose trust in others, you start to lose trust in
yourself.

To help you overcome this problem, you need to focus on key aspects of
trust.
The first is to have faith in your accomplishments.

If you pass off your accomplishments as not being that important, when you
need to rely on them, they won’t be there for you. That is sure to
interrupt the process of trusting yourself.
You need to trust your instincts.

You won’t always be right, but you will be more often than not. An instinct
is something you feel strongly about and does not come only from
experiences. They come from something internal that no one can truly
explain. It’s part of that inner voice that is telling you what to do. You
need only listen.

How many times have you said to yourself that you should have listened to
your instincts?

You should rely on other people.

If you open yourself up to letting others into your life, you find that you
become more trusting of yourself. Whether you like it or not, you need
other people. Check in with the captains. Check with the assistants and
even the volunteer coaches.

You can’t know everything there is to know about every subject. Use the
strengths of others to supplement what you know. It takes the burden away
from you to do everything and know everything. That help opens the
possibilities to put trust in yourself.
Try to filter out negative information.

Coaches can get bombarded with negative information throughout your life,
the season and even in some difficult weeks. Negative junk occurs every day
in the news, at work, and in many cases, your home. The more you learn to
focus on positivity in your life, the easier it is to trust yourself.

A good first step towards this goal is to avoid negative people. They work
hard to try to bring you down.

Trusting yourself sometimes requires a leap of faith.

Take some chances. While you want to be smart regarding the risks of your
choices, you don’t want to overanalyze every decision you make. If you do,
you never make any bold decisions, and you stagnate. It’s true that not
everything works out just the way you had hoped. But, you never know unless
you try. The good news is when you are ready to try, many of your decisions
do work for you and the team and the individual athletes.

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