Recently, while driving, I honked my horn at another driver. It doesn’t really matter when you’re reading this; the previous statement will hold true. We all honk our horns, but this most recent incident made me think a little beeper about honking and how it relates to feedback. Yes, feedback! Here in the US, horn-honking […]
Category: Coaching
Feedback for New L2s
As a teacher, I spend about 35% of my class time reviewing rather than teaching new content. Does that seem surprising to you? It shouldn’t. Consistent review helps us solidify understanding and connect what we’ve learned in the past with new information. As a result, feedback should regularly include the fundamentals of judging, which are […]
Coaching a Friend, Part 3
Last time on Coaching a Friend, we discussed the advantage we can gain by informing our coaching with our knowledge of our friends. In this final installment, I want to talk about the most difficult and possibly most necessary part of coaching a friend. Make it count. Our friendships also create coaching opportunities that others […]
Coaching a Friend, Part 2
Previously on Coaching a Friend, I wrote about the importance of remaining objective when identifying coaching opportunities involving our friends. For this installment, let’s focus on how we can use our friendship to take our coaching to the next level. Use what you know. Even though your knowledge of your friends can make it more […]
Coaching a Friend, Part 1
Your coaching can be informed by your knowledge of your friends and made easier by your level of comfort with them.
Scaling Feedback for Aspiring L2s
When I was a kid, I loved to read. One series that I grew to love was the Choose Your Own Adventure series. The fun in these books was the feeling of choice. You had power to decide how the story turned out. Similarly, participation in the judge program is choosing an adventure. Not every […]
Quality Is Its Own Quality
Last year, I was chatting with some judges in the Mid-Atlantic Slack about review counts, and one of them mentioned that he felt that reviews written was not a great metric to track – that quality mattered more than quantity. My response was the idea that quantity is its own quality. Receiving a well-written review […]
Coaching a Student
Coaching a student is much more in line with the traditional idea of coaching than my last topic. We do this all the time in the judge program. We call it mentoring. In fact, L2 judges are required to show a “willingness to mentor” other judges. While this practice is more commonly discussed than coaching […]
Focusing Feedback
Since I love stories, I’m going to start with one that I heard recently from a judge friend. We were chatting about reviews (surprising, right?), and he mentioned a review he’d gotten from someone recently that said something like this (paraphrased, a lot): “You seemed really down during our draft on Saturday night. You should […]
My Favorite Coach
What kind of coach do you aspire to be? For me, there’s one coach who stands out above the crowd: coach Greg Popovich of the NBA’s San Antonio Spurs.