{"id":747,"date":"2017-01-03T11:00:25","date_gmt":"2017-01-03T16:00:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/feedback\/?p=747"},"modified":"2017-03-03T13:11:50","modified_gmt":"2017-03-03T18:11:50","slug":"introduction-to-coaching","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/feedback\/2017\/01\/03\/introduction-to-coaching\/","title":{"rendered":"Introduction to Coaching"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Riki\"<\/a>The New Year is a convenient time to make changes big and small. We make resolutions and goals in an attempt to alter the fabric of our lives for the better. Here at the Feedback Loop, we\u2019re going to be altering our content for 2017 (hopefully for the better). We\u2019ll still be bringing you quality blog posts on the art of feedback and reviews on a weekly basis every Tuesday, but there\u2019s going to be more consistency to the material in two important ways.<\/span><\/p>\n

First, we\u2019re going to have themed content with multiple blog posts focusing on a broad topic. For example, our first theme is one of the fundamental types of feedback: coaching. There will be blog posts related to this topic through the month of March. Second, there will be a stable of columnists who have proven their chops as both writers and feedbackers, with each columnist contributing a handful of blog posts on each topic. For our coaching segment, I\u2019ll be joined by Jacob Milicic and Jenn Scott. We’ll still have other content as well; Joe Wiesenberg’s Feedback will be a regular monthly feature, and we’ll have guest posts from time to time, and who knows, you may see those guest authors evolve into future columnists. Today, I\u2019m going to kick off our themed topic with an introduction to the coaching process.<\/span><\/p>\n

In judging, we don\u2019t have coaches in the traditional sports sense, a non-player who provides guidance and direction to the team. Instead we have mentors. Mentors are not quite the same as coaches, nor are they teachers, another prevalent coaching relationship in our culture. Coaches and teachers tend to be older than their charges, sometimes by an entire generation or more. As a result, those relationships adhere to a strict hierarchical structure where the coach is the boss. Mentors are much more our peers, possibly older and wiser, but more often they\u2019ve just been doing this longer and thus have more experience at it. Among Magic Judges, I find that I tend to be on the older end of the spectrum both in real age and in the number of years I\u2019ve been doing this. But those factors aren\u2019t hard barriers to forming a coaching relationship. Nor is skill.<\/span><\/p>\n

Think about the relationship between Michael Jordan, the best basketball player in history, and his coach on the Chicago Bulls, Phil Jackson, also regarded as the best coach in NBA history. Jackson was not a better basketball player than Jordan, and yet he coached him. This points to something fundamentally important about coaching that people need to remember: you\u2019re never too good to be coached.<\/span><\/p>\n

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You’re never too good to be coached.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

A coach isn\u2019t necessarily better at a thing than the person being coached, but they provide a solid outside perspective that helps the subject see their own strengths and weaknesses and guides them in finding a way to improve. This principle holds true for mentoring relationships in judging, and it\u2019s probably much easier to see how it can be possible as we have such diverse sets of skills in rules knowledge, deck check ability, logistics, feedback, and more.<\/span><\/p>\n

This is why I push back on the culture of identifying too strongly with our levels in the Judge Program (whenever I publish staff schedules for events that I head judge, I leave levels off). There\u2019s no such thing as a \u201clowly Level 1\u201d in my eyes, as every judge has the capabilities to be a good coach for someone else in the right field. Levels are a shortcut to describe broad strokes of skills, but they don\u2019t tell us much about the fine print.<\/span><\/p>\n

If we\u2019re all going to be coaches, then it\u2019s important for us to understand what that means. Here\u2019s a rough outline of how a coach can help his or her subject (which I call \u201cthe player\u201d because I\u2019m a creature of habit).<\/span><\/p>\n

Understand the desired outcome<\/b><\/p>\n

This doesn\u2019t necessarily need to happen at the outset, but it\u2019s important to establish this understanding between the coach and the player. What is the player\u2019s goal? Knowing this will allow the coach to tailor their feedback towards that goal.<\/span><\/p>\n

For example, if I\u2019m shadowing a judge on a ruling, there are a couple of things that I could pay attention to:<\/span><\/p>\n