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Interview - Getting Your Message Across

John Neal explores the importance of rapport and empathy with your players, in the interest of getting your message across

Video Subtitles

One of the key difficulties often for a coach is getting a message across you can do all the mental preparation you like you can do goal setting you can do Visions. You can have meetings. You can email that you can text them but one of the key difficulties is always getting your message across so couple of ideas that you might like to consider on how do you really get into your players and really get them to think in the way you'd like them to think and I think the key message here is as we've spoken before is understanding your players are a word I prefer which is actually Rapport now report and empathy a different report is simply the ability to understand your players and your coaches model of the world how they see it. Empathy is different. Empathy means not only do you understand it. But you you see it from their perspective and you agree with it report means you don't have to agree with it. Give an example originally some people that went hunting but actually dress up as the animal they were trying to hunt because they wanted to build a rapport with that animal to understand how that animal would move to start seeing which likely to go and they did that in order to kill it so you don't have to like the people that you are coaching but you do have to be in rapport with them. You have to understand how they are thinking now being Rapport means that you start to adapt your coaching approach to better suit the person you are coaching and that's really critical. I think as a coach you really have to be flexible mentally to not only understand how they're seeing it but then change your approach so that you can get into their heads. That means if you got Players many of them work to a great degree in ways that perhaps older coaches don't they use Facebook they text they Twitter they use lots of new techniques and it's our job as coaches to understand how they're seeing it quite often if they're not getting a concept. It may not be anything to do with your planning or your strategy. It may Simply Be they don't see it in the same way you do now, there's one coach and typically 22 players. I would get you to think about which one is easier to change their perspective. Is it the coach that changes their spective or is it 22 players who have to understand the coach personally? I think it's the coach's responsibility to be in Rapport and then adapt their style to best suit the people that you are coaching. Not only the people who are coaching but also the members of the club the supporters even the media so Rapport is critical.