Informed Coach, Informed Leader, Informed Practitioner
Paul Gamble
Crimes Against Critical Thinking in the Face of ...

As the saying goes ‘never let the truth get in the way of a good story’. But it truly is quite remarkable how readily we will override our capacity for critical thinking in the face of a story we want to hear. As we will see, if the message on offer appeals enough to a particular desire or bias, it appears we will happily overlook whatever shortcomings in methodology and inconvenient flaws in logic are apparent. In this way, we can be active participants in ‘group think’.

We might then question our roles in upholding the conventions that abound in performance sport. Upon closer inspection, there is rarely logic in convention. It is beguilingly easy to fall prey to participating in such group delusion. On some level, we could argue that we willingly enter into this to prop up a particular tenet of our belief system in relation to theory and practice.

Crimes Against Critical Thinking in the Face of a Good Story
Informed Coach, Informed Sport Parent, Informed Leader
Paul Gamble
Uniting Participation and Performance

There is a strange insistence that participation and performance are entirely distinct and never the twain shall meet. But is there really no common ground to be found here? I will argue that participation and performance are NOT in fact mutually exclusive - especially in the case of youth sport. There is in fact plenty of overlap. So why should we keep them apart? Is it possible that bringing participation and performance back under the same roof might provide benefits in both directions?

Uniting Participation and Performance
Informed Leader, Informed Practitioner, Informed Coach
Paul Gamble
The Tyranny of Safeguarding in Sport

A provocative title, so allow me to specify at the outset what exactly I am highlighting and the limits of the argument. Firstly and most importantly, let me make it clear that I am excluding from the discussion the necessary and vitally important domain of child-protection and the protection of vulnerable adults under law. What I am specifically referring to is the concept creep that has seen the safeguarding approach extended to sportsmen and women at senior level, who are otherwise (in the eyes of the law) deemed responsible adults capable of providing informed consent, making decisions and advocating on their own behalf. I am also excluding clear cases of misconduct that unamibiguously violate professional ethics and the boundaries of the athlete-coach relationship - for instance, sexually inappropriate behaviour or physical abuse. What I am also highlighting is the mission creep of those charged with investigating such claims and the present danger of over-reach. Why I feel these trends need to be challenged is that the safeguarding system if left unchecked threatens to penalise coaches simply for carrying out their proper duties.

The Tyranny of Safeguarding in Sport
Paul Gamble
Special Post: Choosing the Right Programme

EDITOR’S NOTE:

To celebrate the imminent release of the new title ‘Sports Parenting: Negotiating the Challenges of the Youth Sports Journey to Help Kids Thrive’ we are sharing this special post. The excerpt featured is from the chapter ‘Choosing the Right Programme’.

Environment is everything when it comes to developing talent. Parents are naturally highly motivated to find the programme that provides most optimal conditions to allow their child’s talents to flourish. Seeing past the sales pitch and making the right choice is however not a straightforward proposition. Being successful on this endeavour begins with understanding the key features that make for the most conducive setting to enable young performers to realise their athletic potential. In this chapter we aim to provide parents with some criteria to guide the search.

Special Post: Choosing the Right Programme
Informed Coach, Informed Leader, Informed Practitioner
Paul Gamble
Ingredients for Progress: Heretics and Dissent

The inclination to question is not common - looking back, most of us would admit that we uncritically accepted what we were taught. There is a general assumption that authority figures know what they are doing, so it may not necessarily occur to us that the consensus view that is espoused might be flawed or even untrue. Yet it is always worth allowing for the possibility that the prevailing view may not necessarily have a sound basis or at least might be missing something important. It might serve us well to consciously foster in ourselves and others a readiness to challenge preconceived ideas and the received wisdom, simply in the interests of our own enlightenment. More broadly, it merits highlighting that willingness to question and to offer competing ideas are necessary ingredients for progress. Clearly this has some important implications for leaders and organisations, as well as for the professions and fields of study that we are part of.

Ingredients for Progress: Heretics and Dissent

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Honing Professional Judgement and Decision-Making

Honing Professional Judgement and Decision-Making

Coaching is characterised as a judgement and decision making process. Practitioners and indeed most professionals who work in human performance are de facto coaches of humans. As such, the quest that unites coaches in different sports and practitioners across disciplines is to develop our professional judgement and our ability to make better choices and decisions over time. There is no endpoint to this journey and so the need to continually hone our judgement and decision making applies irrespective of what stage we are might be at in our career. That said, the question of how we best develop these skills for practitioners at the start of their career versus catering for these aspects in continuing professional development thereafter will likely require different solutions.

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Achieving an ‘Integrated Support Team’

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Achieving an ‘Integrated Support Team’

Multi-disciplinary support teams have become ubiquitous in Olympic sports and institutes of sport, and professional sports teams in Europe and elsewhere have since used their impressive budgets to assemble ever-growing support casts who increasingly outnumber the performers on the field. More recently the major professional sports in North America have followed this trend, with more and more teams in the league transitioning to a high performance model for their staffing and provision of athlete support. Whilst it is relatively straightforward to replicate an organisational structure, the central challenge that everybody continues to grapple with is how to make this work in practice. Coordinating a disparate group of individuals to provide seamless support to performers is no small task. Integration is what everybody still seems to be searching for; true collaboration is the holy grail that we all aspire to, but that is several steps further down the path. With this latest offering we explore these questions and consider lessons from other realms such as the special operations forces that might help us to achieve these elusive outcomes.

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Triangulating a Position

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Triangulating a Position

As the value of cognitive diversity becomes more recognised, what is striking is how slow we have been to realise the need to revise our habitual ways of consuming information and interacting with those who hold contrary views. Whilst pioneers who think different are celebrated in modern western culture, in reality we are far less amenable to entertaining disagreement and diverging ideas. In the professional and academic realm we are quick to follow an authority and align with a school of thought. The hordes are likewise quick to leap into the breach to defend the doctrine against perceived challenge or dissenting views. If anything debates in all circles are increasingly polarised, as the assembled masses flock to either one side or the other. We might appreciate cognitive diversity on a conceptual level, but on a practical level we are clearly not there yet. So what steps can we take to enjoy the benefits of cognitive diversity and open our minds to the possibilities as we form our opinions?

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Special Post: 'The Illogic of Being Data Driven'

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Special Post: 'The Illogic of Being Data Driven'

In the digital era there is a great onus on being ‘data driven’ across all domains. The drive to be objective and to quantify input and output is eminently understandable. The well-worn phrase that gets thrown around is ‘how can you manage something if you don’t measure it?’. We do however need to be very careful about what metrics we use as a proxy for the thing we are attempting to evaluate. There is inevitably a separation between the measure we can objectively quantify and the complex entity that it represents. We need to be very confident about the specificity and sensitivity of the particular measure in relation to what we are seeking to evaluate, to avoid false positives (detecting something that isn’t there) and false negatives (failing to detect something that is there). On a more fundamental level, complex phenomena defy simple measurement.

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First Do No Harm: Iatrogenics in Coaching and Practice

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First Do No Harm: Iatrogenics in Coaching and Practice

Iatrogenics is a term most commonly used in medicine. As attested by the Hippocratic oath (and the premise ‘First Do No Harm’), the medical profession is familiar with the concept that an intervention may pose potential risks and unforeseen consequences. In contrast, the idea that we may either not be helping or through our involvement inadvertently making the athlete worse off does not necessarily occur to coaches and practitioners. In this post we explore how iatrogenics applies in the context of coaching and practice, and make the case for considering potential risks as well as benefits before we intervene.

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Clues for Successful Youth Sports Parenting

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Clues for Successful Youth Sports Parenting

Parents play a vital role in supporting their child to participate in youth sport. Parents are quite literally the driver, providing both the opportunity and transportation. Youth sports parenting is a full time job in itself, demanding considerable investment in terms of both money and time. It is parental support that affords kids the opportunity to participate and derive the myriad benefits associated with youth sports, which span athletic, health, scholastic, and life skill realms. Naturally, parents are invested in their child’s youth sports participation, and this investment often leads to increasing involvement. Yet despite the best intentions there are adverse consequences when parental involvement or intervention becomes excessive. In this Informed Blog post we unravel the complexity and challenges of being the parent of a youth sports athlete, and attempt to offer some clues to help guide parents to walk this fine line at different phases in the youth sports journey.

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Leveraging 'Agency' in Athlete Preparation

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Leveraging 'Agency' in Athlete Preparation

Agency can be defined as the sense that we are in control of our own actions and the outcomes that follow. Agency is central to how we perceive our interactions with the outside world. For instance, sense of agency permits us to feel that through our actions we are able to influence external events. In this way, agency is integral to the notion that we have some degree of control over our situation, our standing in the world, and our future direction. In this latest offering we peel back the layers of agency in the context of athlete preparation, exploring what it means (and what it doesn’t mean) in relation to our work with athletes.

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Tempering Athletes: Future Proofing Versus Acquired Fragility

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Tempering Athletes: Future Proofing Versus Acquired Fragility

Tempering is a process used to impart strength and toughness, and essentially serves to bring out the intrinsic properties of the material under stress. Athletes forged in the crucible of severely testing conditions may be similarly rendered highly resilient to future challenges and stressors. Those who successfully come through such trial by fire paradoxically often prove stronger from the experience. The notion that stressors can not only make systems more resilient, but in fact stronger and better as a consequence, speaks to the concept of antifragility, a phenomenon observed in nature and highlighted by Nassim Taleb who famously coined the term. In this post, we will bring this antifragility lens, and a general reticence to accept that sports injuries ‘just happen’, to reframe how we think about preparing athletes to ‘future proof’ them to risks and scenarios that we cannot fully anticipate. In place of safeguarding measures and interventions that seek to protect, we will make the argument for tempering athletes to harness and develop their intrinsic reserves and coping abilities. Adopting this perspective and general strategy for managing injury risk, we will outline some tactics to help guide practitioners in their approach.

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A Wake Up Call on Sleep

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A Wake Up Call on Sleep

Sleep is essential to sustaining life. Yet the majority of us are casually dismissive when it comes to sleep. We routinely deny ourselves this most critical sustenance of our own volition. The attitudes towards sleep among high performing individuals in different realms and society in general are quite baffling. We also largely fail to make the connection between the reckless lack of care and attention we give to our sleep and the dizzying array of consequences that inevitably follow. Objectively this behaviour is bizarre, and our failure to prioritise sleep defies logic. With this latest Informed Blog we explore the myriad ways you lose when you don’t snooze sufficiently.

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Informed Shorts: Making New and Better Mistakes

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Informed Shorts: Making New and Better Mistakes

As the saying goes, there is no success without struggle. The fear of making mistakes can become disabling, particularly if our aim is to try something new or different. So perhaps we need to to reframe how we think about making errors to avoid being too constrained by the desire to not get it wrong. The quest to be creative and innovative in our problem solving necessitates having the freedom to try new and different things. This principle applies whether we are seeking to explore new questions, or find different solutions to existing questions.