The mental aspect of the Springbok World Cup victory
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
By Tim Goodenough, Meta-Coach and co-author of "In the Zone with South Africa's Sports Hero's"
I have really enjoyed reading all the various theories and ideas in the press and on blogs around what happened at World Cup 2007 - some really interesting perspectives have been explored. For me there were a couple of pivotal 'mental' moments that may have been part of the 'tipping point' of success. However these moments were only meaningful because thoroughly prepared and talented players played their hearts out whilst being richly blessed with doses of good fortune.
Jake White's first speech as Springbok coach to his players 4 years ago, wasn't about the forthcoming Irish test match, but instead it was about winning the World Cup in 2007. He asked the players to look around, as many of them would be there, together in 4 years time, to lift the coveted trophy. The players sat dumbfounded, thinking he was mad. Many of them were part of the squad that crashed out of the 2003 world cup in the Quarter Finals, one of the low lights of recent Springbok history. Nevertheless, the seed was planted, a seed that supported these players (9 of which started the match in the final) in coming to terms with the enormity of what they could achieve, and fortunately they had 4 years to get their head around the idea.
Jake White was the first Springbok coach to employ a full time Sports Psychologist for the Springboks in the form of Dr Henning Gericke. Having known, worked with, and learnt from Henning in the last few years, I have seldom met anyone who has finer distinctions and instincts around team dynamics, a critical component when molding distinctly provincial players into a new national team.
Dr Sherylle Calder joined the team in 2005, spending long hours with the players supporting their visual skills development. One of the secondary gains of her work is the complimentary mental development required to successfully go through her intense development programmes. Whilst developing their visual skills, the Boks got mentally stronger, and this combination with Dr Gericke meant that there was an ample opportunity to develop the type of world class resilience required to play and perform in our politically dominated and often very amateur game.
Springbok players and management have faced some of the toughest challenges in world rugby, with many of them being of our own (South Africa’s) making. Politicians threatening to withhold passports before the World Cup, administrators overruling the coach on selection of players, administrators recalling the coach home in mid-tour to give him a performance review, concerted media campaigns to fire the coach and chastising the team, record losses (49-0 to Australia for instance in 2006), the team going without a Manager for most of a season, Jake White publicly sharing his discussions with another rugby playing nation about coaching their team in the middle of his Springbok contract. To name but a few, not to mention the incredibly important, yet contentious subject of transformation in rugby. The team and the coach have been regularly derided for not being representative enough, and when you look at the facts transformation in rugby has not been successful, yet - however these pressures don’t support winning a rugby world cup.
In 2006 national opinion of Jake White was at an all time low, scribes, fans and the public who are so loudly cheering now were baying for his blood. Credit to him and his team that they stuck to their guns, and rode out the storm. The Springboks developed a level of "mental toughness" from the adversity they had to endure, and having a vision painted so clearly about 2007 by their coach, meant they had an aspirational goal to focus on.
Graham Henry decided to withdraw his All Blacks from the majority of the 2007 Super 14 tournament and the number of South African victories away from home rose dramatically, many of those games that were won and lost in the last moments, were now won by South African teams. South Africans learnt to win away from home and in big games, often through the bounce of the ball, or an important moment in the match, but they still won. No game is a more dramatic example of this then the Sharks vs. Crusaders game in Durban. The defining moment was a 50 metre dash to score a glorious try after the final hooter had sounded (to end the game) by a Sharks player who had dropped the ball over the try line minutes before, squandering a certain try. The Try was followed by a successful kick from the corner, by a player who happened to be practicing pressure kicks the week before as a game with some of his team mates. It was his first kick of the match, in the final minute, to win the game.
These 'fortuitous' circumstances based on (physical and mental) skill and some luck meant the Sharks won by 1 point, and was a contributing factor to the first ever home Super 14 final in South Africa. Two South African teams (Sharks and the Bulls) played each other on that day and for the first time in over 10 years a South African team won the Super 14. 9 of those players who played in that final started the World Cup final on October 20. Two games before the final the Bulls started a game in the toughest provincial rugby tournament in the world requiring a winning margin of 72 points to secure a home semi-final and ended up winning 92-3. Throughout the year what South Africans previously thought was impossible was disputed and then disproved and ultimately shattered.
In the final weeks before the World Cup, first Rassie Erasmus for a brief period, and then former Australian coach Eddie Jones arrived as the latest of several specialists called in to support the squad. Having Eddie Jones there from a mental perspective was very important, for the first time Jake had someone he considered a peer as his council, rather than trusted and talented support. This took a lot of pressure off Jake, as well as providing an important foil to some of Jakes restless energy. As a combination, there was a measured, calm and practical approach to the final stages of executing Jake's World Cup plan. The lasting image of Jake during the world cup was a man who visibly looked a lot calmer and at ease, more so than for most of his Springbok coaching career.
The side individually and as a unit had sufficient mental toughness to take advantage of the opportunities that was presented to them, and had the resilience to bounce back in a very short space of time, when things didn't go there way. When considering all the myriad of permutations of sport, it is always a bit of a lottery to try to isolate factors, however mentally, I would consider these to be part of the 'tipping point' of success.
| To contact Tim Goodenough send us an email. For more information or to purchase Tim Goodenough and Mike Cooper's book entitled "In the Zone with South Africa's Sports Heros", click here. |  |
Labels: Eddie Jones, Graham Henry, Henning Gericke, Jake White, mental skills, Mike Cooper, Rassie Erasmus, rugby, Sherylle Calder, sports, Springboks, Tim Goodenough, world cup, Zone
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posted by Telana @ 10:31 am,
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Coaching - why it flops
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
I was reading the below article and think that they make some valid points about coaching. As a coachee myself (as well as a coach) the most effective coaching I have received has been when I have been clear on the process that my coach was offering, and also comfortable with the depth of their philosophy and their understanding of the mind and human behaviour. I hope these points help others who are looking for a coach, to choose the right one for them.
Coaching - why it flops
Oct 22 2007
Cape Town - New thinking from the Centre for Coaching at the UCT Graduate School of Business has identified five key areas that can contribute to the failure of coaching initiatives.
When executive and life coaching arrived on the scene in the 1970s and 80s, says centre director Craig O'Flaherty, it was widely hailed as the panacea to all ills - both organisational and individual - that would enable busy executives to regain life balance while becoming more productive, fulfilled and effective.
"A few decades down the line however, there are more and more voices being raised in criticism of this new profession saying that coaching programmes are over-hyped and that they frequently under-deliver."
O'Flaherty says that rather than reacting defensively to these views, the coaching fraternity should use them as an opportunity to look inwards and examine why it is that these perceptions are gaining ground.
'Frustrated'
"There are plenty of examples of how coaching can and does add demonstrable value to organisations, but it would be foolish to ignore the fact that some organisations and clients are frustrated.
"Understanding why failures occur would assist coaches in designing better programmes for their clients," he says.
Drawing on practical experience gained through the Centre for Coaching, O'Flaherty says that there are many reasons why coaching fails.
Top of the list is that at the start of the coaching relationship, not enough effort is spent in making sure that there is a shared understanding of what the process will involve and what the outcomes will be.
"Is the intervention designed to improve performance or go deeper in actually altering the way people understand themselves and their work? Is it addressing a surface issue or delving into the psycho-social reasons that drive these issues? These questions are critical to resolve before a programme starts, otherwise it's obvious that breakdowns are likely to occur when expectations are disappointed," says O'Flaherty.
'Too simplistic'
Janine Everson, the centre's academic director, says failure may also result if the coach approaches the coaching relationship without a "deep and powerful philosophy" of what a human being is.
"In too many cases, the models used by coaches are too simplistic. They assume that humans change ina simple and linear fashion or their focus is not holistic and they tend to hone in on either the spiritual or linguistic or physical aspect."
In developing the necessary understanding of human beings, Everson says that coaches must themselves be in an active state of learning so that they are constantly replenishing and enriching their own development.
They also need to recognise that they are in a state of constant change and development and that they are in fact no different from their clients.
In their turn, clients - be they individuals or organisations - need to recognise the limits as well as the potential of coaching interventions. In today's modern society, the prevailing norm is for the quick fix.
Instant results, preferably reflected in the bottom line, are required to justify an investment in coaching, and so pressure is put on coaches to develop superficial interventions that yield only partial success.
From: Fin24.co.za - link:
http://www.fin24.co.za/articles/default/display_article.aspx?ArticleId=1518-1786_2205251 Link
posted by Telana @ 10:17 am,
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Glorious Failure
"I intentionally make at least three mistakes a day!" said Dr Michael Hall at a training session I attended.
"Did he really just say that?" I wondered to myself.
"Yes, I try to make mistakes on purpose! Because if I'm not failing, I believe that I'm not learning" Dr Hall continued. That was the first time he introduced me to the concept of being gloriously fallible.
I had heard of learning from our mistakes, and that seemed like the strategy to use to lessen the pain of the error, and hopefully not repeat it. However, developing the intentional state of being gloriously fallible was new to me. How could making a mistake be wonderful and something to celebrate? And even be set as an intention?
Somehow some of us have grown up with the feeling that failing at something is a big negative- it's something that we feel bad about. It's something that we try so hard to avoid- often to the extent that it prevents us from trying something a little different or even new.
Yet failing at something is ultimately just information: as the presupposition in NLP says "There is no such thing as failure- only feedback". And feedback, or information that comes back at us in response to some action we've taken (or not taken even), is the food of champions.
Feedback is how we know we are getting closer to our goal, or further away from it. It is how we know that we need to do something differently, or that we've got it right and need to keep doing what we're doing. Without this kind of information, how would we know that we are going in the direction we want to go- or even just experiencing something!
If we look at the concept of "failure", are we not just looking at an outcome that did not match an expectation? Or worded another way, failure just means that we didn't get the result we wanted. Conversely, then, success is when we get the result we wanted or our expectations are met. Feedback is the mechanism through which we receive the information through our senses, which we then perceive as telling us if we've got the result we were aiming for or not - which we can then label as "failure" or "success".
The exciting part about the information that we label as "failure" is that it gives us clues as to what we need to do differently so that we can then experience the feedback of success. Once we know the structure of that success, we can then repeat it as often as we like.
In reading Marc Allen's book "The Millionaire Course", he has identified being able to celebrate failures as one of the keys to becoming a Millionaire. He describes making mistakes as "the great teaching tools- they can teach us what not to do, and that's invaluable". He also quotes his friend, a director and playwright called John Clarke Donahue as saying:
We should celebrate glorious failure! Why be afraid of failure? Why not celebrate it? When we allow ourselves to fail - in small ways and in glorious huge flops - we're guided to great things by our creative spirit.
I have yet to find a person who is not open to learning and growing in some aspect of their lives. So I have yet to find a person who has not experienced feedback that they have labeled as failure. The most useful part of what Dr Hall, Marc Allen and John Clarke Donahue are saying is that when we celebrate and embrace what we label as feedback, we not only learn faster and get to where we want to go quicker, we also enjoy the ride more!
To you failing at least 3 times a day!
Telana
Labels: celebrate, failure, falliblity, fear, feedback, John Clarke Donahue, Marc Allen, Michael Hall, Millionaire, NLP, presupposition, success
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posted by Telana @ 5:12 am,
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The Author
Telana Simpson
Telana Simpson is a Professional Personal and Communication Coach. She is a caring and focused facilitator who has a passion for expression. She helps executives, individuals and entrepreneurs find authentic ways of communicating their inner potentials.
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