Published in Volume 2008 Issue 6 American Swimming Coaches Association Newsletter
Meaning, Motivation and Ownership
by Charlie Dragon
On the first day of practice I always ask the same question, “Why are you on the swim team?” I ask it of the 12-year-old state champ, I ask it of the swimmer who isn’t close to A times, I ask it of the 17-year-old Olympic Trial Qualifier, I ask it of the swimmer who is new to the team, and I ask it of the swimmer who has been on the team for 10 years. Try it out with your team, I bet you will be surprised at the answers.
When I first asked the question what struck me was how vague and ge-neric the answers were: “Because I like it” “Because I want to stay in shape” “Because I’m good at it” but the most common answer was “I don’t know.” My favorite answer was by a 13-year-old boy who said, “I want to go fast” which I think was a reference to a quote from the movie “Talladega Nights.” We liked that answer so much it went on the back of our shirts that season.
By asking that question I found out from our star 12-year-old boy (2.09 200 IM, 2.26 200 Breast) that he was getting a lot of pressure from his non-swimming friends to skip practice to hang out with them, that he likes soccer better than swimming, and that he was worried about how much he would have to train to keep getting better. This information has helped me coach him, and there was no way I could have known that without opening up discussion about why he swims.
I tell the swimmers that finding out their true, deep-down answer to this question is essential if they are going to spend six days a week, 2-3 hours a day doing something where they can’t breathe, can’t see much, can’t hear, can’t talk, often feel too hot or too cold, chlorine taking a toll on their hair and skin, while training harder than 95% of all people ever will, when they could be at home watching TV, hanging out with friends, on the computer, talking on the phone, or getting all that homework done. If a swimmer doesn’t have a firm understanding of why he/she swims, then the lure of those other ways to spend time will cause doubt about the value of all this hard training.
Asking this question, and having talks with your swimmers about their answers, helps you as a coach to understand where each swimmer is coming from. As a swimmer myself I had friends who were fast (one at the junior na-tional level) but who were in the sport far past the point where it had meaning and practice became torture. Their coaches didn’t care about why they were swimming, only how fast they were swimming. To this day, those friends don’t go to pools and don’t want to talk about swimming. One told me that his worst nightmare would be to have my job. I hope that no one on my team will end up feeling this way.
There isn’t a best answer to the question, “Why are you on the swim team?” but all good answers have the same thing in common: something about swimming is valuable enough to make all this training worthwhile. Swimming must be meaningful. Identifying that meaning for athletes is not as straightfor-ward as it may seem, but doing so is the first step toward peak performance.
Meaning is a complex subject, but as a coach we don’t need to rank an-swers. All we need to do is encourage our swimmers to find an honest, specific answer and then build on it. For example, if you have swimmers who swim mainly for social reasons, try to develop that meaning into supporting and pushing all teammates to succeed. Encourage those social swimmers to know that that their own good performance will positively affect the performance of the rest of the team. Try to take the seed of meaning for your swimmers and grow it by adding more and more things about being on a swim team to their answers.
When a swimmer does not make the technique change we have been hounding him/her about for months, or is stuck at a time and is not going an-ywhere, or is not improving a weakness, I’ve often found the culprit is that the athlete has not attached meaning to the issue. There are often other reasons for plateaus, from physical limitations to coaching short-comings, but sometimes it’s that the swimmer doesn’t value what you are valuing.
As a swimmer I was never a good kicker and never got much better. But why? Really, why didn’t I get better? My reason, which I didn’t know at the time but I can now see in hindsight, is that I didn’t believe kicking mattered. I believed I could get as fast I wanted to without getting better at kicking. Until an athlete can attach value to the change you are suggesting, until an athlete makes the change significant, it will not happen. We as coaches need to find creative ways to make that issue, whether it be kicking, technique, training, etc., meaningful to the athlete. The art of coaching is in figuring out how to make your athletes value what you do, to get your enthusiasm to become their own.
Once a swimmer knows his/her meaning, motivation now comes into fo-cus. True motivation is emotional. It can’t be a number alone, or a place, or a cut, it has to be an emotion that is tied to those things. The first step to under-standing motivation is to figure out what motivates an athlete now.
Motivation is particularly important for swimmers who are stuck at a plateau. Again, many things can motivate, but the true motivators are tied to what makes swimming meaningful for the athlete. The hard part for coaches is that real motivation is internal (not coming from anyone else) and positive (al-lows you to take pride in your abilities). That means coach-directed motivation only works when it triggers an already existing internal motivation in the ath-lete. If a swimmer does not value the set, then all of our enthusiasm will go to little effect. The swimmer who doesn’t want to be at practice, who is attending for any other reason than swimming and training matters to him/her, will not reach his/her potential no matter what a coach does.
The power of true motivation is unmatched. People have done incredible physical feats, have withstood horrible situations, and accomplished more than anyone ever thought possible when they had sufficient motivation. George Washington and his soldiers defeated a much larger British army without enough food, or supplies, sometimes walking barefoot for miles in the snow. Dean Karnazes has run 350 miles straight going without sleep for 3 days, and has run 50 marathons in 50 days in 50 states.
I quote here from Arnold Schwarzenneger, who has become like the pa-tron-saint of our swim team. As strange as that may sound, I think after read-ing his books on bodybuilding you would understand why:
“When the going gets tough, it is always the mind that fails first, not the body. The best example of this I can think of occurred one day when Franco and I were doing Squats in the old Gold’s Gym. Franco got under 500 pounds, squatted down, and couldn’t get back up. We grabbed the bar and helped him get it back on the rack. Five hundred pounds for even one rep was apparently too much for him that day.
Just then four or five Italian-American kids from New York came in. ‘Wow,’ they said, ‘There’s Franco! Hey, Franco!’ They were great fans, and were looking forward to watching him work out – only Franco had just failed in a lift and it seemed probable that he would miss it again on the next try.
I took Franco aside and told him, ‘Franco, these guys think you’re the king. You can’t get under five hundred pounds again and fail.’ All of a sudden his face changed. He looked at me with big eyes, realizing he was on the spot. Then he went out onto the street and spent a while psyching himself up, taking deep breaths and concentrating on the lift.
He stalked back into the gym, grabbed the bar, and, instead of the six reps he was sup-posed to do with 500 pounds, he did eight! Then he walked away coolly, as if it were nothing.
Obviously Franco’s muscles didn’t get any stronger in those few minutes between sets, his tendons didn’t get any bigger; what did change was his mind, his drive and motivation, his desire for the goal. It was impossible to overlook how important the mind was in making the body do what he wanted.” – Arnold Schwarzenegger, “The New Encyclopedia of Modern Bodybuilding”
A great story that really drives home the power of an athlete’s mental state. Unusual external motivation like the kind Franco had only comes around so often, the true challenge is how motivated a swimmer is on a regular day when nothing special happens. That sort of “base-line” motivation can be im-proved on by the coach, by doing small but essential things like removing de-motivators.
This idea, of identifying and removing de-motivators, comes from Jim Collins and his book “From Good to Great.” Collins writes about the ineffec-tiveness in the business world of motivational seminars and generally “rally the troops” initiatives. He argues that what works instead is the removal of the rea-sons why employees don’t want to come to work.
As coaches we need to know both what motivates and what de-motivates our athletes. The things that de-motivate, and are within our control, need to be addressed. For example, the pool we train in is kept at 85 degrees and there is no way to get that changed. But I can lessen the over-heating by providing a bucket of ice water on deck that the kids can put their hands in, splash on their faces, stick their water bottles in to keep them cold, or use in any way they want. Does that really lower their body temperatures? I don’t know, but I do know they love the ice bucket and believe it helps. That removes the de-motivator of being too hot, which in turn raises their base-line of motivation.
Another example is on the days we do dryland they are at the pool train-ing for 3+ hours. They get hungry. Hunger is a de-motivator. So I make sure to have some granola bars or pretzels around to eat after dryland or right after practice (as a side note, there is real muscle recovery benefit to eating within 30 minutes of the end of training). This may sound inconsequential, but my experience is that a small thing can de-rail an entire workout. I see part of my job as doing everything I can to prevent that from happening. Try increasing your athletes motivation by removing de-motivators.
The third piece of this puzzle is ownership. Once meaning is attached to swimming, and once motivation is found and encouraged, swimmers need to develop a sense of ownership over practice and their swimming.
Shifting one’s viewpoint to that of ownership is absolutely essential to making training worthwhile. But doing so is not easy, especially for those ath-letes who tend to fear hard training or think negatively about their abilities. Once a swimmer is able to change his/her outlook to that of ownership, prac-tice will become a very different experience.
I tell my swimmers that the swim team exists for their benefit. The coaches have jobs because they want to get faster at swimming. The first step toward feeling ownership is believing that the coaches are there to help them achieve their goal of swimming faster.
The second step toward feeling ownership is realizing that every practice, every set, every pool length, is an opportunity to get faster, to learn better technique, to improve. Each practice is yet another chance to move closer to a goal, rather than a weight dropped on them that they have to carry. They must learn to feel (again, ownership is like motivation in that it is an emotion more than a concept) that this whole thing (practice, teammates, coaches, swimming) is their own, their place, that practice is their time. Think about the few great athletes who you’ve coached or seen perform. How did they act at huge invitational meets (where most athletes get very tense and nervous), or simply at practice each day? Most looked like they were at their own birthday party. Talking to friends, joking around, positive body language, living happily in their element. Those are the athletes who own the experience. Many top athletes feel meaning, motivation and ownership instinctively, but they only make up a small percentage of our team. It’s the majority who we have to teach to be more like the best athletes.
I use the school example to contrast the feeling of ownership with the feeling of helplessness. Many students feel like homework, tests, even class it-self is forced on them. The teacher puts a weight on them and says, “Carry, or else.” Students who feel this way in school dislike what they are doing, dread the future and never overachieve. I ask them how they would feel if their goal wasn’t to simply do all they are ordered to by the teacher, and try to get A’s, but instead have the goal of learning the subject (let’s say history). If their goal is to learn history, then the teacher is on their side, helping them achieve that goal. Homework and tests are now methods of challenging and pushing them to learn more, rather than forced labor. A’s are the side-effect of thoroughly learning the material, not the end goal. The tables are now turned, and the class is owned. I had a few friends who I believe did feel this way in school, and that’s why they made getting straight A’s look easy.
To do their best, swimmers must feel that same way about swimming. With ownership comes confidence, relaxation and optimal performance. Own-ership puts the swimmers in the valued psychological place of having agency in their training. Helplessness and fear are powerful limiters of ability and as coaches we must do our best to drive out those feelings and replace them with ownership. The art of coaching is teaching these ideas to our athletes and building experiences which allow them to feel meaning, motivation and owner-ship.
