Brett Bartholomew – Bought In – The Art of Coaching (Full)

I’d just got the weight room set up when one player comes up to tell me E:60 is coming in to shoot a documentary on him. Now.

Boom! The crew bursts into the room – six cameramen plus sound and lighting technicians.

“Can we turn the music down?” the producer says.

What in the hell?

I address the players as the crew sets up around us. “Uh, guys, obviously a bit of a distraction. We got a new program today. Just pay attention, we’re going to go through technique first.”

I show them a different phase of the clean progression, but do you think any of them pays attention?

One player starts lifting with terrible technique.

“Hey, man, rack the bar! Take some weight off!” I say, then show him the right way.

“Man, shut up!” he erupts.

He shoots me a look of frustration. And goes straight back to lifting the wrong way again.

My frustration is building too, and I can see the rest of the players are totally distracted by the cameras. My head’s pounding and I have a growing sense that things could get out of control.

Very quietly I say, “Look, I know the camera’s right behind me. Let me help you do this. You’ve got to do it with good technique.”

He doesn’t care. Boom! he does it again. And boom! again.

Now I’m pissed. I stop the music. “Guys, you make millions of dollars. It is my job to keep you healthy. Can you please not get distracted by the cameras?”

As I turn around to put the music back on, the player yells, “You got something to say to me, you say it.”

I have a split-second decision to make. If I try to be Tommy Tough Guy, the player’s going to be even more pissed. Yet I can’t be seen as a doormat. Especially now that 30 other players are watching to see what happens next. I have to come up with a way to defuse this situation. And I’m sweating bullets.

Let me be clear, every single coach runs into problems like this. However, the way we respond to these situations, or stop them from happening in the first place, is what separates good coaches from great. Yet many of us never receive any formal education in these matters.

Too often our way of coping with challenging situations has been to fight fire with fire. Or we have relied solely on our knowledge of the science of speed, agility, periodization, plyometrics, strength training, nutrition and recovery.

We tell ourselves that if we just acquire more technical knowledge we will gain more credibility, and if we develop better training programs we will become better coaches. Then, and only then, our athletes will follow our instructions and we will prevent all of these challenging situations from happening in the first place.

In reality, most coaches I meet already have the technical knowledge and training programs they need. Yes, of course you need to stay up to date on industry best practice . . . but that alone is not going to resolve the difficult situations you face as a coach or stop them from happening.

Deep down, you probably know the truth:

Any training program is only as good as the athlete’s willingness to buy-in.

The deciding factor in how good we are as coaches is not just our technical knowledge but also our ability to build trust and resolve conflict once it arises. That day with the NFL player, I think we can all agree I was facing a spectacular lack of buy-in from my athlete. A superior knowledge of periodization or understanding of randomized control trials wasn’t going to help me in that moment, nor would it have prevented the situation from arising. Only proficiency in the Art of Coaching, including the ability to build trust and navigate conflict, could help me now.

That’s when it clicked…

I noticed that the athlete’s eyes kept flicking to glance at the cameras. And I realized my comments about his technique had made him feel threatened. He was trying to save himself from embarrassment if ESPN aired the footage.

“Listen, I’m going to find an alternative exercise for you,” I said. “I know you don’t like the Olympic lifts anyway.”

I took him off to do a trap bar jump squat.

Immediately you could feel the tension in the air diffuse. Everyone was able to focus on their training again. When I spoke with the athlete afterward I communicated to him why it was so important for me to correct his lifting technique. Fist bump. “We cool, man,” he said. And we went on to have a highly successful coaching relationship from that day forward.

For too long we’ve been told it’s enough to master only the technical side of coaching: making athletes bigger, faster and stronger; movement assessments and injury prevention; and optimizing nutrition and recovery. As if athletes are robots with predictable inputs and outputs. Meanwhile the Art of Coaching – which deals with the complexity of human behavior, communication and influence – has been sidelined.

Even worse, the Art of Coaching has frequently been oversimplified, as though it’s just all about cheesy motivational sound bites or “Let’s all hug it out.” The Art of Coaching is not motivational fluff. It’s backed up by decades of research and hundreds of published papers in the behavioral and social sciences.

One of the reasons we’ve tended to be exclusively focused on studying physical sciences is that there’s an expectation we should already know how to deal with people effectively – that it should come naturally. There may even be an element of shame when we’re not sure what to do or say to get through to our athletes or other coaching staff.

Let me tell you, the ability to build buy-in is not something you’re born with. This is not just about having “people skills” or being a natural-born leader. It’s about effective communication skills and influence tactics that you can learn. And they will benefit you not just now but for the rest of your career.

At this point in my career, I know it takes sophisticated influence strategies to be a truly effective coach. But I had to learn it the slow, hard way.

I had always viewed training as a way to push my body beyond my perceived limit. So when I started coaching, I got frustrated when athletes didn’t attack their own training with the same fervor. All they had to do was approach training with a focused intensity and be consistent. Why couldn’t they see that?

As a teen, I’d spent more than a year living in hospital overcoming life-threatening weight loss associated with depression. Because I had an appreciation for just how short life is, I was filled with an intense sense of urgency. And I was determined to set a spark in these athletes using the electricity inside of me.

Some athletes bought in. Others were captivated by my high-energy style and sense of urgency (for a while anyway). But then, over time, they went back to their old habits. To re-engage them, I worked harder: I intensely focused on every action they performed, from the way they foam rolled to how they went through each dynamic stretch in their warm-up and every rep during their training session.

That approach worked – at times. Whenever someone was unresponsive, I’d go sit in my office after a session and feel dejected, like I was a failure.

But I was never going to give up that easily. If what I’d learned in college couldn’t help me get through to these athletes, I would have to look elsewhere. I did the hard work of acquiring deeper self-knowledge, uncovering my own emotions, desires and beliefs. And I came to understand why some athletes didn’t buy-in to my coaching.

Young and eager to make a difference, I had been trying too hard too early in the process, overly anxious to get buy-in from my athletes instead of being patient and truly building it. My intense sense of urgency had blinded me to the fact that I needed to view every athlete as a person first – a person who didn’t necessarily respond to the world the way I did.

I sought out research in disciplines that could shed light on how to influence human behavior. My studies took me across the worlds of psychology, sociology, neuroscience and communication theory, and even into the boardrooms of Fortune 500 companies. And I gained valuable insight from great mentors – and critics too. Gradually I began to see that the true Art of Coaching takes into account a host of factors, such as individuals’ drives, their cultural and family backgrounds, and how they relate to one another and their environment.

The pieces began to fall into place. I applied my findings and developed systems to incorporate what I learned into my daily practice as a coach. And as I gained experience and refined my skills and tactics, I noticed something extraordinary: better relationships, a profound increase in buy-in from athletes, and massive improvements in their performance.

When you are able to consistently build buy-in, you will unlock the full power of your training programs and deliver the ultimate outcomes you’re striving to attain with your athletes. Improvements of this scale lead to something that can change your future as a coach:

You will set yourself apart for the right reasons.

Whether your dream is to one day own your own facility, coach at a Division 1 school, or work with an NFL or NBA team, learning the skills and tactics that help you build buy-in is the single most important thing you can do. It can help you to:

• Significantly increase the number of athletes who comply with your training programs
• Optimize the performance of your athletes
• Reduce the incidence of athletes missing training, turning up late, or talking back to you
• Understand what drives your athletes, so you don’t have to spend all your energy pushing them to be motivated
• Communicate with athletes in a way that gets through to them
• Know what athletes are really thinking and feeling
• Unlock the latent passion in athletes that you thought were just disengaged
• Find the best way to get through to struggling or troubled athletes
• Connect with entitled athletes so they do what you need them to, while maintaining your relationship
• Manage conflict with other coaching staff and administrators
• Set the foundation for better relationships to prevent conflicts in the future

In order to build buy-in and navigate conflict with athletes, administrators and other coaches, you need to become proficient in 3 core skills:

Great coaches achieve buy-in because they make it their job to understand the drives, desires and beliefs of others. And they work to understand their own selves so they can genuinely connect with other people. They take a “seek first to understand” approach.

Of course, human behavior does not exist in a vacuum. Environmental and social factors play their part as well – everything from the first bars of the first song you play in the weight room, to how much sleep your athletes get, to what people on social media are saying about them.

Finally, building buy-in requires you to consider everything you know about your athletes and their surroundings, and then select the best way to communicate with them and influence their behavior. Everyone you interact with is subtly influenced by your every look, gesture and word.

If this is all sounding complex, that’s because coaching is complex (but you know that already). Once you understand the science behind buy-in, you will be able to adapt to any situation you may face as a coach. Learn how to send the right signals and use the right persuasion tactics, and you will become a trusted and respected leader.

There are so many resources out there for improving your knowledge of exercise science that you could spend your entire life poring over them and still not get through them all. Yet even though “buy-in” is a term you increasingly hear in the coaching world, there has been a total lack of research-backed resources to help coaches learn the 3 core skills essential for building trust and managing conflict.

So I spent years researching the social and behavioral sciences underpinning these 3 core skills. I went on to test, apply and adapt them in my work as a coach. Then I created resources to help all coaches develop these crucial abilities. My book Conscious Coaching first touched on the art and science of building buy-in, and when it was released in 2017 it became a best-seller and is now used as a text at two U.S. universities.

Now I’ve decided it’s time to dive deeper into these topics and provide practical, action-oriented resources to help you apply the teachings, start building greater buy-in, and radically optimize your outcomes.

First I will guide you through the unifying theory I have developed for driving improved behavioral outcomes with athletes, clients and coaching staff.

Learn about the interdependent factors that shape athlete behavior, and how we can impact them through strategic deployment of communication and influence tactics. You will learn:

• Why athletes need a strategic framework to avoid the anxiety, envy, insecurity and dependency that can arise from social media, peers and parents
• The neuroscience behind why most people’s decisions are driven by emotion, and why emotion will trump logic every time
• How to identify a person’s primary drive (the drive to learn, bond, acquire or defend) and the advantages of leveraging it
• How the training environment impacts your athletes’ performance (and what happened when the Iowa University football team painted its visitors’ locker room “drunk-tank pink”)
• The ways your gestures and expressions can have just as powerful an influence as your words

Find out the number 1 obstacle that gets in the way of us becoming better coaches – ourselves. You will learn:

• A mental exercise that can help you identify your blind spots (and keep you from thinking you’re more competent than you really are)
• The strength you can gain by delving into the real reason why you coach (Hint: it’s always more than “I want to make a difference”)
• 3 Stages of Internal Identification (reflection, inspection and progression) that bring clarity to your deeper purpose
• How some socially undesirable behaviors can be the most successful behaviors to deploy as a coach (if you use them right)
• How empathy can actually damage a coach-athlete relationship, and why compassion is a far more powerful coaching tool

Learn about frameworks and behavioral models that can help you gain a better understanding of your athletes and other coaching staff, and how to engage with them. You will learn:

• 16 Archetypes that describe personality traits we frequently tend to encounter among athletes
• How these Archetypes can help you solve problems in your coaching environment or improve athletes’ outcomes
• Why the golden rule to “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” is wrong for coaches, and what works instead
• The “fundamental attribution error” and how to prevent it from making you seriously mis-judge an athlete
• How effective coaches tell the difference between a people problem and a situation problem

Acquire influence tactics that can help you change people’s attitudes, beliefs, values and behaviors. You will learn:

• The 9 influence tactics that can be used to in essence “periodize” your interactions with athletes and coaching staff
• Why great coaches don’t rely solely on familiar pressure tactics like demands, threats and persistent reminders (and use a whole range of situation-dependent tactics instead)
• Practical ways to get athletes to do things they don’t want to do – without damaging your relationship
• Why the “sandwich” technique – a compliment followed by a criticism followed by another compliment – is a powerful tool so long as you know when to use it. (And can be a dangerous tool if you use it the wrong way.)
• The safe and effective way to leverage influencers like peers, teammates, role models or family members to persuade an athlete to do what you want

For 5 weeks, we’ll explore the practicalities of applying the science behind buy-in to your everyday life as a coach. I’ll share my advice, tips and stories, and I’ll challenge you with practical exercises and homework that will push you out of your comfort zone and bring lasting improvements to your work as a coach.

Topics include:

• The mistakes I made early on in my career that we can learn from
• Real-world alternatives to glorifying “the grind”
• How using a personality assessment to understand what drives your behavior can exponentially strengthen your coaching and self-awareness
• Enhancing your awareness of gender differences in coaching
• Using the Reporter Exercise to nail down your personal coaching style
• How the Hidden Camera Activity will make you cringe but you need to do it anyway because it will tell you things about your coaching that your friends and colleagues won’t
• The step-by-step process you can use to work out why you’re having trouble with a “difficult” athlete . . . and then find a solution
• How to use humor in training sessions to get better results (You don’t have to be a comedian or a clown. Even if you’re not a jokester, you’ll like these strategies.)
• Prepping to build buy-in with a new athlete or team
• Why you should seek critical feedback, and how to do it
• How to get to know what drives your athletes, including their likes and dislikes . . . all to help you engage them better
• Techniques you can use to keep track of what your athletes tell you about their life off the field (without them feeling like you have a dossier on them)
• Getting your communication right from onset to encore in a training session
• My answer to one of the questions I am asked the most: Who is the most difficult athlete I ever coached, and what approach did I take?
• How to calm down at the end of the day for your own sanity and the health of your relationships outside of work
• Practical ways to repay your mentors, and why you should

Since creating the practical hands-on activities in Conscious Coaching Field Guide 1 (which you’ll also get in this course), I’ve had huge numbers of coaches asking for more. So I’ve created a bunch of new activities and you will get exclusive access to them when you join the course.

The guide takes you through each activity with step-by-step instructions, helpful tips and insights. The activities help you develop the skills to build trust and commitment in athletes. And they challenge you to improve your communication and conflict management skills and ultimately become a better leader.

Behavioral science researchers have identified 9 key influence tactics, and during Bought In you will learn how to use them to produce optimal outcomes. This handbook is your easy reference guide to the influence tactics, covering:

• The advantages and disadvantages of each tactic
• When (and when not) to use a tactic to achieve your goal
• How to use each tactic effectively