INTRODUCTION

As a coach, you have many responsibilities, such as promoting the individual development of your athletes, designing and delivering training sessions and mentoring the team process. A tremendous amount of knowledge is available that can help you to do all this in the best possible way. It is noticeable, however, that there is still very little information available in the area of one of the most important preconditions for developing talent: encouraging a growth mindset. In other words: increasing the belief that talent and skills can be developed.

Athletes with a growth mindset view their own development quite differently from those who believe that talent is mainly a given. They are motivated to accept tips and advice from coaches, do not give up after making a mistake, take more responsibility for their own development, tackle challenges rather than avoiding them, focus mainly on things that they can influence, and see criticism as a means to identify points for improvement instead of as a personal attack. This book is full of tools to help you gain insight into the mindset of your athletes and influence it in a positive way.

Tomorrow’s talent is written from the point of view of the sports coach, but in reality, all the knowledge and skills in this book have a much broader application. In education, raising children, the business world and many other areas, knowledge about how to encourage a growth mindset is hugely important and can be beneficial. Therefore, it is not only relevant for coaches but also for teachers, athletes, managers, entrepreneurs, parents and others. Those readers then need to translate what we have written here from a sport perspective into their relevant practices.

Before moving on to the first chapter, it is useful to say something about the role that encouraging a growth mindset plays in the final goal of any athlete: performance. What is the connection between a belief in the ability to develop and performing on an optimal level? You can see this clearly from the following pyramid:

Winning

Growth

The bottom layer consists of acting in the right pedagogical way. Key to this is that each athlete is first and foremost a person to whom you as a coach create a connection. Without a relationship there will be no performance: athletes need to feel that you as a coach recognise their value, that they have the right to be there and that they form part of the group. One of Louis van Gaal’s main strengths as a football coach was to look at the whole person instead of just the athlete.

The middle layer is provided by the growth environment. The key for athletes is to develop as well as possible. Encouraging a growth mindset plays an important role in this: if players realise that talent and skill can be developed, they improve much more quickly. This part is what this book is all about.

The top layer is a winning environment, where players deliver their best performances. This is the final goal for most athletes: to win competitions and become champions. In this layer competitiveness is key. This is helped by high self-confidence, a strong focus on the task and the will to win every point, duel or sprint.

It is important for the coach to pay attention to all three phases. There is a progression to this. As sports psychologist Ken Ravizza says: “The athletes must know you care about them, before they care about what you know.” To create a growth environment, you first need to act in the right pedagogical way. Once a growth environment is created, it then provides the foundation for a winning culture.

We believe that a lot of books are written for the first and third step in this pyramid, but the second step is mainly overseen. After we read the quote “If you don’t see the book you want on the shelf, write it”, we decided to do so. Therefore, in this book we explain the concept of a growth mindset in sports.

In Chapter 1, we will introduce the concepts of a growth mindset and a fixed mindset. We will also explain how a player’s mindset can shift and what role the coach plays in this. In Chapter 2, we will describe eleven behavioural indicators that reveal which mindset a player has and how you can influence their behaviour directly. In Chapter 3, the focus is on how you as a coach can promote a growth mindset by applying twelve teaching principles to create a learning culture in which every player can develop.

WHY BELIEF IN THE ABILITY TO DEVELOP IS IMPORTANT

1

1.1 The development iceberg

“Most people never see the hard work and effort that has been put in. All they see is the end result and think it’s easy” (Anonymous)

FIFA World Cup group stage, June 2014, Brazil. Daley Blind, left fullback of the Dutch national team, has the ball playing against Spain, who are leading 1-0. It is almost half-time when Blind sends a long ball towards striker Robin van Persie, behind the defence. Van Persie jumps, swerves and heads the ball over Iker Casillas into the goal. World class goal. The product of a large dose of talent. Natural talent.

At least, that is what it looks like. In an interview Van Persie gave after the match, he tells a quite different story. There he says: “When I was eight, I went for extra training on headers. I was really bad at it. I practised headers with balls for senior players, really hard balls. Usually for an hour.* That is how you learn.”1 An excellent example of the development iceberg (see Figure 1.1). Van

Persie's header

Van Persie did that not just to learn how to head a ball, but also to maintain the skill and improve it: “You need control for a header. It is a process. At a certain point, I let it slide for a while. Until I said to myself: You are not scoring enough with your head. Then I started working on it again. I saw that it was improving again. It’s important that you train yourself. It is the only way to improve.”

So, Van Persie had practised a tremendous amount in order to make that goal against Spain possible. The final product (the header) was visible to the general public, the road to achieving it (endless practice) often remains hidden. What implications does this have for the way in which we regard talent in our society?

1.2 Talent is more than aptitude

“Ability to learn, the desire to improve, is essential for elite athletes. Talent does not only consist of innate ability, which is genetically determined, but also of ambition, drive, willpower, perseverance and coping with pressure” (Joop

Alberda)

Of course, Van Persie was lucky with his ‘football genes’. Without a lot of innate talent (aptitude) for the game he would not have become the top scorer of all time for Holland. But the fact that he went to extremes to learn how to make headers shows that aptitude is not the only factor that determines the final level of an athlete. Van Persie would likely never have scored that goal against Spain had he not practised headers so often.

Ability to learn

Talent is often viewed by society as a ‘natural ability’, a ‘gift you are born with’ or ‘something you are just very good at’. No doubt, the right aptitude is important, but it only tells one part of the story.

A better definition of talent is ‘the level and the potential of an athlete compared to others of the same age’ (see box ‘Biological age’). That depends partly on aptitude, but also to a large extent on ability to learn. This is why the following practical formula gives a true picture of what is needed to achieve a given level:

Talent = aptitude x ability to learn2

Aptitude is what an athlete has inherited genetically, for example aspects such as height, fast reaction times, speed and motor skills.* They are born with this; they didn’t have to do anything to earn it. In the area of speed, for example, that means a certain type of fast muscle fibres.

Ability to learn is the extent to which an athlete is able to develop themselves further, for example by practising a lot, asking others for advice, handling setbacks and stress well, and regularly tackling new challenges.

Biological age

Your calendar age is determined by your date of birth. Your biological age states how far along you are in your biological development. People who mature early are developed biologically at a younger age. For late developers, the opposite applies: they mature late. It is important to compare athletes with others who have the same biological age. 3

Influence

As a coach, you have no influence on the aptitude of an athlete, because that is genetically determined. Where you do have influence, is the ability to learn. You can increase someone’s ability to learn by creating the right conditions for development. By doing so, you develop their talent – their level and potential compared to those of others of the same age.

Talent is not a fixed quantity, it is dynamic. Exactly which part of an athlete’s talent is genetically determined and which part needs to be developed, is mainly a question of interest to scientists. For you as a coach it is only relevant to know talent can indeed be developed to some extent. You would do better to invest your energy in developing all your athletes than discussing who has the greatest innate talent.

Jamie Vardy, top scorer at Leicester City in the title winning Premier League season 20152016, described this as follows: “I don’t think anyone can be told if they’re good enough when they’re 15 or 16 years old, because a player that age has got so many years to grow and develop. They still have years left before they reach their peak.” Vardy himself played at the fifth level in England until he was 25. At Leicester City, he became a national team player for England and a Premier League champion.

The example of Jamie Vardy proves that talent is not fixed. It is something you can develop. In this paragraph, we used the formula ‘talent = aptitude x ability to learn’ to explain this. This formula is based on the scientific model of psychology professor Françoys Gagné, named the Differentiated Model of Giftedness and Talent (DMGT). This model explains how gifts (natural abilities) are developed into talent (competencies) via the developmental process. In Figure 1.2 you will find a simplified version of this model.

* Height, fast reaction times, speed and motor skills do not depend solely on aptitude either. What we refer to here is the part for which that does apply.

What does the formula ‘talent = aptitude x ability to learn’, which is derived from the DMGT model, imply for the way in which you as a coach look at your athletes? And how can you help them further develop their talent?

1.3 Beliefs about development

“To oversimplify: someone with a fixed mindset sees themselves as a full stop: I can’t do that. Full stop. Someone with a growth mindset sees themselves as a comma: I can’t do it yet, comma, but I can learn to do it” 4

Talent is a combination of aptitude and ability to learn. To speed up the development of athletes, you use their ability to learn.

The basis of an athlete’s ability to learn is found in their mindset: the extent to which they think that their talent and skills can be developed. If their belief in development is strong enough, there will be a positive effect on their ability to learn.

Mindset is defined as follows: the (un)conscious belief of an athlete about the extent to which their talent and skills can be developed.

Cluster 1: ‘Interacting with your athletes’

Cluster 2: ‘Coaching your athletes during practice and matches’

1.Show how development works in the brain

4.give process compliments

2.Ask open questions and shift athletes into the learning phase

5.Prefer feedforward over feedback

3.Uncover underlying beliefs

Cluster 3:

7.Show the development path of (elite) athletes

6.Use development-oriented language

Cluster 4:

‘Influencing the

around your athletes’’

10.GIVE a good example

8.Focus on the process, not just the result

11.Involve the athlete’s environment

9.Make progress visible

12.Get the critical mass on board

Twelve teaching principles that will encourage a growth culture.

Teaching Principles

Cluster 1: Interacting with your athletes

1 Explain how learning works in the brain: practising creates new connections and reinforces existing connections. The brain has plasticity and changes, depending on what you do, think and feel. That is why it provides a basis for progress.

2 Give athletes visibility of the points they need to improve by asking questions. This makes them realise that they cannot do something (properly) yet. Then help them to get to work to learn the skills and then automate them.

3 Ask about the underlying beliefs that form the basis of behaviour. If you can figure out where certain types of behaviour are coming from, you have a much better view of their limiting beliefs. In this way, you can shift athletes towards learning new things.

Cluster 2: Coaching your athletes during practice and matches

4

Address the compliments that you pay towards the commitment athletes show, towards the improvement in their skills in the future, towards their improvement compared to a time in the past, and towards the athletes’ performance rather than towards them as people. Do not compliment athletes excessively or on fixed traits.

5 Feedback says something about past behaviour. Athletes can no longer do anything about that, so feedback can be experienced as an attack. Reword feedback so that it is future-facing: feedforward. The future is something an athlete can influence.

6 The language you use has a major influence on an athlete’s mindset. Avoid statements like “He is naturally talented” and use the word ‘yet’ to say that an athlete cannot do something yet, but can learn to do it. Using the word ‘already’ shows that they have learned something.

Cluster 3: Making the process of development visible

7

For elite athletes, their performance is most visible in matches and competitions, where it can easily appear that the skills on display are mainly innate. By showing the development history of athletes, you make visible what they did and did not do earlier in life to achieve this level.

8 An athlete cannot completely control the results in a match or competition. Plus, winning is in the future. To encourage a growth mindset, it will help to focus above all on the process in which the athletes are involved. That is where the most development occurs directly.

9

Over the years, athletes can improve without being aware of it themselves. By making their progress visible, they can see that they have got better. Link this to the way in which they have worked hard, so that athletes make the connection between their efforts and their development.

Cluster 4: Influencing the environment around your athletes

10

11

More than the words that you use, athletes (and especially children) learn mainly from copying your behaviour. So, always provide a good example by displaying the behavioural indicators of a growth mindset in your own behaviour.

You only have a limited amount of influence on athletes. Their family, friends and school or work play an important part in their mindset. Try to influence their environment, for example through offering education, sending videos or influencing the athletes’ physical environment.

12

Within a team sport, the critical mass determines to some extent what is the norm for the team. They have a strong influence on the other athletes in the changing room. Identify the critical mass and influence them to adapt a growth mindset. They will then probably bring the others along with them.