Tag Archives: Goals

Floorball – Creativity within the frames

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Give your floorball team members goals, not instructions on how to reach them. Ask for their input and point of view. Give your floorball players room to act and therefore also space for creativity, within the frames. You don’t need to have all the answer, guide your players to answers inside themselves (e.g. Player: How should we do this?  Coach: Do you have a good suggestion how to do it? Or, how would you like to solve it? Or, someone else, who has a good answer?)  After starting the fire (why and what), avoid putting your fingers in to the fire (how), create the framework for the fire and trust your players.

Floorball drills for 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 year old, skills passing, running and shooting

José Mourinho

“I use a global method, I use direct methods when preparing our organization, but I also use guided discovery where I create the practice, dictate the aim, and the players come up with different solutions” /José Mourinho

Floorball – Guided discovery

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Magnifying glass.
Most of us has once owned a magnifying glass, have you? I have. The original purpose of a magnifying glass is to visualize the details or make the details bigger. Did you use the magnifying glass for something else? I did…
I assume that you have at least once tried to create a fire with your magnifying glass, when you were young? How can this be connected to (direction) your vision, goals and focused areas?
Your vision goals and focused areas should do the exact same work as the magnifying glass, catch the energy within the frames and focus it to a point to create fire.

Youth Floorball shooting, goal scoring practices and drills

Are we looking at the same picture?

One of the most important things, when talking about vision, goals and focused areas is communication. How can you secure that everyone has the same target image or picture as you want or how do you know the player have understood your message or seen the picture you try to “paint” out for them?

There will be a lot of things that will make the picture to differ between your floorball players, experience, expectations, their own will, the language you are using including your body language and many other things. Therefore it’s important that you somehow get a receipt of their understanding and interpretations. If you also allow you players to comment or maybe add things to your vision, focus or goals, you will immediately get a stronger buy in from each and one of the players.

A message from the future

Why should you have a vision? The vision will give you guidance in your leadership, coaching, daily decision making, acting and communication.

When you talk about a vision, you and I might have different pictures in our heads. I will try to give you my picture. For me to start with a vision can be in whatever format, only your own fantasy can limit it. It can be everything between some bullet points on a paper to a short movie “from the future”. So the format is not that important, but how it’s perceived, it should create energy and direct it on the long term, and to be honest how exciting are some bullet points, even if they would do the work?

A vision can be a colorful multi-dimensional description of what you as the leader see in the future, you can in your own mind/head try to move couple of years into the future and describe what you see, feel, hear, regarding the team, achievements, team spirit, players, club, fans, results, behavior etc. A good way to describe what has happened in the future is to actually try to describe it as it would have happened, not in, should terms. Because as you have read earlier the pictures you create are important (sour lemon or basketball example). There is one more dimension to ad, our brains can not make difference between created realistic pictures and realistic pictures, the difference comes from our own values and belief…

I try to visualize the difference for you.

Vision 2014
– We should win the league 2014
– We should improve our team-spirit
– We should increase the intensity in our practices
– We must… etc.

Or…

8th of May 2014
I would like to welcome you all to this press conference. I can imagine you have a lot of questions after our victory in the League. If I just start to give you my point of view of the key success factors, after that you will be able to ask some questions to the players.

To start with, I think our victory would have not been possible without the fantastic team spirit we have in our team, everyone has a clear defined role, and all of the players have accepted this during this year/these years, we don’t use the word “first teamers”, we are one TEAM.

During this year we have increased the intensity in our practices which we also showed clearly in yesterday’s last game in the league. We were the strongest team in the end, we were willing to run the extra mile, and if you look at the amount of goals we have scored this season, it’s 89 goals and that gives you also the picture of an offensive, strong and quick team!

The setup, could be that you actually rig a press conference with the players in the press role. Do you feel the difference between these examples?

Guided discovery and all in

After creating a vision it’s important to also involve your floorball players, what do they think? Is this the correct way? Don’t just accept an yes, ask questions, why do they think it’s the right way, or why not, what did they find exciting in the vision (and not, why?), was there something that needs to be changed, added or deleted? In the end you are of course the one deciding about changes, but if you don’t listen to your players, you need to explain why you will do that, why you will continue with your “picture”, but in that case are you walking alone towards the vision or do you have your team with you on the trip? I can say that if the vision is well taught throug, prepared and tested on a smaller group before the presentation, and it’s attractive, you will only get positive feedback and explanations why it’s correct and therefore the players also feel that the vision is also theirs. Otherwise you sometimes get good input that will complement the vision, things that you haven’t thought about or didn’t feel were important, but for the team it was. Even if you make some changes, you will still have the same buy in from your team, in this case maybe even more, because they have added something and you as the leader have showed them that their opinion counts, respect!

José Mourinho

The same method applied on practices and drills.
“I use a global method, I use direct methods when preparing our organization, but I also use guided discovery where I create the practice, dictate the aim, and the players come up with different solutions” /José Mourinho

Floorball Positive Attitude

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The head coach of a floorball team has one main job. He/She has to get the most out of the floorball team during the season. Everyone wants to win the floorball championship or the league title, but the reality of the situation is that only one floorball team will make it, and if  that is the only goal you as the floorball coach and your team have, to grade your performance only by whether or not you have won it all, there are going to be a lot of unhappy floorball coaches and players at the end of the year.

Floorball practices for 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 year olds

So ask yourself. Can you make your team better than it was at the beginning of the season? Can you put up a set of different goals, measuring development in different areas, where the league title of course can be one of the goals? Can you turn your floorball players and team into a cohesive unit? Can you teach your floorball players something about the game and teamwork and improve their outlook on life at the same time? Maybe the first thing you should work on is promoting a positive attitude within your team.

Floorball – Run the extra mile on practice

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If you assume that the floorball teams on certain level practice the same amount of practices each week, lets say four times, and you want to outcompete your opponents, you can choose to increase the amount of floorball practices or work on improving the quality of your floorball practices and drills, in order to “run away” from the other teams.
Let’s have an theoretical example, 4 (floorball practices) x 31 (weeks, length of the season) = 124 floorball practices during a season. Each practice contains 5 floorball drills, 5 X 124= 620 drills. Each floorball drill is repeated 5 times per player during the floorball practice, 5 X 620=3100 repetitions.

Floorball 1 vs 1 practices drills

Instead of increasing the amount of floorball practices you could set up a goal that each player will run 3 meters extra every floorball drill, this would mean 3100 drills X 3 meters X 20 players = 186000 meters. Your team would with this small improvement run 186 kilometers extra during the floorball season, the result should be visible in the end of the games or at the end of the season, you would have physically and psychologically strong floorball players, they will take the extra steps needed for success. Instead of running, you could let your floorball players practice a feint while waiting. 10000 repetitions will automatize the move, 10000 hours will make you master of it!

Floorball youth practices drills and training

The power of small steps

You can of course use the same principle for improvements in general or your work towards common goals. Let’s say you can do 3 small improvement steps each day, after a month you have 90 small improvement steps and after 6 months 540. If you can make each floorball player in your team to take these small improvement steps you will have 540 X 20 players = 10800 small improvements in your floorball team.

Floorball – For me or for someone else?

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Internal or external motivation? The internal motivation comes from you, you do something because you want to (and you know why) and you can see the benefits for you. External motivation comes from for example external rewards, like prices, money or other benefits. It can be hard to tell what did motivate you most, but on the long term the internal motivation is the motivation that will help you most in your performance. Other sources for motivation might be:
– Task related motivation, comes from the teams goals and purpose, common efforts towards a common goal.
– Social related motivation comes from the social intercourse with the other team members
– Internal motivation comes from individual reward, goals and performance.

What is it that motivates us with a particular task. This may be some reasons:
– Social satisfaction
– Tournament moments
– Self-control
– Lifestyle
– Physical and mental wellbeing
– Success quest
– Money – survival – Luxury
– Status
– Competition
– (Nice view), See the Waterboy example in – For me, the team or why do I do it.

floorball reward

Rewards may increase motivation?

Yes answers, most people probably without thinking. So here’s a little story:
There was a group of boys who used to play football at a farmer’s field. The farmer himself did not like it and tried repeatedly to drive away those little football players, without success.
He decided to go for a new tactic. He walked up to the boys playing football and said that everyone would get 50 cents, each time they played football at his field. Next week, he gave them one Euro each. The week after he told the boys that he had short of money so they could only get 50 cents again. The next week he said he would only be able to pay 20 cents. The young football players were really upset, “Who do you think you are? How can you believe that anyone of us would play for you, for 20 cents?” So what the boys had done with joy and for fun (internal motivation), ended up as the farmer wanted, they quit playing after the external reward was minized or removed…

When a man comes home with flowers, the question might be “Okey, what have you done now, why do you bring me flowers? Or when you receive or are offered something for free, you immediately think “What do they want me to buy from them or what kind of subscription/contract is behind the gift”?
Rewards are good and fun, but you have to have the insight that people or your players perceive it very differently. Therefore, it is good to explain and justify carefully why you give the person something. Otherwise, some people get the feeling that the other person is trying to take control of me and tie me up by giving me something.

It’s good to have money, so you can buy things that can be bought with money. It’s although a lot better to not lose the things that cannot be bought with money. (It’s better to have internal than external motivation)