Fascinating

Scot Morrison was kind enough to post live twitter updates from my friend Patrick Ward's seminar performed at Drive495 this past weekend.  Here is the page. How awesome is technology?!

Certain things really jumped out at me from following the feed:

1-I have said before, when discussing Dan Pfaff's work previously, that sometimes an expert's mastery of a topic can give us more confidence in our own knowledge of the material than we probably should have. Patrick clearly has that ability. Yes knowledge on any given topic discussed within Patrick's seminar was probably able to be fully grasped by the audience there. But I say that the amount of time spent applying this knowledge and the ability to make effective decisions in both the planning and adjustment processes is what will take significantly greater time in our development as coaches and, by extension, the development of our clients and/or athletes. Again Patrick is on another level when it comes to this ability.

Many of the points discussed will have a majority of the audience members at Patrick's seminar, or at any other educational event, saying to themselves, "There is no way I can apply this model (or technique) in my practice." At the clinic I recently put on at Rise Volleyball Academy a key point that I make consistently through my presentation is that there is not an unimportant part of your program and if you accept that then our job really is to reconcile the difference between ineffective practice, effective practice, and BEST practice. I will continue to count on Patrick as an effective guide for doing so.

2-Because of my current coaching environment I have some pretty severe restrictions on things ranging from schedule availability to equipment/space limitations and more. It seems that this is always the case! My situation is not special or unique and most coaches and trainers would complain about the same thing with completely different problems (Public vs. Private Practice, Small Group/Individual vs. Large Teams/Groups). The idea of opening up a new facility soon and reducing these restrictions really gets me excited. But that doesn't mean that for what I am able to do and with what I am able to do it with that I cannot be doing the best job that I can do right now. If I sat down with Patrick and went over the restrictions that I have there is no doubt in my mind that Patrick would not just sit there feeling sorry for me. Instead he would do his best to help me focus on what it is that I can and should be doing to make the training environment work better for me and for the athletes that I coach. Reconciling these differences will essentially help to bring us closer to nailing our hedgehog concept (assuming that the work we are already doing we are both passionate about and effective at).

(I LOOK AT THIS PICTURE AND SEE MYSELF)

So the real lesson for us here is we have to be capable of reducing the noise in order to get our signal to come through loud and clear. If we've never been moved by a sign that what we are doing is making a major difference in the lives and the training of those in our care then we have some major adjustments to make. If we have been moved in such a way then it becomes that much more important to us to work as hard as we can to continue to GET BETTER!