Positive Coaching Essay

It’s a continuum. The coach needs to help the athlete create goals through evidence-based methods and then ensure that the parents are educated on the goal process and understand the commitment required by their athlete child.

The “psychology of coaching” is essentially a set of strategies designed to increase a coach’s ability to influence the behavior of others more effectively. Psychology is basically the application of common sense (Smith, 2013). Positive coaching fosters a more positive and cohesive team climate (Burton & Raedeke, 2008)

Goals enhance focus and concentration, boost self-confidence, prevent or manage stress, create a positive mental attitude, increase intrinsic motivation to excel, improves quality of practice by making training more challenging, enhances playing skill, technique, and strategies, improve overall performance (Burton & Raedeke, 2008).

Goals act as a map or blueprint and help athletes to be committed to achieving their goals. Goals also need to be positive focused and SMART (as discussed above) but also “action oriented”. Athletes back by their coach and parents need to keep sight of goals on a daily basis. This increases confidence by helping them monitor their progress. This provides a focus on the process vs outcome, supports long term with short term goals, and emphasizes improvment of one’s performance. In addition, some of the athlete’s goals need to be set outside of sports in order to teach them to become a whole person (Woolsey & Portenga, 2011). It’s not surprising to me that the athletes in this scenario have had issues with their grades,