Archives for Education

Generational Differences – Not Bad, Not Good, Just Different

January 28, 2017 | No Comments

An important characteristic of those whom you are coaching, educating, or leading whether you are a coach, teacher, or employer are generational differences. The students who are graduating from college are now entering a workforce in which there could be four or more generations working for the same company. This is challenging and at the same time exciting. However, it is important to confront two fundamental assumptions that each generation makes about the younger generations entering a given organization. Cam Marston, in his 2007 book, Motivating the ‘What’s in it for Me’ Workforce, highlights these two assumptions. First, the senior
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Leaders Need to Know Self

October 26, 2016 | No Comments

In my last post, I introduced the five basic questions at the foundation for the Collaborative Coaching and Leadership Action Model. The basic premise of this model is that coaching, educating, and leading are about taking a person or group from where they are now to some place new. To accomplish this, it is important to understand ourselves. The importance of knowing self has become increasingly obvious as I have developed as coach, leader, and educator. In one of the first National Soccer Association of America courses of my soccer coaching career, Doug Williamson, who became my coaching mentor, emphasized
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CHANGE INVOLVES LEARNING

July 4, 2016 | No Comments

As a coach, educator, and/or leader, we are pursuing some kind of end that we have in our mind. We call them goals, objectives, or outcomes. In some way, shape, or form to achieve these ends –in-mind, change is involved. It is crucial to recognize that, whether you are a coach trying to help your player learn a new skill, an educator helping a student obtain new knowledge, or an employer training their employees, all of these activities involve change. Change involves learning, whether we are doing something new or trying to do something better. Recent developments in educational research
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Show Them You Care

March 13, 2016 | No Comments

Whether you are coach, educator, or other type of leader, you have the potential to have a significant impact on those you lead. If you think back about a teacher, coach or boss who had a major impact on you, I suspect one of your key memories is how they cared about you. As you consider the ways that you may impact others who look up to you, consider the extent to which your actions show that you care about them. Teddy Roosevelt said, “Nobody cares how much you know, until they know how much you care.” For many people,
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Communication: The Foundation for Changing Mindsets

January 24, 2016 | No Comments

The ability to communicate is THE most important life skill that coaches, teachers, and leaders of employees need to develop. Like any other skill, it takes practice. The three most important words for the success of any leader, whether it be a soccer team, a classroom, or a business, are communication, communication, communication. The best leaders have good communication skills. The motivational speaker, Tony Robbins, emphasizes that “to effectively communicate, we must realize that we’re all different in the way we perceive the work and use this understanding as a guide to our communication with others.” So what does it
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Leading, Educating, Coaching, Change, and Learning: They are all connected!

November 8, 2015 | No Comments

We often consider coaching, teaching, and leading as separate activities. At their most basic level, all three are about taking someone to a new place. When an individual takes a journey to some place new, change is involved. To change, people need to learn. Helping others learn is about helping people engage their brains in what they are doing. Therefore, using an approach that integrates the best practices for helping people learn should improve one’s ability to lead, coach, and teach (i.e., to influence their development). I refer to this as educating, coaching, and leading with the brain in mind.
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Change Your Focus

September 3, 2015 | 1 Comment

It has become increasingly clear to me that for any of us to maximize our effectiveness as a coach, leader, or educator, we need to change our mindset to focus on the needs of those we lead. As John C. Maxwell, a nationally recognized author on leadership, points out, “Leadership is not about titles, positions or flowcharts. It is about one life influencing another.” Changing our focus away from ourselves and towards others simplifies the challenge of leadership. Drew Dudley’s 2010 TEDx Talk in Toronto highlighted the capacity that every person has to be a leader, and influence and change
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