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Motivation and Skill Quadrant Part 1
Bullets and Timestamps:
[00:00:03] Introduction
[00:00:30] Putting Athletes in a Box
[00:01:01] Motivation & Skill Quadrant
[00:02:33] Coach Edwards’ Personal Experience
[00:03:46] Outline of Next Video
Coach Edwards here. Want to talk about motivation and skill quadrant. This is something that’s really handy as a coach and as a parent and also as an athlete. As I draw this out and you look at it through your eyes, whether you’re an athlete or a coach or a parent, you’re instantly going to be able to put an athlete into a box. As human beings we really like to do that. We want to be able to classify and it helps us understand.
Now coachingas we all know is a bit of an art, and when you coach you can’t coach each kid the same. But one of the things that really help me when I coach is understanding where kids fit on the motivation and skill quadrant. And it looks like this. We would have a box like so and on the top we would have motivation. And then over here we have skill. And within each we have high skill and low skill and high motivation and low motivation.
I did this up for our parents this year and I’ve talked to athletes in the past about this, because when you’re putting together a program it’s really nice, obviously, I look at the travel teamsand the elite teams that bring together like 25 of the top skilled, I would say highly skilled, not always highly motivated, but obviously it would be great if we had this when we’re dealing with athletes that are highly skilled, highly motivated, and that’s easy to coach, right? There’s not a lot of skill when coaching a kid like that. The skill comes in taking that kid higher and moving them beyond where they are with your group and your team. But as an athlete I think it’s really important to kind of say, okay, where am I in this grade?
When I started playing lacrosse, in 5th grade to let’s say 8th grade or 9th grade, I was highly motivated but I was low skill. Let’s say I was right here, okay? And I think as an athlete, athletes don’t always know, their perception of where they are in the motivation scale is sometimes skewed. An athlete can think, hey, I’m motivated, I’m working hard. But compared to another athlete, they might not be working nearly as hard, right?
So as I progressed through my athletic career, not only lacrosse but also my Olympic career, even though I was low skilled I was highly motivated. My goal was kind of to bring me further up into this area of the spectrum because ultimately I knew to move on from where I was in my game, I would have to be highly motivated and highly skilled to take it one step further, okay?
I just want to take some time in the next couple of videos to go over the pros and cons and benefits and not so benefits of being in either one of these categories and how it can set you up sometimes to succeed or fail. And we’re going to do that in the next few videos, I want to keep these short, I want to keep it kind of under five minutes for you. So this is step one and we’ll move on to step two in the next video.
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