How do you break a losing streak? If your team is in a slump, this video presentation can help turn your season around. Presented by Bo Hanson, 4x Olympian and Senior Coaching Consultant, this series of three videos will give you practical strategies to turn your season around .
How to Break a Losing Streak Part 1 Transcript
I was recently at a conference and there were several professional football coaches at the same conference and I’d spoken first and the coaches spoke after me and they were in a panel. It was a great concept because everyone loves to hear about coaches and their real life stories as to how they dealt with various issues as they went throughout the season. One of the coaches was asked that critical question which most coaches have to deal with at some point in time and that is, ‘How do you turn around a losing team?’
In doing a little bit of research, if you Google ‘fix losing streak’ you’ll be inundated with pages and pages of the longest losing streaks in history, the teams who have the biggest losing streaks, you’ll be inundated with teams who are suffering from a losing streak right now but you won’t find a lot of information on what to actually do about it. So I thought I’d just present a few of my ideas about what you can do to fix a losing streak.
One of the key questions that we ask all of our coaches, in preparing them for their season ahead and also helping them to review their season, is for them to embark on a study of what their program actually is. What I mean by this is, if we think about your sporting program as a jigsaw puzzle and that within that jigsaw puzzle it may be made up of ten pieces it may be different, everyone’s program is a little bit different depending on the complexity of it. Pieces of the puzzle, such as: the training program, the equipment, your conditioning, your support staff, the athlete’s level of self-awareness, the culture that you have, the leadership, your coaches, their coaching style, the overall team dynamic, the list goes on an on but the critical thing is to help address a losing streak, even to understand why you’re on a winning streak you have to understand what are the pieces of your puzzle. What happens when people are on a losing streak, quite often they are unable to pinpoint exactly what is going wrong. One of the interesting things about losing streaks and winning streaks is that cause and effect are often separated by time. What I mean by that is that something that just happened this morning doesn’t cause the losing streak it could have been something that happened in the pre-season and it’s festered throughout this time, now it’s costing you.
The critical first step in understanding why you’re on a losing streak, or a winning streak is to start to understand what’s working well for you and what isn’t working well. To do that, you have to have an understanding of what are all the little pieces of the puzzle. Sometimes you’ll have all of the right pieces but they won’t be in the right position and so the picture doesn’t look correct and other times you may be missing pieces. So that’s the first step, to address what’s working, understand what isn’t working and to look at how you can improve.
How to Break a Losing Streak Part 2 Transcript
The second stage to addressing a losing streak is to revisit the framework that you set up at the beginning of the season, now that’s assuming that every coach has set this framework up in terms of the GRIP Process, the understanding what your goals are, understanding what the teams values and subsequent behaviors are and how they contribute to your goals. Because I will guarantee that if a team is not performing well, it’s because those behavioral standards have been let slip and now we’re paying the price for it. The ways out of that, is to address it from an accountability perspective. That can often mean that there needs to be some very honest and accurate feedback given to all members of the team and for them to self-assess what behaviors can they take control of to improve. Because it’s the simple things – I will guarantee that you’re not just losing on the weekend, you’re not just losing when you’re playing competition, those losses will be accounted for in how you’ve prepared for training every single day of the week. That’s the uncommon thing about high-performance is that it’s tough, it’s difficult to aspire to the highest levels of standards and behavior on a daily basis. A lot of teams fall short in that area.
It’s the teams that hold themselves and each other accountable for those behavioral standards that are more likely to experience sustained success. So the second part to this is to assess your behavioral standards and assess what identity your team wants to be. Some teams don’t see themselves as a playoff team and even when they start the season well, because their identity is not that of a playoff team, they find a way to create their own losing streak because their belief about themselves has to change in order for them to make sure that they keep being successful. So it’s about find out what the behaviors are, accurately assessing it, receiving feedback and being accountable to each other to start to improve those standards on a daily basis.
How to Break a Losing Streak Part 3 Transcript
The final part that we’ll talk about in turning a team around is basically talking about your beliefs. It’s a complicated area, a belief is something that you hold to be true or false or wrong or right, and we have beliefs about all different types of things. Players have beliefs about whether or not our team is going to be successful this year. Obviously a belief can do one of two things, it can either help you or hinder you. A lot of the time, if a team has a belief as we mentioned before about not being a playoff team or a championship team, it’s funny how we will find a way to prove that that belief is true and accurate.
So one of the critical aspects of turning your team around is trying to get an understanding of what do people honestly believe. If people believe that the team is going to be on a losing streak and the season is not going to be successful, everything else is not going to help because fundamentally, people’s behavior is going to be governed by that negative belief. So the key thing about beliefs is, how can you change that?
Most beliefs are based around evidence, that evidence is something that you can see, you can touch and you can feel. My strategy would be to create some evidence that disproves their negative beliefs, thus to create more positive beliefs. If you look at history, most teams that were on a losing streak eventually broke it. At some point in time, someone had had enough.
I remember rowing at the ’92 Olympics and we were racing the German 8 in the Olympic Final. The Canadian crew had been beaten by the German crew at the previous Olympic Games as well as the World Championships in between. For whatever reason, there were rowers within the Canadian crew that year that decided enough was enough. That day they raced with a level of intensity that they hadn’t previously had. They ended up winning and they broke that streak that the Germans had. Sometimes it does come down to desire, but that desire underpinned by a belief that we can do the job and that belief is going to be anchored by evidence. It’s not going to be, suddenly we turned up at the Olympic Final and now we’re going to do something miraculous. The reality is, is that that team had done times that had proved that they were faster than the German team, they’d done training evidence they were stronger, fitter and more physically capable than they’d ever been in the past and so that gives them a reason to believe that the result today can be better than what it has been before.
So part of our role as a coach is to point out the physical evidence that changes our beliefs and be more positive and address the issues and hopefully turn around your results.
At Athlete Assessments, we’re here to provide you with excellence in service and to help you be your best. If there is anything we can assist you with, please Contact Us.
