Displacing Our Motivation with Alan Keane (Part 1)

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Hey everyone, just wanted to hop on before the start of today's podcast. This is part 1 of my conversation with Alan Keane, Great Britain's under-20 coach and co-owner of Movement Sports. Hi and hello, welcome to the Transforming Basketball Podcast. I'm Adam Omiecinski and I'm here with Alan Keane.

Alan, could you introduce yourself, give us a brief background to the listeners?

Sure. Well, first of all, thanks for having me on. I guess this was a long time coming. Alex had asked me quite a period back to jump on and it was always my intention, but we just never found the time. So first of all, thank you for having me.

My name is Alan Keane. I'm an international basketball coach for Great Britain, currently the head coach of the Great Britain Under-20 team. Work a lot in the coach support space. Run a co-owner company called Movement Sports with Simon Turner, who was a previous guest of yours.

I think he was on in the earlier days with Alex. And we run a business where we support coaches in their journey. And that could range from anything from dealing with difficult players, conflicts, style of play, to navigating their timeouts, effective communication, and so on.

So that's a really rich journey because a lot of coaches let us into their space. So in one way or another, I'm immersed in coaching on a daily basis. Like I said, I wear 2 hats, and then I guess I wear 3 hats.

The final piece of the puzzle is I'm head of basketball at a club in Scotland, which is a club that does a lot around social impact. So even though basketball is the vehicle, it's— we're currently trying to use that to impact the community in a positive way, in different ways.

So that's— that would be it in a nutshell.

I'm gonna actually just hop on that and When you say the club in Edinburgh, they're trying to make a social impact through basketball. Can you give us a little insight?

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah.

So I guess a good place to start would be just to explain the setup. So I came on board there, this will be my 4th year, and your previous guest, Simon Turner, who was the founder of that organization in terms of its current form.

Now the club has been around since the '70s, even the '60s, I believe. The club is known as called Birmingham Euroblaze. It used to play in European Championship competition at a senior level. So When you walk into our facility, you'll see on the walls there, you'll see pictures from the '70s where we were playing against Real Madrid and Barcelona.

That would not happen now, let's say, but that's where the club stemmed from. Simon came on board 25 years ago or more, and the club has secured its own facility, which is in the middle of Edinburgh city, which is incredibly privileged to have our own facility in the midst of a beautiful city like Edinburgh.

So what that facility does, it's only a one-court facility, Adam. It's nothing extravagant. There's no tiered stands or anything like that. It's a one-court facility with office space.

Yeah.

The S&C room, studio. But what it does is it gives us agency to do whatever we want because we're not renting the space. We're not having to get out at a certain time. You know, we've got 6 full-time members of staff operating out of there and, you know, 450 members.

So it's just, it's a typical club you'll find in the UK from grassroots right through to seniors. Our senior teams are not professional, even though we bring in 2 Americans per year and they're professional. So, you know, you could argue, is it semi-pro in some way?

But it's low, very low level. But what we try to do with that is use basketball as a vehicle to impact the lives of the young people. And I say young people, including the adults that come through our door. So we have an ethos at the club and we have a way of being that says we're going to coach you through a place of care.

And, you know, we were very lucky enough through my own studies at Liverpool John Moores University to bring in an expert about care and coaching, a gentleman called Colm Cronin. And they took us on a journey On how to do that better and how to be more intentional to coach people through a means of care while still trying to win.

You know, this wasn't about let's have fun and let's just enjoy it. It was how can you be intentional about working with young people who have a desire to get better at basketball? Some of them will have aspirations to go on and play in the States or play at a higher level.

But how can you continue to coach them, meet their needs, but also do it differently today? Traditional stereotypical transactional way of coaching. And this is where the, you know, ecodynamics and CLA approach has been. We've really dug down into it in our club.

And again, like I said to you, we have full agency over what we do. So often it's a playground to try different things. But to answer your question, to go back to your question, we do a lot of work and outreach work in other schools in the area, like a lot of clubs do.

And we're always trying to dig a bit deeper as to how we can offer more to the community by the fact that we have our own facility and that we have agency over what we do. And it's an opportunity we're still trying to grow and get better at in terms of the social impact side of things.

The long-term aspiration here is, and you know, we're into our second cycle of our 3-year ambition or 3-year strategy. And at the end of that 3 years, we're really hoping we have, we can offer professional men and women's team, full-time professional, because that's a space we want to get into and challenge the traditional norms.

So as you'll know, Adam, it's very much a transactional process when you become a professional team and you sign players on 1-year contracts. It's really 6 to 8 months. And if they get injured, they get released, and you bring in the next, and everything's very transactional, let's say.

We want to get into that space to challenge that and be a bit more transformation around what we do and how we do it, even how we coach, the coaching methods we would use. We would go against a lot of the traditional ways of running a professional team with putting this person at the center of everything we do, which is easier said than done.

And we can all say that, but actually following through, and that's another challenge. But we have the right people in the right places with our board, our CEO, and the coaches in the club to make that happen. So we're working towards that, and that will really test what we're trying to do when we're trying to be a team, a club, a group of coaches who coach through a place of care.

Because if you're coaching through a place of care, you're parking your motivations as a coach. That's the first leg of the table. The term is motivational displacement. Can you as a coach ultimately park your motivations for what you do with a player, with a team, and serve the needs of the motivations of those 12 young women or young men in front of you?

And again, we would go down a rabbit hole to unpick that, but that's the basis of it.

Motivational display. I really enjoy that term, Alan. That actually shifted where I was going to take the conversation. Looking into your background, it seems that like the athlete-centered approach is very important to you. Like, how did this emerge, this strong interest in like learner-centered learning and athlete-centered approaches come to fruition?

I guess it was probably like most coaches, you know, you reflect back on your own experiences and, you know, you've got a range of experiences all the way from great to horrific, sadly, because we know sport isn't always what it's portrayed to be.

It can often be an avenue into unpleasant experiences. And, you know, the coach actually can be the custodian of that. And I had really positive experiences as a player. I played in the Super League back in Ireland, which is a semi-pro league, and I had some wonderful coaches.

And one stood out more than anybody else, and that was a coach named Seanie Burrows. And he coached me in a way where I was improving as a player, constantly improving, and I felt that he cared. He made me feel like I belonged.

And that culture of belonging, which is, you know, a very rich topic, and I'm no expert on it, even though at our club it's one of our ambitions. Is to facilitate a culture of belonging for every single person who walks through the door.

Shawnee gave me that feeling. It gave me that feeling that I belong here, and any mistakes weren't seen as errors, which is why I gravitated to Keith David's perspective on errors— what they are, what it is, what it's not— or reframing what a mistake is.

And I'll pick that up in a second. But Shawnee gave me that feeling that, you know, I wasn't making a mistake and I was always going to be supported. So I guess that's my early experience of it coming from an Irish community, like living in Ireland, we're very community-based.

So growing up in a culture where your community is very strong and very important factor in your life, it's a sense of identity. I found myself moving more towards an athlete-centered way to approaching a way of coaching. Once I had been exposed to that, I got exposed to it through my master's degree in coaching science back in 2009.

That's when I first learned about it. And I started to challenge the coaching ways and coaching practices I was doing up to that point, which was with good intention. But I look back at it now. And if I was to describe it as a leadership way, it was definitely pace setting.

And I look back and I think about all the players who were able to keep up with me pace setting and survived. Again, we can link it to survivorship bias. But I think of the countless players I probably left behind with my pace setting approach to coaching.

Like if you can't keep up with me, so what I say, what I tell you to do, what I direct, what I dictate—if you can't keep up with that, then you don't survive that. And I regret that way of coaching, but I don't hold on to those regrets because I was going through a learning process.

I think the sad thing, Adam, is coaches are still in that space, and they've been in that space for 20, 30 years, and maybe never become aware of there's a better way to do this. Somewhat similar to what Alex portrays around coaching methods, you know he's.

He's very much portraying the CLA as a better way to enhance player development or skill set within a player. So I wish I'd have found the athlete-centered way coaching sooner or been informed about it sooner. But ever since I got on that master's course, I've been on a wonderful journey.

And how is your new educational pursuit with the PhD? How has that influenced your day-to-day and your coaching methodology?

Yeah, that's— wow. 7-year journey, man. It's been 7 years. It's been wonderful because, like, just to give a bit of an insight and more context, The topic was around self-regulated learning. So self-regulated learning explained in a nutshell is how can you go about coaching somebody to be independent and self-motivated at acquiring skills and knowledge, new skills, new knowledge.

And there's a process you have to go through in order for people to be independent and be self-motivated. We can't just turn up and expect them to be motivated. Like they need a reason to act. When you look at motivation as a concept and it's in its most basic form, I heard this from somebody else.

I wish I could quote the person, but I can't recall. Motivation could simply be described as reasons to act. And therefore, we've got to step back. And if that's what I anchor myself to when I coach, then I'm going to have to shift my lens on what I think we should be working on and really look at the people I'm coaching and dig in and acquire information and data from them as to their needs and motivations to be here.

You know, I feel quite strong on that topic, whether it's a professional team or whether it's an under-12 junior team. You've got people coming through the door with different needs and more different needs is obvious, but different motivations. Even though they signed up to the same thing, their motivations will be slightly different.

So it begs the question, do we as coaches enter that space to acquire more information around why they're here? Why are you a pro? Is it just for the paycheck? Is it for the 3 months off in the calendar year? Is it for progression?

You know, what state? So getting that information, what I'm effectively saying here, Adam, is a better understanding of who we coach will enable you and facilitate you to coach them better, to coach the what, to coach the how better. But it starts with a better understanding of the people you coach.

And I think that to get to that space, I feel like there's— there is almost a linear process here. I feel I may be wrong here, and I'm sure I'll be shot down by some people, but I also feel there's a step towards feeling that way or thinking that way, and that's a perception of self.

How well do you know yourself as a coach? What's the coach's— the individual coach's level of self-awareness? You know, when I talk to you about the work we do with Movement Sports, Simon Turner, myself, that A lot of our work is taking coaches into that space around enhancing their self-awareness around who they are as a coach and why they do what they do.

My apologies if I've gone off on loads of different tangents there.

No, no, no, no, no. What I'm curious on now is like the linear fashion you think it can be conducted in tapping into a player's essentially their why and their motivation for being there. What do you mean in a linear fashion, like a step-by-step process?

You think it can be that clean or?

Yeah, I've kind of almost regretted— I just want to be careful I've said linear because, you know, the world we operate in as coaches and as coach developers, supporters of coach growth, it's anything but linear. But what I guess we'll talk about stages.

If I could go back to pre-2009, like I said to you, when I was first introduced to the athlete-centered way of coaching, if I could go back to that state prior to that stage I would have wished somebody had taken me to the side and helped me to understand the value of me spending time getting to know me as the coach, getting to know myself as the coach.

And so effectively, I'm talking about an enhanced level of self-awareness. And I have no doubt, and again, it's something I feel strongly on, and maybe, you know, if I extract part of my studies around the Prof Doc, you know, we definitely delved into the space, I delved into the space of myself as How can I draw out more awareness of self as to why I do what I do?

What's the impact of what I do? And is there a better way to do it? So almost going on a reflective cycle. And I would consider myself a strong reflective practitioner, but I am that because I was supported to be that from many, to name a few sources.

Simon is obviously one, Mark Bennett was another, and the support I had from Vlada and Driskovic and Warwick Cann. They really helped me to go on a journey to question what I do and is there a better way to— why I do it, is there a better way to do it?

So I think before you get to understanding or going into the space to trying to understand the needs and motivations of your players, and they can be parallel journeys, by the way, I would encourage coaches to start with self. So if I was to take you, Adam, let's just kind of not role-play this, but I guess just to bring this to life and give an example.

If I was to encourage you to go on a journey to enhance your self-awareness as a coach, I'd focus on questions around Drawing out your level of self-awareness and social intelligence, as opposed to being a deficit detector and going, Adam, you're being too directive, you're talking too much, you're— the drills and activities you're using are not effective, you know, and I wouldn't support you in that way.

I would just load you with a series of questions, and I would take a strengths-based approach to that as well, such as like, Adam, tell me about a time you felt really comfortable in your role as a coach and you felt like, right, I'm firing on all cylinders here, I'm nailing this.

I'm really doing a heck of a job. Or what are your 2 or 3 strengths as a person? Like, let's step away from the coaching domain. Or can you give me an example of one of your strengths that really was effective in a game you've coached last season?

So just using somewhat questions around taking a strengths-based approach, I think, can go a long way towards helping another coach to move towards enhancing their level of self-awareness.

Well, I think that was very effective because as you were just posing those questions, I felt very comfortable and very open about those things. And I was curious Like what I would answer when you ask those questions. So I think taking that strength-based approach, it's already enhancing our relationship when it comes to those conversations.

So I'm going to be more open and I don't do. Do you feel as though like like those perhaps those those weaker areas, the skills they need to improve upon, they'll be kind of self-evident to the individual as you talk more and more and they kind of fall into them themselves and.

They use their strengths eventually that they've already discussed to kind of build those up?

Yeah, and I think you've got to be— absolutely is the answer, yes. But I think we've got to be very careful. And if we take the same approach with players, like, this is what I really like about what Simon and I do with movement.

Everything we do with coaches, Simon and I always step back and go, well, actually, we could take the same approach with players because you're working with people. And we're also taking the perspective— it's very ecological dynamics based. We're also taking the perspective that we don't have the answers to prescribe to

somebody of how to be better. What we can do is something we say just tongue-in-cheek a lot is actually we don't have the answers, but we do have a lot of good questions. So the person can go on a journey of self-discovery or enhancing their own self-awareness through probing, guiding, I guess constraining with the type of questions you ask.

You know, could take a person on their own journey to understand self better. And for me, I've had— I've experienced both of them. I've experienced coach from people who sat above me in those positions to help me, and it's been very prescriptive, it's been very directive, it's been very much tell and direct, and it's, it's not always worked for me because I've had an inquisitive mind of why, why do that?

And you don't generally get those answers on a level that's for me going, well, that's not forensic enough, I'm not sure if I believe and agree with that. Whereas I've had some amazing people Take me on a journey to think for myself, you know, and turn the camera on me as I coach and try to— well, what am I seeing from how I deliver that session?

And have been asked wonderful questions. For example, I give Simon again credit for this. I'd have him back on again if I was you. He's a depth of knowledge that's just unbelievable. It's a bottomless pit of— he's got a very divergent way of thinking.

But he asked me one time, you know, we was going through my strengths. We did a StrengthsFinder assessment. He asked me the question when we unboxed what the strengths were. So self-assuredness was one, continuous learner was one, that they were up in the top 3.

And he said to me, well, we said, what's the impact of you overplaying these strengths? So an over— and, and the way he phrased it was brilliant. I thought like an overplay on my strengths become my weakness. So having that depth of awareness of self, not just knowing what your strengths are, but knowing when you overplay them in what context that they actually become a weakness, not a strength.

So again, I'm pointing towards the benefit of having someone support a coach's journey who's, uh, competent in that space but doesn't feel like they have all the answers, but maybe have the tools to guide, support, nudge, constrain, to afford you the opportunities to understand yourself better.

That seems like— I mean, I don't know how coach education system is set up in Scotland or when it was when you were in Ireland, but Here in the States, I feel like that would be just like the lowest hanging fruit. I know budgetarily-wise it'd be difficult to implement, but having a mentor-mentee relationship as you're going through the coaching process, I think would just alter our capabilities so, so, so much.

Because again, like you said, that awareness, it's very difficult to do on your own. I mean, you, even as very self-reflective people, it's still, that's only one perspective. I think having that guide by the side would, I don't know, 5, 10x speed up the skill set, the skill development of coaching.

Like—

I have no doubt about that, Adam. But I think it's also— it'd be unfair not to mention the barriers that exist with that. And, you know, because I feel that way, but I could be seen as biased because that's a— that's part of my profession.

But you're absolutely right. I think we could speed up. So what's the best way for a coach to develop? Well, as Cody Royal would have said this years ago, coaches supporting coaches is the best coach development. And I agree with him wholeheartedly. There's a level of relatedness, you know, and if you go back to one of the key components of growth and development and an enabler of growth and development is that relatedness factor.

So coaches helping another coach, or coaches who've been coaches and now in that coach support development space, or— and that's not to undermine anybody who's not been a coach that's working in that space at all. But relatedness is a huge contributing factor. But again, I think we should just highlight that it's easier said than done that coaches should take on a mentor, take on a coach developer, take on a coach support.

It's a vulnerable place to go. I always feel privileged when coaches let me into their space. So for example, this past weekend, there was a high school coach in the state I'm working with— in the States I'm working with— played in some tournament this past weekend in 4 days.

And I asked him, he's never done it before, would you feel comfortable recording your timeouts? Just get your assistant coach to do it on their phone. WhatsApp, give him my number, tell him WhatsApp the videos across me. You don't have to do anything.

And for that coach to do that, it takes a big step because they're letting you into their world and a world that maybe they're not used to where they're watching their own timeouts. And now you're going to send them to somebody else, you know, who may have a perspective on that.

So if you go back to what's the— I guess in some ways, Adam, I can draw a parallel here and join the dots for you around caring coaching, which I spoke to you about. And go caring coaching around coach support could have the same pillars, which are engrossment.

Am I going to park? Am I going to as a coach support, or am I going to immerse myself in that person's world? If I don't, I can't support you. I'm just lecturing to you. If I'm just going to jump on a Zoom call and do a PowerPoint presentation about a prescribed topic, it may not be related to that coach.

It may not help that coach. That coach could be an amazing communicator. They don't need a session on communication. They need a session on how to build a team identity. And tools and ways of going about building a team identity. So engrossment, which is one of the pillars for caring coaching from when a coach is coaching a group of players, it's the same for coach to coach.

And if you go to the second pillar, like I told you already, it's the term motivational displacement linked to engrossment. Am I going to park my motivations to support you as a coach? And am I going to step back and identify and try to extract information that tells me these are your needs and motivations for the support?

And then the last one is incredibly important. You have to be reciprocal to the support. You can't force, you can't do this onto somebody. And I feel the same way with coaching. I don't think you can do it onto players. You can offer it to players and you can offer it in a way that they actually are more enticed to take it.

You know, it's, it's a, there's a wonderful, if I can just at this point, just tell you one of the most influential people in my coach delivery, Adam, has been a gentleman called Stephen Rollnick. And, you know, Stephen's specialty is motivational interviewing where you can engage in a conversation with a person or a group of people and get to a point of them speaking about change, changes they want to make.

So you're not telling them what to do. You're having a dialogue, you're having a conversation in a way that's enabling them subtly to engage in change talk if there's things they need to change. Stephen's done a lot of work with addicts and people with bigger issues than coaching people to be better, life issues, and smoke— people trying to give up smoking, alcohol, drugs on different levels.

You know, he's done amazing work in that space, but he hasn't sat there and told them what they should be doing. He's engaged in a conversation that's enabled them to think about change and enter that dialogue themselves. So this has to be reciprocal.

And I think if we entered the coaching space in terms of coaching teams and players to go, actually, I'm not going to coach onto you. I'm going to offer you a way of coaching. I'm going to offer you a way of being in this environment, especially if they're junior players, because they paid to come in there.

They did. They're not professionals. We can't be transactional. So therefore, they have all— they should have all agency. But the hard part for the coach is how do you coach 20 people in one facility during one practice session and they've got different needs and motivations.

Well, now you're down to the skill of that coach. Have you got the ability to differentiate how you coach each of these people? We're coaching them the same sport. That's the common denominator. We're coaching them basketball. But you might need to coach it different ways to different people.

But how to go about how to find out which way, that's obviously where the investment of time comes.

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