Why are Coaches hesitant to change?

This is the Transforming Basketball Podcast hosted by Alex Sarama. This is the podcast helping coaches and practitioners change the way we think about basketball performance. Our goal is to provide the ultimate resource for making sense of applying contemporary skill acquisition ideas within basketball.

Within this podcast, Alex and his guests unpack how an ecological dynamics framework impacts our perspective of the game. If you're ready to join us, Join us in our quest to transform the basketball world. This is the podcast for you.

Would you like to learn about our unique player and team development strategies at Transforming Basketball? Well, this is why we've put together our free activities book. Inside, you'll find 50 unique activities with diagrams and text descriptions for you to use immediately with your players and in your practices.

Head to the show notes to access this incredible free resource. Welcome back to the podcast. Gray, Adam, and myself are going to unpack a pretty big topic on today's one, and this is mostly theoretical, but we're going to look at why a coach is sometimes reluctant to change.

And this is something since we launched with Transforming Basketball Something we've been seeing a lot is some reluctance and maybe a form of inertia which exists. And, you know, we've been sharing a lot of these ideas. We've been trying our best to make it really practical and simple for coaches to apply, but there's often still a lot of resistance, maybe skepticism in certain circles with coaches talking about this.

And we thought it would be an interesting episode to just talk about and share some ideas. I haven't looked at any empirical research on this, and I know there is some. Especially, I think a lot of it's been done in classroom teaching, looking at like pedagogical styles.

And I'm sure there's some research out there on coaching behaviors which we'll dive into later.

If not, there will be soon.

Yeah, exactly. But let's start with you, Adam. Just why is it, do you think, what are some key things preventing coaches from embracing a contemporary approach?

Well, I'm immediately going to go to theoretical stuff because to me it's way too lazy. We're categorizing again when we're saying coaches, we're human beings. And it's not that necessarily we're not changing. It's that change is difficult. And because we are always changing.

However, when I take a step back and look at my life and the things that I find difficult to change, what really I think prevents me more than anything else is my belief systems around that, and some of which I'm not even aware of.

So for instance, like changing my eating habits was very difficult for a very long time. Well, I had a traumatic event. I developed a kidney disease and I became very strict and very hyper-aware of what I was eating. And I was afraid of reconnecting with that traumatic experience that I went through.

With the kidney disease, so to get to that change, I really needed to be perturbed. I needed my beliefs challenged. I needed support. So there are so many elements that we need to surround ourselves with in order to actually induce change with people.

And it's really interesting to me because I think, like you said, there's no in a lot of instances, there's no reason to change. And for me, it's always been why I really went headfirst on this five years ago was I just wanted to become the most effective coach.

All it was about being, and I wanted to. I didn't wanna feel like my players could have been getting something better and they weren't getting that just because I was too lazy to do research and explore something else. And I think a lot of times though, the status quo is so easy and there's no reason for coaches to work differently.

And I think what something I've seen a lot is it's often coaches who are very self-motivated, curious, who are already spending time kind of invested in personal development. Like maybe they read like self-improvement books and things of that nature. And it's tough because, you know, how do we get this message across to a coach who maybe doesn't have interest or time in that, but this is actually really important.

We should be trying to coach in more effective modern ways.

I agree. I think a lot of it too is, uh, the tighter you hold on to a belief, like how associated is it with your identity as well? So in America, a lot of people really associate who they are with what they do.

And so I think they can get locked into the pattern of a coach does this, right? A coach is supposed to impart wisdom, but tell the player, tell the person How to do the right thing and correct the wrong things, right? Well, who's doing that for you, right?

There's, there's not going to be that kind of infrastructure for that. And so breaking out of these entrenched ideologies is really, really hard, especially the closer they are to your identity. If you want to look at, to go at a high theoretical level, the identity is like your deepest attractor well as a person, right?

The things that you want to change that are more deeply entrenched to you, they are going to be the harder things to change. I've also had to change the way I eat for various reasons or change my activity level in different ways that maybe I didn't want to.

I like to go out and run. I like to go out and play basketball. I was actually really hurting my body and I had to change my exercise routine in a manner because you know what changed? The identity aspect of, I do want to be active.

I want to be healthy, but I don't want to continue hurting myself. Right? So if, unless you're forced with that reason to change, like you're talking about, Alex, There's really not any reason to change or the awareness that you might need to, or could even change anything to begin with.

And I think that's a really, really big conceptual hurdle. Like Adam was saying, we face in all aspects of life. It's really hard to bring yourself out of something that just because something is working or there's no sign that something is wrong does not necessarily mean it's the right thing for you.

Right. But you're not shown that anything is wrong. So you just keep going about it the wrong, you know, in a particular way.

For me, the point I always come back to, and you guys know me well, obviously, I have a sense of frustration sometimes where I feel like this is so easy, like the information is so accessible, and I just get frustrated that some coaches have no interest in even engaging with the material or just trying it.

And that, that's the thing that always pisses me off a little bit because it's like ourselves and many others in the skill acquisition community We're doing a lot of work to try and help coaches. And, you know, I think it's, it's just that question why, you know, why, why do you not even try to engage with this?

It's a tough one.

I think it's that aspect. It has to be deemed as some type of threat to their livelihood, right? Not that, oh, I don't want to change, but maybe I'm incapable of changing. Or if I even attempt to do so and fail, someone might recognize that this is the right way to go about things and I'll be replaced, right?

It's almost holding on, freezing the degrees of freedom even, even tighter in such a higher level. So I get frustrated too. I talked to some people in my previous program or across information processing sides of things, and the conversations just kind of hit a wall and people are just really entrenched in some of their beliefs.

So I do a lot of work with memory. People don't necessarily want to be told that memory is not what they think it is, right? Because they have memories, right? Like, and that's associated with who they are and what they do and what they've done and where they might go.

When really this approach and this, this kind of framework for viewing the world actually opens you up to more possibilities while retaining who you are.

So Adam, coming at you next, I think just continuing with some of the things Gray just highlighted, we've both gone from coaches to coach developers very quickly. It's just boom, it's just exploded. And I think maybe this idea of change, maybe that word itself is too aggressive or too strong.

I guess, I mean, it's all semantics, to be honest with you. These words have different meanings. And that's frankly why I don't say a lot when I'm coaching, because words require interpretation. And that means one word means to me is different than you.

To me, it's an evolution. And we're always evolving. There is no boom, I changed today. It's providing some sort of intervention. What I keep coming back to as we're discussing this change thing is just like when I wake up in the morning, it's so easy to fall into my old routine unless there's something literally blocking me from doing so.

I need to be perturbed out of that attractor state. Otherwise, I'm just going to stay there. Because inherently, as human beings, to Shift a little bit different. Our bodies are freaking lazy.

So let's say this then, Adam. Let's say my position in London Lions, right, as the director of methodology. Luckily, I've got an amazing coaching staff, right? And it, it didn't have to be a case of we must coach this way. Yes, it was very clear at the start we were using the CLA, but the coaches just gravitated towards it and just did a great job immediately.

But what could coaches do if there's not actually like a director or a general manager saying to the coaches, you know, this is what we're doing? Could coaches maybe try and impose some of these constraints upon them themselves.

Yeah. And I think get a part of this community with Transforming Basketball, or just share these ideas with other people. If you're somewhat interested, reach out to Alex, reach out to myself, reach out to Gray, because you need a support system. I mean, I did it by myself, and I ended up getting fired for it.

I knew it was right. So I stayed with it. But, and I did have some support. But if you have a support system, like a coach developer with you, like along the way, God, that's got to be so much easier.

I wrote about it at the end of the book, Adam. I was fired too from this program in Belgium. Everyone thought it was the best thing in the basketball world, and it was the more time I spent there, the bigger the cracks, you know, the cracks widened and widened.

And it was games approach and drills versus CLA, and everyone just perceived it as being the best thing. And I was fired for wanting to really go down this path. And I think that's the thing we're getting at, like, we've been there, we've gone through the struggle for coaches.

I think if coaches want to engage with us, we can really share what works, what doesn't work, and just the advice of of things that we've found has resonated as we've been through this journey.

Absolutely. And I think one unique thing we're doing here as compared to other models, there's a lot of free resources and I don't think anyone here cares if you sign up for every Transforming Basketball product ever. I mean, please buy Alex's book, please buy Alex's book in stores now.

But you know, the idea is that you can actually listen to us, take these ideas and go develop it on your own. And you don't have to go buy the comprehensive dictionary of everything that has ever occurred a basketball game to feel like you can be a master of the game.

You can take these ideologies and these ideas and develop them yourself. And what we kind of offer here is more of a structured community to bounce these ideas off of. But it's not— we're not hoarding knowledge. This knowledge is available and it's been going on for decades and it's across sports science.

I find it really funny that some people on social media have called us like salespeople and marketers because it's the complete opposite to what we are.

It's open source.

You know, it's I think it's so apparent in just how we are, how all the free stuff we offer. But unfortunately, you, you know, you're always going to get that.

Of course, of course. And that, you know, that's tough to break out of. But I do think that's important if you're trying to change, finding that community that Adam was talking about, right? Like, have these conversations. They're difficult conversations. Changing is hard. Like, even verbalizing like, hey, I might be doing something wrong in a very crucial aspect of my life, that puts you at such a vulnerable state, right?

That in and of itself is a very tough kind of— it takes a lot of force to drive you out of that position, right? So by even attempting to have the conversations, you're already opening yourself up to so many more possibilities, and it's not going to force you one way or the other.

It just means that you're open to learning and developing, and you don't view development as something that can be completed at one point and then you start a different thing at another time.

Just an open message here for the coaches listening to this. I think we'd love to get your thoughts on this and maybe some specific ideas as to how we could use our platform at Transforming to help, you know, inspire more change, help you figure out some of these things.

Because I think, you know, we're so into it, sometimes we don't actually step back and see what else we could be doing. So if you have any specific ideas listening to this as to what you'd like to see from us, please just shoot us a message.

It'd be great to hear.

Absolutely.

So I think that's a great note to end this episode on. Adam and Greg, thanks for joining me.

Thanks for tuning in to this episode of the Transforming Basketball Podcast. If you'd like to learn more about the work that we do, head to transformingbball.com to access our free resources and spread these ideas throughout the basketball world. If you enjoyed today's episode, be sure to subscribe and leave a review on your favorite podcast platform.

You can also connect with us on Instagram, X, or YouTube with any questions that you have from the episode. See you next time on the Transforming Basketball Podcast.

Thank you.