400 - Unbreakable Belief: The Underrated Key to High Performance in Sport and Leadership
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Welcome to the Purple Patch Podcast!
On this episode, IRONMAN Master Coach Matt Dixon discusses the importance of engineering mini victories in coaching, both for athletes and leaders in various industries. He emphasizes that confidence is built through tangible evidence of success, not just physical preparation. Dixon shares his experience of shifting from a focus on physiological performance to creating conditions that foster belief and trust. He highlights the significance of designing training sessions and goals to ensure athletes and teams experience progress and success, which in turn builds confidence and commitment. This approach, he argues, is crucial for leadership effectiveness and team performance.
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Episode Timecodes:
:00-1:10 Episode Promo
1:39-3:35 Intro
3:45-end Meat & Potatoes
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Transcription
Matt Dixon 00:00
We're building today's show all around one coaching insight for you, something that when I review or hear all of the different perspectives on coaching, I very rarely actually see it bubble up to the surface, and that's the power of engineering mini victories. We're going to discuss this in the context of athletes, but also make it applicable to everything in life. When you listen to today's show, if you're inspired to have a discussion with us around your own performance journey, whether it is as a leader of a team in an organization or as an athlete taking on a big challenge, feel free to reach out our win cycle programs and our one to one and squad programs for coaching across all endurance sports. We would love you to become a part of the team, and we offer complementary needs assessment. Just reach out to info@purplepatchfitness.com We'll set up a conversation, and if nothing else, we'll make sure that you get some value out of it for your own performance journey, and then from there we end up being a match. Well, terrific. Then we'll take the next steps. All right, enjoy the show. Bye. and welcome to the Purple Patch Podcast, as ever, your host Matt Dixon. And today it's a little bit of a different one. It's actually a pretty nice, cute, succinct show, but it's something that is a little out of the norm for us. But I'm incredibly excited to share. I'll tell you what, if you listen today, and if you're a coach, or perhaps you're an athlete that is coached, or even if you master your own journey and you're self-coached, I believe that this topic is incredibly relevant for you. And what makes today's episode even better is that one of the lessons from sport that we're going to dig into today that just beautifully transcends the journey of sports and athletes. In fact, it has a broader application to high performance in any industry and across broader life, and so therefore, beyond the coach, the self-coached, and the athletes, if you're a leader or a manager in your line of work, this is equally an important episode.
Matt Dixon 02:43
I want to revisit the art of coaching today, and I'm going to shine a light on just a singular lesson, an ultimately tool that I've leveraged over the years to help people get the most out of themselves. Now this is a episode and a lesson in which we're going to first dig into athletics, and then we're going to broaden our perspective, and we're going to talk about performance in organizations and business, and so we're going to dig into win cycle as well. This lesson has very little to do with physiology, in fact it's all about confidence and engineering mini victories as a coach, as a leader, as a manager to enable greater trust, confidence, and commitment sounds pretty good. A, it's all in today's meat and potatoes, you Alright, let's dig in the meat of potatoes. I'm going to talk about something that I really enjoy discussing myself. Like many coaches, I spent the early years of my career focused almost exclusively on the physical side of performance, the training load, and getting it right, the intensity. I was the recovery coach, so integrating intentional recovery, driving adaptations. What was the right type of intervals? How much over distance should I prescribe the assumption was pretty straightforward, and I was no different than most coaches, and that's that if I could build enough fitness and positive adaptations, and then the results in competition would flow, but over time I started to realize that that perspective, that explanation was, for lack of a better phrase, incomplete. I would often see two athletes that would arrive at races, and remember, this is at the thin edge of world-class performance, arrive at races equally prepared, and on paper, actually every part of their training day. Amaster would look eerily similar, their fitness was comparable, and yet when the pressure rose, when the intensity of competition bubbled up, and the day demanded something truly challenging and difficult, one athlete consistently performed closer to their potential than the other. What was it about that athlete? Well, I tell you what it wasn't. It wasn't physical difference. They were equally talented, they were tough, they were certainly conditioned and prepared. More often it came down to belief, then we talk about belief.
Matt Dixon 05:43
This isn't optimism, it's not positive thinking. It certainly isn't motivational mantras. It's something actually more practical than that. In many ways, it's a quiet conviction that they could handle anything that the data demanded because they had already accumulated and I want you to listen carefully here enough evidence to support that conclusion and that observation changed how I coached most people assume that confidence across life, and let's narrow our focus in athletics. Confidence precedes success, or it's something that we're just born with. But my experience has been very different than that. I would almost say it's the opposite. Confidence is the outcome of accumulated evidence, athletes don't become confident because someone like me, a coach, tells them you're ready, you're good. That might create a little short-term inspiration, but it's not stapled on their heart. An external motivator can be powerful and important, has its role, but that's not how an athlete gets confident. The way that an athlete gets confident is because they repeatedly experience proof that they're capable, they're equipped, they're ready, and once I understood that I stopped thinking exclusively about how do I develop the fitness, what are the right intervals, how much training load should we accumulate, what will she do with an adequate recovery to make all of that training come to life. I started to also, in partnership, like lanes of a swimming pool in parallel started to really consider how as a coach can I help athletes develop belief and once I started digging into this one of the most valuable coaching tools that I had emerged and what it was was simply this I want to engineer mini victories.
Matt Dixon 08:05
That was a catalyst that I saw to help athletes develop the evidence to start to build the confidence and the belief that we wanted, not artificial victories, certainly not have an athlete win on a day to day basis by me lowering standards, because these were ambitious, goal-driven athletes trying to do something incredibly challenging. I had to keep the expectations and challenges high, and certainly not by celebrating mediocrity. In fact, it was the opposite. The objective was to try and create legitimate experiences of success within the ecosystem of high demand, and so what might that look like? How did I actually do that for an athlete? Well, firstly, it might be around workout design, I might look at a training session and say, great, we want to do some very, very demanding intervals, let's call it a round threshold, but I would often try and design these intervals to ensure that the most challenging section, when it was physically under the most demand would be a moment in the interbus or in the session itself when the athlete was best positioned to execute them well, rather than just saying six by six minute hard. I might try and progressively build into the work where the last four were great, even if I was theoretically giving away a little bit of physiological stimulus, I wanted them to develop agency and feel like they were successful, while also delivering the physiological stimulus. I also quite often really emphasized, you might call it.
Matt Dixon 10:00
Double emphasis on the lower demand training sessions, really trying to keep a very strict lid on how hard they were going to go in those sessions, keep it very, very light, orders the catalyst, so that I could then have them show up to the key demanding sessions feeling better, where they could actually bring their best to the sessions that were going to be the most demanding, not to make things easier, but so that they could consistently perform well and step up to the occasion when the demand was there, and that became really, really powerful, even in a broader perspective. I would build the fabric of multiple weeks of training to try and ensure that athletes developed a sense of control, in which we would just have one or two, or maybe three days of real emphasis, where I asked them to be wholly present. I asked them to step up for the challenge, but designed the other days of the week to help facilitate that.
Matt Dixon 11:11
So, a highly polarized approach, not because just that they would perform best in there, so they get the most out of the sessions, but so that they started to see evidence that when they asked their body to step up, it would respond. Now this was incredibly important to set sessions up for success, to set weeks up so that we could get performance predictability early in the coaching relationship. It was also doubly important if an athlete really required a boost of self-confidence for any reason. Maybe they've been through a bad run, maybe they're coming back from injury, maybe their performance recipe hasn't been great before. Now, with this, as I mentioned before, performance targets remained highly ambitious, but I did make sure that calibrating the targets carefully enough so that the athletes can actually develop evidence, tangible evidence of progress that was powerful. And then, as a coach, my discussions and reviews around the training would center on these aspects of progression, and so I would always aim to highlight, to provide much like a lawyer delivering a case in court. Hey, look at this progression, look at what we're developing. I wanted the athlete to feel the improvement, to see the progression now from the outside.
Matt Dixon 12:46
These might appear as ordinary coaching decisions, but in reality they are actually designed to shape how athletes experience the development, and so in other words, I wasn't building training plans, and still don't build training programs just to try and create fitness improvements. It was actually equally in partnership to create evidence, evidence that the person, the athlete, is improving. Why is this important when it comes to coaching, well, the truth is that evidence changes how athletes see themselves, because as human beings, how we see ourselves has an extraordinary influence on what we might be willing to attempt, how much we're willing to endure, and ultimately what we can achieve there is amazing power in us doing something challenging, and when we take on that challenge, when we start to see that we believe and understand and feel that we're making progress, everything changes. Why? Well, here's the key thing. When we challenge ourselves with ambitious goals, quite often those goals are pretty far off in the distance, and hopefully they're really ambitious. Let's think about one of the Purple Patch Pros. Oh, great. What are we looking to achieve? I want to become world champion. Boom! Great, love it. Big dream. What are we going to do to get there? Well, I tell you what, to go on a multi-year journey to become an Iron Man champion, a world champion, to become the very best version of ourselves, which is where we place the emphasis. It's going to be a journey, by definition, in which it is not linear in progression ever. It's going to include setbacks, challenges, cul-de-sacs, in which we need to reverse, adapt, evolve the.
Matt Dixon 15:00
Approach, it's going to be messy, that's what performance is. And along the way, it's going to be a colossal amount of commitment and effort, quite often without a yield of development and improvement. So, quite often, despite the effort, despite the sacrifice, we don't feel that we're getting closer to the goal, and that's a part of being a world-class athlete. Now, these goals are quite often for amateur athletes being chased and committed to in the midst of the context of an incredibly busy life that also has the same ups and downs, and so we have this collision of competing demands, so performance isn't live here, linear, it's massively messy, it's going to include setbacks and challenges, and I tell you what, it can feel overwhelming, and so, how, as a coach, can I help that professional athlete, that amateur athlete, actually master the journey within the midst of this chaos? Well, I understand that there is no better feeling than progress, or, as I might say, progress, when there is a huge gap between effort and outcome that's left unaddressed, boom, that's the reverse. It can erode confidence even amongst the most committed and capable athletes, and so at this stage I should point out this is not about me being a great cheerleader. In fact, that's not what great coaching is.
Matt Dixon 16:46
What we're looking to do here is to create evidence, not just say you can do it, you're almost there, no pain, no gain, get all that stuff to the side. We want to build evidence in a meaningful way, evidence that your plan, my plan is working, evidence that your capability as an athlete is evolving, is growing, is improvement, and that's where it becomes profound. Why, when we, as athletes, as human beings, feel like we are improving, feel like we are making progress, can see it, can live it, can feel it. There are multiple impacts of that that are genuinely profound. Number one, that athlete is going to start to trust the process because they see that it's working, and so they deliver or develop confidence through capability, in other words, trust in themselves, they're the ones doing the doing, this is the most important part, they're living it, and they're starting to see, I can actually do this. I'm empowered here. That's great. They're also developing trust in you as the coach, as the leader. The plan is working. I'm being prescribed this, told what to focus on, and guess what? I'm feeling the journey. I've got the mini victory, another step in this direction that feels miles off, but I'm getting there, and so trust is number one. This trust is a catalyst, then to feed number two commitment. Yeah, we get committed to things that we feel like we have agency over, that we feel like we've been successful in it's much easier to commit to something that we're positive about, and we're improving in, and over time that commitment makes it just that little bit easier to open up what's the magic word of performance for frequent listeners, consistency, and over time this consistency creates a compounding effect where we start to build better outcomes and results, and there is the flywheel effect, with greater consistency comes goodr performance. It feeds our sense of commitment, and we carry on, and we carry on, and it's not an accident. A coach's ability to do this and make sure to highlight it in the athlete is a process of assessing and reflecting and ensuring that that athlete can visually buy into and understand what we're trying to do, and see the progress, so if you strip it down as a coach, and you make it really simple, you want to ensure that every key workout you're designing it so the athlete can be successful.
Matt Dixon 19:57
Now, sometimes it's okay with trusting. Tact that you set them up for failure, but the majority of the sessions you're looking to design it and highlight it in which the athlete can actually see progression, so in a really practical fashion for the try heads in the group, this would be as a swim session, I love let's go eight two hundreds or eight three hundreds, and progressively build the effort and intensity up, so that they can be most successful at the end, rather than just going six by 10 minutes, very strong zone four on the bike, I might go under at and slightly above zone four, boom, progressively build through focus on how good the last four were, and even if you give a little bit of the theoretical physiological stimulus away in the pursuit of helping the athlete feel good, the impact when it comes to balance is profound. It's really valuable, so as a tool, what I try to do with any individual athlete or team is to try and build mini victories and do it with intent. Don't just get drawn into assessment and analysis of data, enable the athlete to feel it's a big step up in the art of coaching. Now, the truth is that this principle extends well beyond sport, and so it's a good moment to actually expand our discussion and thinking via our performance leadership program, win cycle. We're at seeing repeated challenges for managers and leaders of teams, and many are struggling to consistently get the most out of their teams. The leaders that we work with, many of them are exceptional.
Matt Dixon 21:52
They are incredibly smart, they have great domain expertise, they've got super knowledge in what they're trying to do, and they've even got quite often a great strategic brain, and we can see as soon as we meet them they've got great leadership attributes, but quite often many of them haven't really had the opportunity to flex that coaching muscle. You see, so many people have ridden, risen to the position that they're in because they're great at their job, but then they've been asked to maximize their team's potential without any real coaching support. It's a little bit like a pilot suddenly thrust into the positioning of mastering air traffic control. So, if this sounds like you, why don't we just briefly leverage this coaching principle to help you day in and day out at work. Here's the challenge one of the many challenges the most common challenges that we see leaders make is the assumption that just creating a clarity of goal is enough for their teams. Alrighty, here's our annual targets. We've all got our KPIs. The strategy is defined, expectations are clear, everyone understands what we're trying to do and what success looks like. Super, go do it. You're all motivated, you're all committed, you're all tough. Go do the work, and then suddenly, why is it not happening? What's often missing is the intention or the attention between how people experience progress along the way. You see, if you set up a year strategy, 12 months is not a very long time, but goodness me, it is a long time.
Matt Dixon 23:46
Over the course of it, it can feel very, very far away when day to day you're in the weeds doing the doing with all of the chaos and the alliance and the competing demands and the rapid change that we're navigating through right now. 12 months can feel like an eternity, and so a transformation initiative can appear overwhelming long before meaning results are even visible. It's no different than coaching an athlete, and if that gap between your team or team members, effort and the outcome and results is huge, and it gets left unaddressed. What emerges is no different than an athlete. It erodes confidence even amongst the highest performers and teams, and so, just like coaching athletes, it's not about you as a manager or a leader being a cheerleader. It's not about infusing some recognition programs or manufacture positivity. What we're trying to do here is really fricking hard. We want to have high high. And it's that's the truth there, but also as leaders we do want to manufacture or engineer, as I like to say, mini victories, so that every individual on the team working hard and being committed can start to feel and establish evidence that the strategy is working, that their capability is growing, that the team is being effective, and their inputs are leading to outputs, and so, as a coach, as a leader, as a manager, we want to shrink the challenge, because if we can create a little mini victory, a target for this week, a focus for the month, and it's on something that we have agency under that's going to create a short-term immediate impact, while also leading to the bigger game. We can't lose sight of that suddenly. Then what happens? It's no different than an athlete. They feel successful. They develop an understanding that their work is leading to results. They're building a body of evidence of their capability of the strategy, and what happens, it is exactly the same as an athlete. They start to develop trust in themselves, all right. I'm doing good work. The effort that I'm putting in is having an impact. I can feel it, I can see it. And on top of it, this strategy, while ambitious, while might have seemed crazy when we leaned it out, as a manager, I'm believing in this, it's working, so trust happens. What happens when people develop trust in a team? It's natural. It happens every time. Commitment floats. I'm committed. That means that teams become slightly more adaptable, more resilient. They're committed to something. It has meaning, it has value, it drives purpose, so commitment, just like an athlete, yields consistency, and when you're consistent, the results start to flow.
Matt Dixon 27:11
It is a self-feeding beast, and that's true, because when you have trust and you have commitment and you yield consistency, good things start to occur, and you're doing that in a team. Woof, that's where we start to have a catalyst. That's why, for me, across all of the aspects of coaching, this one that doesn't receive much attention is worth shining a light on, because there's a truth here. Leadership is coaching. Coaching is often described as the art of helping people achieve more than they thought is possible. I always talk about it as coaching as a role. My job is to help people get the most out of themselves. Leadership is the same. There's no different. And the leaders that I admire most, they're not distinguished by the ambition of their goals. Many leaders can set big goals, they're distinguished by the understanding that belief should never be left to chance. They recognize that one of their most important responsibilities is to create the environment and conditions in which confidence can emerge, where they can help people see their own progress, feel it, experience growth, and that's through accumulated evidence, set targets, set goals, make the ambitions huge, but then design mini victories under your team, and when you do that under your team's control, you enable success as a coach, as a leader, as a manager. Then focus on those behaviors that every team member has under their control that are going to yield to great outcomes. Shrink the challenge, make it smaller, engineer the victory. If you want your team to buy in, all in to trust you to commit to join hands and say I'm all in on this project, just like an athlete, we want to build confidence and trust, that's when we feel progression, and that's where the interest compounds, and so as a leader, as a coach, design mini victories. I hope that helps as a catalyst. Now, if you're an athlete and this resonated with you. We have a rare handful of coaching spots open. Reach out to us one to one info at Purplepatch fitness.com or click on the show notes to book a coaching strategy call.
Matt Dixon 29:52
We'll see if it's a fit. Of course, you can also join as a part of our squad program, and in addition, if you're a lead. It, and you want to extend your team's coachability and your ability to coach. Check out our program, www.wincycle.org or, of course, you can reach out to us, info@wincycle.org We'd be happy to set up a complimentary needs assessment, and, of course, as ever, a positive review helps, and share this with anyone that you might find beneficial. All right, I hope this perspective resonates with you, and of course, we'll chat next week. Take care, guys. Thanks so much for joining, and thank you for listening. I hope that you enjoyed the new format. You can never miss an episode by simply subscribing. Head to the Purple Patch channel of YouTube, and you will find it there, and you could subscribe. Of course, I'd like to ask you if you will subscribe. Also, share it with your friends, and it's really helpful if you leave a nice positive review in the comments. Now, any questions that you have, let me know. Feel free to add a comment, and I will try my best to respond and support you on your performance journey, and in fact, as we commence this video podcast experience, if you have any feedback at all, as mentioned earlier in the show, we would love your help in helping us to improve. Simply email us at info@purplepatchfitness.com or leave it in the comments of the show at the Purple Patch page, and we will get you dialed in. We'd love constructive feedback. We are in a growth mindset, as we like to call it. And so, feel free to share with your friends, but as I said, let's build this together. Let's make it something special. It's really fun. We're really trying hard to make it a special experience, and we want to welcome you into the Purple Patch community. With that, I hope you have a great week. Stay healthy, have fun, keep smiling, doing whatever you do. Take care.
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
coaching insights, mini victories, athlete confidence, performance journey, win cycle, leadership, high performance, belief, evidence, training design, progression, trust, commitment, consistency, coaching tools