Win Cycle: 3 lessons from world class Ironman coaching that every high performance leader needs
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Welcome to the Purple Patch Podcast!
On this episode, IRONMAN Master Coach Matt Dixon, host of the Purple Patch Podcast, discusses lessons from 25 years of coaching, emphasizing the intersection of sports and business performance. He highlights three key coaching lessons: 1) Holding high standards paired with systematic support, which led to a high-performance culture and low injury rates among his athletes. 2) Clarity over activity, which reduces performance risks and ensures alignment and focus. 3) Rewarding behaviors and effort over outcomes, fostering a culture of self-improvement and control. Dixon advocates for a mindset shift from managing to coaching, aiming to enhance leadership effectiveness.
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Episode Timecodes:
00-:50 Episode Promo
1:18-7:06 Intro
7:11-end - Meat & Potatoes
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Transcription
Matt Dixon 00:00
Folks today is a fun one. It's all about coaching as it relates to leadership. In fact, I'm going to share a few of the lessons that I've gained over 25 years of coaching as it relates to becoming a more effective leader. This all fits under the banner of our wind cycle program. And after listening today, if you'd like to learn more, and then just simply head to our website, wincycle.org you can also reach out for a complementary needs assessment to understand how we can work with you and your team to drive better performance readiness and ultimately greater performance predictability across all of your team. Just reach out to us at the email address info@wincycle.org Okay, I hope you enjoyed the show. It's a cracker, and as ever, a positive review helps, and please share it with anyone that you find think might find it interesting. Cheers. I'm Matt Dixon, and welcome to the purple patch podcast. The mission of purple patch is to empower and educate every human being to reach their athletic potential. Through the lens of athletic potential, you reach your human potential. The purpose of this podcast is to help time-starved people everywhere integrate sport into life.
Matt Dixon 01:18
And welcome to the purple patch podcast as ever, I'm your host, Matt Dixon, and today we're going to discuss coaching. In fact, we're going to designate this one of our special wind cycle episodes. This is all around leadership. Today, we've been spending a lot of time over the last few months going in and helping organizations, leaders, executive teams and the extended teams below them, not just find performance readiness on a day to day basis, but unlocking predictable performance through mechanisms of coaching and team. Team is the thing that drives everything to the next level, that starts to help organizations get into win cycles. And I thought what we would do today is have a little bit of fun and force me to take a step back and think about my 25 years of coaching and draw from it three lessons. What are three things that I can share with you as a leader that might inform, inspire, or help you drive a little bit more effectiveness. Now, in order to do this, I thought we just take a moment and let's take stock of my coaching. When did I even get into coaching in the first place? Well, I actually started, and not many people know this, but my coaching journey started in swimming after the second time that I'd failed to make the Olympic team, I transitioned into age group swimming. Now I was very, very lucky. I happened to stumble into working at one of the top age group swimming programs in the country, and after a few years there, I decided I'm going to go off and I'm going to go and get my master's degree in clinical physiology. And while I was studying for my master's, I got to coach at the division one level of the NCAA collegiate system. I was very lucky there. I got to guide and coach several NCAA finalists and even a couple of Olympians. From there, I found that sport of triathlon, not just triathlon, but Iron Man Triathlon, one of the biggest challenges that there is in sport, two and a half miles of swimming, 112 miles of bike riding, all capped off with a marathon, and I burnt myself out. I ended up on the trash heap of chronic fatigue.
Matt Dixon 03:34
And it was there that I took all of my lessons of clinical physiology and, of course, my initial experiences of coaching swimming and determined there must be a better way, and that's really in honesty, where I gained my stripes in coaching as I went on a journey of development of the purple patch pro squad. And we had a lot of success. In fact, we became one of the most successful squad of professional triathletes in the history of the sport. But in parallel to working with these elite athletes, I was very lucky, and I had a unique journey, because I was also working with many top business leaders who were looking to not just improve their performance in their hobbies, whether it was running for marathons or doing triathlons or riding their bikes, but also fueling how they showed up in business and in broader life, and we unlocked a system where it was connected deeply at the intersection of world class sport and elite business performance. Because it turns out, the pressures and demands that a professional athlete faces is very, very similar to the pressures and demands that top business leaders face. And it was when we formalized that system that over the course of the last years, we've been deploying our wind cycle program, and it's growing under our feet. It's been a lot of fun. Of course, it's an opportunity for growth and further development of my coaching. And our whole team's coaching, but we've really started to unlock the intersection between something else as well. What does it take to be a great coach, and in parallel, what does it take to be a great leader? And one of the things that we have seen drive great effectiveness in leadership across all of the organizations that we've worked with so far with our wind cycle program, is when there is an important mindset transition, and that's when we get leaders to shift from I'm managing people to I am their coach. And that makes sense, because ultimately, if we just pause for a moment and we think, what's the role of a coach? It's very, very simple. Strip it all away, whether we're working with an individual, whether we're guiding and leading a team. As a coach, my role is to help people get the most out of themselves, themselves, and so isn't that really leadership. So what we'll do today is we're going to go through three important lessons, things that I've drawn from my coaching
Matt Dixon 06:10
experience that are the foundation of great coaching. So as you listen today, if you're a coach, I invite you draw from it, apply it to your own coaching. But if you're listening from a different arena of leadership, whether you're a teacher, whether you're leading a team in any type of organization, I hope that you can draw some inspiration and insights and maybe apply it to your own journey. I come with humility. I'm not claiming that you're not a great leader already, but I do find it fascinating to listen and learn from people in different arenas, to be able to draw from and think I'll have a bit of that. I'll apply it to my journey. And that's the spirit of today. It's all in the meat and potatoes. So Barry, without further ado, let's do it. It is the for this week, win cycle, meat and potatoes. All about coaching.
Matt Dixon 07:10
All right, let's do it, team. Three coaching lessons. I tell you what. It was a job of work, as they say in England, but a job of work, to distill it down to three coaching lessons. But we are here with the meat and potatoes. We don't have all day, and so I did want to finalize three. I will say I think there's going to be a follow up to this episode, because there are two or three others that I really, really wanted to squeeze in, but we'll have to save that for another day. It's a lot of things that go into coaching and development, but these are applicable to leadership. Lesson number one for me, and I'm going to put this under a banner, then I'm going to provide the context. The first coaching lesson is, don't be afraid to hold very, very high standards. That might sound obvious, but it's really important. Let me tell you about my journey of guiding the purple patch pros. These were a group of athletes, typically around a dozen athletes that I was working with at one time, and they were all at different stages of development. They had different goals, but they were also competitors with each other. They were competing for prize money, for sponsorship dollars, and, of course, for podiums. And yet, I was applying a team approach. They were ambitious. They worked hard. Many of them wanted to be an Iron Man champion. Even wanted to be a world champion, and we went through a 15 year journey where we ultimately developed a high performance culture of a group of athletes that while they were competitors, were bound by a distinct belief and performance readiness. In fact, I always reflect on that and realize that we became a performance factory. Results flowed. We almost believed that winning was inevitable. That's why we called it a win cycle that we were in now. When I was coaching and I was leading, I was tasked, whether I liked it or not, with the development of the journey of these athletes. I had very high expectations and standards. In fact, if you asked any of my athletes, I think that none of them would say I was too easy. That wasn't an accusation that was thrown around at me. And there was a reason for this, and Matt's that every single one of these athletes had very high expectations, very high goals.
Matt Dixon 09:38
They were lofty. None of these athletes that I coached ever accused me of being too easy, and there was a reason for this, as each of the athletes were seeking to develop into doing something incredibly challenging. They wanted to become world class, the thin air of world class performance, and there is no shortcut to achieve this. There's no easy path. The athletes thought it was tough, but they were healthy and they improved. And here's the interesting thing, the athletes thought it was really, really hard work, but at the same time, for the vast majority of the athletes, they stayed incredibly healthy. Our rate of injury, very, very low. They improved not just across one season, but we had a strong reputation for long term development. They kept improving year on year. They had a lot of trust in the process, and they stuck around. Our retention was around four times the norm. And one other thing, as a group, we had fun. It was an incredibly positive environment. And I strongly believe that winning doesn't need to come at the expense of fun. And guess what, when you win, people tend to enjoy it a lot. There's a reason. And so how can you achieve two things at once? It's very hard, it's tough, and yet, we're having a lot of fun, we're staying healthy, we're improving, we're achieving. There's a reason for this that I see many, many coaches missing, and that's the deep understanding of how people perform best long term, it's when they are actually challenged that's where people grow, where they thrive, but that challenge is paired with a massive amount of support. As a coach, I made sure that I paired high expectations and high standards with a huge amount of support, and it was systematic support. Here's a few areas that I committed to. Number one, I'm always going to tell you the truth even when it's hard. I didn't sugar coat things. I ensured that I was honest. And I hold this standard for every single athlete that I coach, and the output of that was trust, and over time, the understanding that I was only providing the truth in the pursuit of that athlete's development and results.
Matt Dixon 12:12
Secondly, I was consistent, and I was consistent in two ways. Number one, how I showed up every single day. I believe, as a coach and as a leader, we are the role model. We set the tone. But I wanted to make sure, as I was leading these athletes, the aspects for me, such as my attitude, my mood, my level of fatigue, never influence how I showed up. There was a bit of broad way to coaching as there is with leadership. You always show up with the veneer of consistency, and also the second part of consistently is how I applied our standards and expectations across the team. It had to be consistently applied in the same way to every participant. It's the only way long term that we developed trust. The third aspect that I ensured is something that's incredibly important. It's a single word care. I needed to ensure that the athletes knew that I cared not just about their sporting results, but about them as a human being. To do this, I sought to help them with sponsors. Could I connect them? Could I help them build strategies? I was there to help them navigate through challenging situations, to support them as much as I could in broader life, not to be their friend, I think that's important, but to help provide a sense of mentorship and stability in an incredibly demanding and pressure filled environment. And finally, something that extends well beyond sport. I integrated recovery as a weapon, not as a sign of weakness. In fact, my nickname was the recovery coach. We embraced it. We used to talk about the courage to recover. I asked my athletes Yes, to work incredibly hard. I knew their performance, though, was built on a platform of emotional and physical health. That was the only way that I would get them to show up their every day, the best that they could do to yield the best outcome and results. And I didn't just talk about it, I lived it. I committed to it. And what it drove over time is bouts of integrated recovery and allowing them to breathe and embrace the aspects of broader life. It fueled not just that platform of health, but long term engagement, a love of the process. And ultimately, as a coach, I got more out of them time and time again when I see leaders push high expectations and standards but fail to partner that and provide genuine and authentic support, human first.
Matt Dixon 15:00
And systematic, they may get results, but typically it's short term, long term. We can't outrun physiology. Burnout will emerge, and this is key. On the flip side, though, if we don't demand, then they can't grow, and we start to see with that every time, indifference emerges time and time again. We see high challenge with high support being high growth. And when you do that, you not only build progression and confidence through capability, you create identity with what you're trying to lead. So that's my first lesson in coaching, my second lesson, I'm going to label this, get clarity over activity. I'll say that again, get clarity over activity. I think this is a huge catalyst of a reduction of risk to so many factors that kill performance and also destroy coach, athlete or leader, employee relationships. Let me break down what I see as my list of performance killers. Number one, a lack of alignment between coach and athlete. Number two, a lack of clarity, clarity of what we're focusing on clarity of what my role is, a focus on too many things, the disbursement of energy and focus across many, many factors that might have a role but ultimately build up to create a lack of traction and progression. Number four, getting swayed or distracted by bright, shiny objects, things that detract us from the course and the plan number five, a loss of focus on mission. Many people think about what they're looking to achieve, get
Matt Dixon 16:53
alignment, but then allow it to evaporate from focus. And finally, reactivity and a lack of course correction. When things do stray off track, so many people stay in the weeds, work very, very hard and never pop up to say, is my energy and effort actually yielding impact? These are the things that we see that can create confusion, conflicts, frustration, and ultimately a lack of results. They destroy coaching relationships, they stunt development and results. And guess what? It isn't complicated. If we fail to have real alignment and buying on the mission and what success looks like, it can only lead to frustration. I see so many coaches and their athletes working their tails off and ultimately failing to yield results, and they wonder what the issue is. But quite often it comes down to a lack of clarity around mission, focus, role. The risk of working hard without clear direction is simply catastrophic. The most rushed part of the crow coaching process is true clarity. That's what we need to get, and this is why I always insist, let's get clarity before we start with the activity. And I tell you what, it could be pretty painful, but it's critical when we break down our model of coaching, the first two of the four phases of the model anchor across two labels, number one, aspiration, number two, action. And this is phases that I consistently see coaches rushing. And it's in them, the long term, only going to create challenge. Now, I won't dig into every single detail under each phase, but I do want to give you a little bit of insights. Let's talk about aspiration, what that looks like in a coach athlete or leadership team scenario. The first thing I always ask an athlete, when we start is in a year's time, how do you know that we would have been successful? In other words, tell me what success looks like for you. It can be qualitative. This is well beyond before we start talking about goals or KPIs or target races in an athletic sense, that's what we're talking about here. What does success look like? And I also want to understand why. Why is this important? How will you know what success is and what does it mean to you? Start to unpack the purpose, what it looks like for the athlete if we do achieve this.
Matt Dixon 19:37
And we want to get aligned coach and athlete on that mission. It's something that's emotional, something to hook into, and ultimately, the fuel for long term commitment. We always know motivation will ebb and flow, but this commitment is driving towards what we're looking to achieve. Then under that once we have that alignment, you. Then we can start talking about goals. And goals are simple, tangible stepping stones that are going to move us towards that ultimate success. Now in an athletic sense, that's going to be goals related to training, performance and ultimately race goals as well. And the last thing around this aspirational phase is great, if we achieve this, and then what does it mean for you as the athlete we might have the long term vision, but what impact is this going to have on you, or what does it mean for the team? Now, this is a phase of coaching that I like to say has got quite amount of healthy conflict, because ultimately, without misalignment and buying, we're only going to create confusion when things get tough, when we get busy doing the doing. And so it's okay to have some conflict, yet we really can't move on until everyone is bought on. This is what we're looking to achieve. Then we can transition to the second phase of the coaching model, which is action. And this is where we start road mapping. What are we going to do to achieve that success? This is a time of contracting. It's also a phase of clarity. What will we focus on? What are the things that are going to drive the performance needle, that are going to enable progression, to move us towards these goals that we've outlined? So that's a key focus. What are we going to focus on? But perhaps just as important, what are we going to remove? What are we going to strategically not focus on? Because I talked about disbursement of focus is
Matt Dixon 21:50
one of the performance killers. And so for this, what can we filter out? Every high performing and successful individual that I've ever worked with has become a master of looking to reduce complexity and be ruthless in prioritization. These are the things that we are going to focus on, and just as importantly, what can I declutter? What can I remove? They might have a role, but they're not going to drive the performance needle, or they're not a part of our focus and energy right now, and with that clarity, then we start to have an understanding of lack of distractions and a filtered focus of the things that are going to drive and we have to agree, we're going to say no to everything else. This gets clarity of buying, of what I'm going to guide as a coach, what the athlete is going to adhere to, and where they're going to place the energy. And we have complete alignment what we're looking to achieve with clarity of where the focus is to move along and progress to those goals. The reason I say it's contracting is because that's the phase that with that clarity, I'm now, as a coach, going to hold that athlete to account for these agreed behaviors and focus areas. So that's my job, and it is only now, only now that I get to do the coaching in the classic sense of the word, and all I'm really doing is holding the athlete to account for the areas of focus I'm providing support, I'm providing and listening also to their feedback, and I'm course correcting when the focus list starts to lead things astray, When we hit roadblocks or stumbling blocks, how do we come out of the weeds and get back on track clarity before activity yields better results every time my last coaching lesson reward behaviors and effort over outcomes. Look when an athlete wins a race, an Iron Man or a half Iron Man every single time it is a cause for celebration.
Matt Dixon 24:05
In fact, one of the things I always encourage our athletes to do is whenever you get a great result, pause, enjoy it. Let it swim over you. These are really precious times in life that we're not going to have many of them. Ultimately, we should enjoy successful outcomes. It's always something to celebrate, but not blindly. Let me tell you, across all of the professional athletes that I've coached, I've had countless athletes who have raced without their personal performance being great, and they might still have won. In other words, as a coach, as I reflect on the performance, the outcome might have been great, but ultimately, in truth, in reflection, they failed to do everything they could in their power to deliver their best personal performance. And so there's an opportunity for growth there, but they might have still won, and that's fantastic. Sick. But that doesn't mean every time, it's a great personal performance. Equally, many of my athletes have delivered important and positive performance, and those have emerged out of days that they might not have won or even gotten the podium. Perhaps they overcome massive adversity, perhaps they were having a tough day, and they still did everything under their power under that day to deliver the best result for that day. And that equals growth. And so even on the tough days, sometimes there's great reason to really celebrate, to really understand what you're doing well and evolve. And so whenever a leader or an athlete over emphasizes the outcomes and nothing else, it leads to a reactive state. In fact, I often talk about coaches getting blinded by complacency. Just because we're winning doesn't mean we're doing great, and it's that first for personal development that is empowering. What I found over the years is that long term development emerges when I coach through constant reward and reinforcement of two main things, number one, somebody's effort, and number two, the behaviors that lead to the impact and results that we're seeking. So rather than just looking at the outcome, the results really reinforcing the behaviors that we believe are going to be positive to influence those results.
Matt Dixon 26:38
And we always make sure that these reinforcements are very, very public and highly positive. This ensures that the athlete retains the focus and energy on the factors that they can control, and it also liberates whole teams from a loss of motivation or eroding confidence when things completely out of their control impact outcomes and results, because that can happen. It happens across any arena in life, and I can't overstate the absolute power and importance here. Through positive reinforcement of effort and behavior, we help foster a mindset and a broader culture of people having a passion for the process or the process for self improvement. We help them channel a high performance trait, control the controllables, the things that are under our control, that we can influence. We also help them develop confidence through capability and improvement. When human beings feel like they're getting somewhere in an area where they're out of their comfort zone and they're growing, it builds massive confidence, and ultimately, bizarrely perhaps, we also facilitate higher likelihood of better results and outcomes. Because by people driving their energy into the things that are catalysts to create results, the results tend to take care of themselves. Let me tell you, I had many athletes that arrived to purple patch with big dreams. I want to win an Iron Man. I'd love to win a world championship. And we never talked about it. What we talked about is you becoming the very best athlete that you can become everything that is under your control. And when we got athletes to buy into that, to obsess on controlling the things that they could control to get better. The results took care of themselves.
Matt Dixon 28:45
We had a lot of Iron Man week victories. We had multiple world champions. It's not by chasing the outcome, it's by reinforcing the behaviors that drive the outcome. In fact, across our purple patch pros, I'll share with you a mantra when it related to racing, we always talked about, you have freedom to fail. And that sounds weird, failure in a phrase as it relates to world class sport. But this wasn't defeatist. In fact, it was about liberty, fearlessness, trust, go on and do everything that you can under your control to the very best of your ability. If you do that, you have the very best chance to achieve the great outcomes, outcomes that we chase. The rest look. The rest is down to the very beauty and essence of almost every single sport in the world, and that's the Jeopardy, the reason that sport is so powerful, so wonderful, just like life is, no matter what we do, there's always some Jeopardy there, and that's the part that. Yours, meaning passion and joy, just like life, three lessons of coaching. Don't forget it. And I invite you to apply some of these to your own leadership. I hope that helps. And as I mentioned at the top of the show, feel free to check out the wind cycle website, wind cycle.org you can also get in contact with us. Info at wind cycle.org and as ever, a positive review always helps. And feel free to share this with anyone that you think might be interested. All right, we'll see you next week, we'll be back to regular purple patch programming. Take care.
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
Leadership coaching, performance readiness, predictable performance, team dynamics, Ironman triathlon, clinical physiology, high standards, systematic support, clarity over activity, reward behaviors, effort over outcomes, long-term development, high challenge, high support, human potential.