In this extract from Ben Oakley’s book, Podium, we look at examples from four different sports that may encourage you to change your approach to offering feedback and instruction.
Several talent development books, including Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers and Matthew Syed’s Bounce, have emphasised the importance of quality and quantity of practice in the development of champions.
After all, it is the coaches who create the practices and build in the rich feedback loops that Syed describes: “Great coaches are able to design practice so that feedback is embedded in the drill, leading to automatic readjustment, which in turn improves the quality of the feedback, generating further improvements, and so on.”
In some sports, this approach starts from an early stage on the talent pathway, simply because of the distance between coach and athlete during training sessions.