Personality

Coaching swim practice this morning. It starts out with me giving them the warm up. This morning it was 200 free, 2 x 200 IM kick/swim by 25s and then a 200 pull. Pretty basic. The next step is I hold everyone up and give them a little talk. Maybe this is just announcements for the schedule or a congratulations to my triathletes in the group for the past weekends race or sometimes a bit of my from the heart words of wisdom. It's funny, I have found that many of them actually enjoy a few words - something that provokes some thought.

At 5:59am, not many people are doing anything out of the normal realm of their usual personality. But even when they are half asleep and just beginning to transition from slumber just 30 minutes prior to a full out workout pace in the next hour, the subtle characteristics of their personality show right through.

One of my favorite lines from the movie Pulp Fiction was, "Personality goes a long way." It sure does in my book. It's almost like I can guess what a person will do in practice, during a set or during a course of a season, by what I observe in their personality. I have some totally driven athletes and some very easy going athletes. From either side of the spectrum, I get good work and fast swimming out of all of them. Just because an athlete is easy going doesn't mean they won't be the fastest one in the pool though. On the other side, sometimes the super driven athletes are the ones that we wait for.

All of the different personalities make coaching great fun. Reading your athletes well is a benefit and a key component of coaching success in my opinion. The next challenge though is to get your athletes to comply with what you feel is going to be in their best interest. First they must understand and believe in the plan. And that is very hard for many of them, especially the super driven ones. That drive they some of them have is what makes them succeed but at a certain point it can work against them. It all comes down to personality...