Andrew Longley – Article 2 – A shared purpose

The art and neuroscience of high-performance coaching – A shared purpose

Article 2 in the Series of 12

Andrew is a performance psychologist & keen student of applied neuroscience, who will over the coming months share insights ground the art and neuroscience of high- performance coaching. Each article will share a little of the latest applied neuroscience plus give simple tips on how to practically bring it to life in your own coaching.

Great to be back with you. In my first article I shared a little of my background and briefly introduced you to the coachup model of high-performance teams and coaches which you can see below.

So today we’re going to take a look at an absolutely critical part of high-performance coaching. Defining a shared purpose with your team.

We hear a lot about having a ‘sense of purpose’ or ‘finding our why’ but most people don’t really know what this means. We often understand that it’s about unlocking our motivation and accessing some magical part of who we are that unleashes our performance. This is all true, but today I’d like to share some of the science behind it and give some practical tips on how to define a shared purpose with your own teams.

The fascinating piece of science behind this is via an amazing part of our brains called our default mode network (DMN). Our brains are meaning-making machines. They are always making meaning and sense of our world because this is a critical aspect of stripping out uncertainty which is one of the brain’s essential functions. As part of this meaning-making, our DMN also tell us when we are living in-sync with our underlying purpose. This is happening 24/7 and we cannot switch this off. When we are living in-sync with our own purpose, we feel fulfilled, driven, joyful and motivated and it’s our DMN who’s telling us this. Think about what it felt like when you had your first child, or you played on the best team you’ve ever been on, or you worked in your dream job. However, when we are living out-of-sync with our purpose, we feel a lack of fulfillment, drive, joy and motivation. Think about what it felt like when you worked in a job that drained you, or you knew you were meant to be doing something more important with your life, but you didn’t know what. This is how our brain tells us if we have genuine purpose in what we do…or not.

Now which of these two conditions would you want your athletes to be feeling when part of your teams? This is exactly why as coaches we need to help our team connect to a shared purpose.

So as coaches, when we can define a shared purpose with our team which is genuine and the athletes connect to, we are unlocking their fulfilment, drive, joy and motivation. This is best done at the start of a season or when a team forms and it cannot just be going through the motions of creating ‘vision statement’ like often happens in the workplace. It cannot be rushed.

This is a fairly complicated thing to do as it involves humans who are always complicated in our uniqueness, and it’s impossible to convey in a few short sentences, but a short practical list you could start with is:

Ask all of your athletes what is it about being on this team that gets them excited and out of bed in the morning? Do not rush this and do it at a time when everyone can be fully present and engaged in the conversation. Hiding the mobile phones for this exercise is a great tip too.
Have all of your athletes take turns to share this in their own words, get them to expand on it if they’re being too brief. It’s about their story and hearing them describe it in their own words. If you need to encourage more out of them, try questions like ‘what is it exactly about hanging out with your mates that you enjoy’ or ‘what do you love most about playing football? ’. What you’re wanting is to hear some authenticity in what they’re sharing and to understand what’s at the heart of their reason. This is their own purpose! For example, it could be about being together with their best mates every day, or improving themselves every training to be the best netballer possible, or playing the game they love like their mother did, etc.
Once you’ve heard from all the athletes, find the common threads in the reasons and distil these down to as few reasons as appropriate. What you’re wanting to do here is to not lose any of the uniqueness if the reasons are different but get to as small a list as possible.
Then from this small list of your team’s reasons (their purposes), ask the team (with your help as needed) to craft this into a purpose statement which represents the core reasons. Using the examples above, this could become “We want to be part of this team because… we get to play the game we love, we get to improve every week and we get to do this with our best mates.”
Then finally, ask the team to refine this further into a punchy sentence or motto. We want to make this a punchy sentence so that we remember it easily, we can include several different purposes, and it becomes uniquely the team’s. For example, “We get better, together, playing the game we love.”
Once the team have their own purpose statement. This can be used in many ways to lift motivation, drive, joy & fulfilment. For example, to lift spirits and motivation
after a disappointing loss. Coach: “Even though we didn’t win today, did we play the game we love? Did we learn something to make us better? Did we do it together
with our best mates?” This is a great way to redirect the attention of the athletes back to what’s most important to them.

A well-known example of a team’s defined purpose is the All Black’s “leave the jersey in a better place”. This is a powerful purpose statement because it carries so much different meaning behind such a short sentence, and different people can hook their own personal purpose into it. Different purposes of the players which could be captured include: whakapapa, being a guardian, self-improvement, selflessness and altruism. Amazing.

So, there we have a little of the applied neuroscience behind why defining a shared purpose with your teams is such a critical aspect of high-performance coaching. You could also do exactly the same exercise with your coaching group, or management group because it’s fundamental to any team’s performance.

However, before I put my ‘pen’ down I wanted to share a fun fact about our DMN which may help you in your own coaching, personal or professional lives. Our DMN is also at the center of unlocking the huge power of our unconscious brain and creativity. How does this work? Well, our DMN

is also known as being ‘task negative’. What this means is that it activates when we are not doing a focused task, like writing an important email or solving a work problem. This is why we have all our best ideas when we’re doing something like taking a shower, going for a run, listening to music, or driving our car on a familiar route. So, a high- performing coach habit is to intentionally plan for having time in your day where you’re not doing specific tasks so you can let your DMN work its magic. This is especially helpful if you have a major dilemma you’re struggling to solve, or you’re seeking some innovation or creativity.

The third article in this series next month will focus on why a high-performing team must have a shared in-group identity, and how you create one with your team as their coach. Stay tuned.