AGC #008 - Atomic Habits for coaches

Today, I’m going to explain how five takeaways from James Clear’s legendary productivity book, Atomic Habits, can apply to sports coaching.

This summer, we read Atomic Habits for our Liberty FH staff book club along with our spouses and swapped ideas on how we implemented its lessons in our personal lives and marriages.

But it has no shortage of lessons that can be applied to coaching too, to make you more efficient on and off the field, and smooth out some of the stresses of the job.

Let's dive into my five biggest takeaways from it.

#1: The 4-step cheat sheet

Clear lays out a straightforward, four-step process for creating good habits.

Here’s how I used it last spring to try to make a habit of building better relationships with players:

• Cue: make it obvious

  • Got regular reminders by including a section in my daily habit tracker for intentional interactions

• Craving: make it attractive

  • Caught up with players at coffeeshops (I normally make my coffee at home) as a treat

• Response: make it easy

  • Put Post-its and a pen on my desk, and made a recurring Wednesday morning task to write short notes to three players

• Reward: make it satisfying

  • Kept a record of who I’d hung out with and written to in the habit tracker

You can apply this framework to pretty much any habit you’d like to build - and the inversion of it for any habit you’d like to break.

#2: Never miss twice

A lie we tell ourselves, according to Clear, is that sticking to good habits is all-or-nothing.

That it’s game over if we slip up once, and evidence that we lack motivation or willpower to make a habit stick.

His personal rule is to “never miss twice”. One mistake is just an outlier in the long run, but two mistakes is the beginning of a new habit.

In coaching, the cumulative fatigue and stress of a long season can easily cause us to let good habits slide.

It could be something personal like eating habits, or a work thing that started well but has fallen off, such as getting on the field 15 minutes early to set up practice.

Let’s take the latter example and 3 ways to avoid the ‘second mistake’:

• If you forgot to set up practice ahead of time today, forgive yourself and focus on doing it tomorrow. Even if it keeps happening, you’ll have done it 50% of the time if you always make sure you get back on the wagon. Which is better than the 0% if you quit the habit entirely.

• Ask yourself, without judgment, what took you off course and see if you can eliminate it. Are meetings running too long before practice? Give yourself a bigger time buffer so you’re not rushing.

• Put it on your calendar. “Practice” and “Plan Practice” probably already live there. So add a short block for “Set Up Practice”.

#3: Decisive moments

First thing in the morning, you’ve sat down at your desk, about to start your day’s work. You pull your phone out of your pocket, as you likely do dozens or even hundreds of times a day.

Twenty minutes later, you’re still procrastinating on it and you haven’t started your work. Sound familiar?

Clear calls these “decisive moments” - the critical points throughout the day where your choices affect how you’ll spend the remaining time.

The simple act of unlocking your phone changes your conscious choice framework: “Should I start with my emails or film review?” has become “should I check Twitter or Instagram?”

The choice you make dictates your options for the next few minutes, or even hours in some cases: consider the choice between crashing on the couch or going to the gym at the end of the day.

Some of my decisive moments as a coach include:

• Blocking time on my calendar for that day’s major tasks/projects

  • Forgetting to do it immediately results in less important things getting done

• Delaying the first look at my phone

  • My wife and I don’t bring our phones into our bedroom, but I’ll be more present for family breakfast and in a better mood for my colleagues if I wait until leaving the house to look at it

• Expressing frustration out loud

  • The vibe and cadence of a practice or team meeting can be ruined if I can’t keep my emotions in check as a coach

#4: The two-minute rule

Clear’s “two-minute rule” aims to prevent procrastination and dictates that “when you start a new habit, it should take less than two minutes to do.”

The idea here is to make habits as easy as possible to start, and that nearly every habit can be scaled down to a two-minute version. “Read before bed each night” becomes “read 1 page”, or “run 3 miles” becomes “tie my running shoes.”

The simple action becomes a gateway habit down a more productive path.

This is a riff off FlyLady’s famous 5-minute room rescue, where you clean the dirtiest room in the house for just five minutes. This makes the task seem more manageable, and you either find yourself more motivated to continue as you start to see progress, or at least make a dent in the job.

There are endless ways to use the two-minute rule in your coaching life:

• Clear my email inbox ➡️ Reply to 1 email

• Review yesterday’s game film ➡️ Watch the goals and big chances

• Making travel itineraries ➡️ Plan the first morning of a trip

• Plan this week’s practices ➡️ Decide on one exercise

And so on. A simple way to kick-start the habits you want.

#5: Standardize before you optimize

Habits have to be established before they can be improved. If you can’t learn the basic skill of showing up, then figuring out the finer details will likely remain beyond you.

Clear’s take on this is “instead of trying to engineer a perfect habit from the start, do the easy thing on a more consistent basis”. The little rituals we develop can help us focus better on the task to come - that’s why your players do a familiar warm-up before each game, for example.

One of our better-established habits as a coaching staff has been maintaining a tasks database within Notion. Standardizing this took a while, as we had to build the habit of writing down things we needed to get done, instead of just asking each other.

Optimization has come in the form of being able to assign them to each other (and get notifications) along with a due date, task status, additional details, and links to the relevant project to keep things moving along efficiently.

On a personal level, I’ve been trying to establish the habit of getting up at 6 a.m. - an hour earlier than the rest of the house - on weekdays and using the time to write tweets and newsletters before work and family demands take over.

I’m still figuring out how best to use that time, but it starts with just making the choice to get out of bed and show up to write.

I could easily have picked another five Atomic Habits that apply to coaching - if you haven’t yet given the book a go, I highly recommend it.

Best of luck with building better habits!