Don’t React, Act!

posted on: January 25, 2017
author: Brian Lomax, Ed.D.

Yesterday, I was having a conversation with a couple of coaches and we were discussing the different types of focus (process goals) that an athlete should have for practice and for a game. One of the coaches has a friend who is a sport psychology professional at a large academy, and he told me that this friend said they teach their athletes to not think during games, but just to REACT. I heard that sentence and thought, “hmm, I don’t like that!” Now your first impression of that viewpoint of “just react” might be that it makes sense, but if we go a little deeper on this, I think you’ll see that “reacting” is not actually what we want to do.

It’s entirely possible that I’m being overly pedantic in my criticism of the word react in this context, but I believe that being precise with one’s language in coaching and performing is important. Otherwise, the performance you get may not be what was intended. To say that we want athletes to simply “react” when performing is a lazy use of language in our coaching. It isn’t what you want them to do because the word implies that someone else is in control. Someone else is taking “action”, and your athletes are “reacting.”

Now if a coach who used the word react in the context above were reading this now, he would probably say something like, “Brian, that’s not what I meant.” And therein lies the problem. You didn’t communicate what you really meant to say. What you meant to say was, “we teach our athletes to just execute during games, not think.”

For the teams and athletes that I work with, we don’t talk about reacting. We act, we execute and we do our job. Our goal is always to break the opponent mentally and that can only happen through purposeful actions. It happens by knowing how to use your strengths as an athlete or a team to make the opponent uncomfortable. If the opponent makes an adjustment, we don’t react to it; we respond to it so that we can take control again. We follow our process and we do our job. We constantly compete with purpose.

As a coach and/or a competitor, consider how you can use more precise language so that you are performing with purpose. Act, execute, do your job and follow the process. Let the other person/team react to what you do. I would much rather be the person in control rather than the one reacting to my opponent’s game. How about you?