learning to teach confidence
or how to teach how to think
John Boyd was a fighter pilot in the Korean War and became a military strategist later. Boyd had the unique ability to make explicit the implicit. His revelations on how to make decisions amidst chaos are relevant to football coaches and something we can all learn from in order to better prepare our players and increase their confidence.
As it would be, Boyd allegedly had an IQ of 90 “which he claimed was an advantage because it forced him to be more efficient.” Whether or not Boyd’s IQ was that low (and beyond the point of how much the value we should put in IQ), I appreciate Boyd’s perspective — you’ve got to do the best with what you’ve got.
In high school football, your players show up in the June before their freshman year and then about 41 months later they leave your program. You must take advantage of all 41 months with an efficient, repeatable process that develops them into the players you need them to be.
And what I will argue for in the rest of this article is that an efficient, repeatable process is the basis for building confidence in your players.
Let’s go back to John Boyd and take a brief look at his process for making decisions amidst chaos: the OODA loop.
Learning to teach your players how to think
OODA is an acronym for a decision making process through the following loop of steps: Observe, Orient, Decide, Act.
Here it is in a simple diagram:
I first heard about this process in Cody Alexander’s book Match Quarters where he demonstrates its use as a model for teaching a pre-snap thinking process for his defensive players.
I am not going to go over every point in the loop here, but if you’d like to learn more about it, you can do so in this article.
In short, the OODA loop is a process that takes you from learning more about your situation (observe), choosing a way to frame the situation you are in (orient) so that you can make the best decision and then act. Your action will then cause a result that you must observe, thus starting the process over again.
The point of talking about the OODA loop is to demonstrate that there does exist a proven (John Boyd was a fighter pilot who lived to explain his ways) framework that provides confidence in the middle of uncertainty by filtering out what’s important and what isn’t important.
And confidence is just that: a belief in knowing that you are going to do the right thing. But how do you know that you can do that.
Because you know what causes things to happen. In other words, you know what matters and what doesn’t.
The importance of playing with confidence
Peyton Manning sums up the importance of playing with confidence when he said:
Playing football, or any sport, requires a certain tolerance for pressure, and because of that, you’ve got to have a plan to teach players how to operate in this environment. You do that by proving to them that they have prepared for the game’s demands. You prove to them they have prepared by putting them through a proven and repeatable process.
The players must have confidence that they can perform because they not only have done it before, but they have figured out how to do it before. In other words, you must have give your players a process that allows them make better decisions by teaching their focus to process what matters and what doesn’t matter.
Back to Manning. What’s interesting about his perspective on pressure is that he views it as something relative. In his view, you have the ability to affect the pressure you feel. But think about pressure in the physical sense.
If you press a flower in a book, the flower’s physical shape will be affected — it will be flat. If you go deep in enough in water, you will feel the pressure build in your ears.
Is pressure in sports the same or can you escape the pressure?
According to Manning, you can relieve pressure when you know what you are doing. In other words, you can escape pressure by preparing. And the act of preparation is the foundation of confidence. Preparation weakens pressure’s ability to induce poor performance.
But football has so much ambiguity and requires instant reactions that you must develop mental processes that players can operate within that produce repeatable results no matter the situation.
“The best way to succeed is to revel in ambiguity”
In The Mind of War, a book on John Boyd, the author Grant Hammond argues that the essence of Boyd’s thought was in developing a way to deal with ambiguity.
Hammond reveals how “ambiguity is central to Boyd’s vision . . . not something to be feared but something that is a given. We never have complete and perfect information.” As a fighter pilot, Boyd had to learn to react to uncertain stimuli in split seconds over and over again. He took his decision making process and codified it in the OODA loop.
The OODA loop provides a repeatable process that fighter pilots (or anyone who makes decisions) can use to navigate their way through ambiguous chaos because it turns that chaos into meaning by filtering out the noise.
Seeking processes that allow players to play with confidence
Boyd said that “uncertainty is irrelevant if we have the right filters in place.” Those filters are what you must build into the thought processes that you create for your players.
With 22 players moving in a somewhat organized way, it is imperative that you teach your quarterback what to look at (observe) and then how to analyze the information he sees (orient). He then must figure out where the ball should go (decide) and then execute the throw, handoff, or pitch (act).
The quarterback will face new situations every game that he must navigate through. He must make quick decisions that everyone will judge. To play with confidence, he must be confident in his decision making abilities. In order to make simple the complex, he must have a process that he is comfortable operating within. When the circumstances change on the field, whether that be different defensive presentations or a two-minute drill to win the game, he must know that his process works.
Final thoughts
You must give your quarterbacks the tools to succeed in the situation that they operate in: the football field. You must account for all that is going on. You can’t reduce their thinking process for the sake of simplicity. You also cannot complicate it by giving him multiple variations without rhyme or reason. It must make sense in the given environment and it must be repeatable.
Expert coaches can do this and it looks simple. But what those expert coaches have mastered is the ability to “have the right filters in place.” That is what I strive to do: watch enough and learn enough football as to start to see the patterns arise that reveal what is important and what is not important. In the meantime, I am learning to teach like they do by learning from the processes they employ.
Until next week —
Emory