⏳ Read Time: 3.5 min, 824 words
📌 What’s inside:
👀 What most coaches spend their time on
🧠 What elite coaches quietly prioritize instead
🛠 Five things that separate good from great
Our first book, Lead Yourself First, is our field manual for coaches to build their Leadership. We’ve heard from many coaches who have read it, love it, and are taking their staff through it.
Haven’t gotten your copy yet?
Already read it? We’d deeply appreciate it if you leave us a review on Amazon.
📖 Anecdote: What Gets Attention in Coaching
We’ve been struck by an idea lately, and we’ve noticed in our work in golf.
We’ve gotten to work with quite a few golfers who operate in close proximity to each other. College golf teams, even pros practicing together. They do almost everything together, not just in life but within their performance.
They hit range balls together. They play practice rounds together.
And yet, when we show up and start asking them about the processes and systems they use, we realize they haven’t had those conversations with one another.
In essence, what we’ve noticed is this:
Great golfers do a lot of golfing together. Said differently, they perform around and even with each other a lot. And yet, it’s so easy for them to miss the tiny nuances that make the OTHER golfers they’re around elite.
The thing that Golfer A has that makes him elite is exactly what Golfer B needs. But they never talk about that!
How does that happen?
We’ve now been looking for this in coaching. It presents a sobering truth. It’s possible to be next to an elite coach, to coach with them, and unless you know what to look for, you might completely miss the things that make them elite.
Spend enough time around coaching, and you start to notice a pattern.
Most conversations revolve around:
recruiting
schemes
game plans
facilities
Who’s got what
None of those things are unimportant.
But when you zoom in on the best coaches, the ones who sustain success over time, you notice something different. They’re not ignoring those things.
But rarely do they consider any of those things the most important thing.
Their attention goes somewhere else.
Somewhere quieter. Less visible. But far more impactful.
📊 Research Insight: Attention Drives Behavior
We’ve talked about this idea often, so we won’t repeat ourselves too much.
Research in performance psychology shows that what leaders consistently pay attention to shapes team behavior more than what they say they value.
Studies on attentional focus and behavioral reinforcement show that individuals and teams align their actions with what is repeatedly emphasized, corrected, and rewarded.
In other words:
People don’t respond to what you preach.
They respond to what you notice.
Which means a coach’s focus isn’t neutral.
It’s instructional.
🛠️ 5 Things the Elite Coaches We Work With Obsess Over
1. Clarity
Their players know:
What matters
What winning looks like
What their role is
Confusion drains performance faster than a lack of effort ever will.
2. How Things Feel, Not Just How They Look
They pay attention to:
The tone of practice
Body language after mistakes
How players interact with each other
As we talked about last week, performance is fueled by the environment you’re creating. So, they always have their finger on the pulse of their environment.
If it feels tense, rushed, or uncertain, execution follows.
3. “Small Behaviors”
Small, repeatable actions:
How players transition between drills
How they respond to coaching
How they communicate
They understand that games are just a collection of habits under pressure.
4. Consistency in Leadership
They don’t reinvent themselves based on wins, losses, or outside noise.
Their standards, tone, and expectations stay stable.
Because consistency in leadership builds trust, and trust drives performance.
5. Their Own Behavior First
Before they evaluate the team, they evaluate themselves.
How did I show up?
What did I reinforce?
Where was I unclear?
They understand that leadership isn’t separate from the environment.
It is the environment.
🪞 Why This Matters
When coaches fail, it’s rarely because they don’t care enough.
They fail because their attention is scattered.
They’re pulled toward what’s urgent today. What’s right in front of them. Or what others are talking about.
Elite coaches anchor their attention to what actually moves the needle.
And over time, that focus compounds.
🏁 Closing Reflection:
You don’t have to do more to coach at a higher level.
But you do have to focus differently.
Teams rise to what you pay attention to every day.
And that’s where elite coaches separate themselves.
🛠️ Want to Build Elite Culture?
Get BETTER’s Culture Playbook. A system designed to install a thriving, healthy, high-performance culture. Join over 1,000 coaches who use our Culture Playbook from youth club teams to national championship NCAA programs and everything in between.