What is your coaching style?

In psycho technical term, this can be phrased as, what is your most frequent behavior modification style?  Without worrying about jargon, let me get to the point. 

We all try to modify behavior, our own and others as well every day.  Certain behaviors we want to encourage /increase and some we want to discourage /decrease.

For example, related to self, I want to encourage daily workout and eating salad before every dinner.  And want to reduce delaying my night sleep time and reduce eating sweets.  How do I go about it? Very simply, reward and punishment (positive and negative) are 2 ways to go about it.  Reward behaviors to be encouraged and punish behaviors to be discouraged, and neglecting or ignoring would be another alternative way to modify. 

Based on the above simple premise, I will have a tendency to either use reward and neglect a wanted behavior and punish or neglect an unwanted behavior.  Very few would have a balanced approach.  So, becoming aware of my tendency will be the first step.  Tracking such a tendency will be tough as it would have become habitual by now to the point of instinctive reaction.  We can get help of an objective observer to track our tendencies, or you can take video of a simulation. 

One situation where these tendencies come out easily is during sports coaching sessions.  Take an informal coaching session, suppose you are giving ball catching practice to a kid / junior.  You are supposed to throw a ball and coach the other person to become a better catcher of the ball.  Take the first 20 throws and comments into account.  Generally your behavior modification style would become evident by then.  i.e. whether you focus on positive or negative comments and how much you use neglect / ignoring of either reward or punishment will become evident. 

 Similarly amount of praise or criticism is used to change self also can be found out.  Self coaching style might be more difficult to find out in an objective way, but it would be worth the effort. 

It would be best to check this all by ourselves first, but i can’t help jumping ahead with one point.  Generally human beings don’t like criticism and prefer encouragement.  It would be true for children anyway, if you think back to your own childhood experiences.  

Of course, identifying and segregating which specific behavior elements to be encouraged or discouraged is another challenge altogether.  But first one step, or one blog at a time... ;)