Using External Cues To Improve Your Coaching

Aubrey Watts, Coaching Education Coordinator at the United States Olympic Committee, joined Chris P., Rush’s Developmental Director, on an amazing Webinar in which she explained how to help our players improve by this method.

As we move forward on our Monthly Campaign, Coaching The Micro Division U6-U8, we focus on our webinar with Aubrey Watts, who works in the Coaching Education Department of the United States Olympic Committee, in which she explains viewers ideas on how to help players improve quicker by using cues.

In this amazing presentation, Aubrey starts by walking us through the difference between Performance & Learning, understanding the first as a temporary and measurable change in a skill, while the second relates to relatively permanent changes.

From there, the presenter deepens the analysis towards responding to the following questions:

What’s the impact and relationship between the level of expertise of an athlete and his/hers attentional focus?
How does that affect the process of cueing?
Why is it that research suggests that external cueing is more effective than internal cueing to improve performance?
How can external cueing protect the expert athlete from ‘mentally choking’?
What are the key components of an effective cue (what the author calls ‘the anatomy of a good cue’)?

Through this process, we invite you to not only reflect of the questions posted above but also practice and adapt to the Micro Division U6-U8 context.