Talking To Your Team About Skill Mastery – A Sample Script

One element of creating a positive sports culture is shifting your definition of success to include a focus on mastery. By aligning with Positive Coaching Alliance’s skill development principle, the ELM Tree of Mastery, and then sharing this with the team, your athletes will be better able to set goals, recognize and celebrate improvement, and bounce back from mistakes. Here are the five key elements for a Mastery conversation with your team.

1. Define Success – Let’s shift our definition of success from only focusing on ‘winning’ to celebrating ‘mastery’. When our goal is to improve every day, we’ll be setting ourselves up for sustained success and skill development. Despite what the scoreboard says, we will be able to celebrate our other wins such as incredible effort, teamwork, and taking risks. 

2. E is for Effort – Let’s give our best effort in every practice and game. We control the effort we give but not always the results we get. We can encourage teammates by acknowledging specific effort plays: “Great hustle when you came back to help defend on that counter-attack.” 

3. L is for Learning – As we strive towards mastery, we will continually learn and improve. We can always be better tomorrow than we are today. Improving as individual athletes, and as a team is more important than whether or not we are better than another team. We are competing with ourselves. If we are improving, we are winning that competition. 

4. M is for Mistakes – We want to look at mistakes as opportunities to learn and grow. We all will make mistakes and that is ok! Think about a professional game you watched recently. Did you see one of your favorite athletes make any mistakes? Without taking risks we won’t improve. Sure, that means we might make some mistakes. But trying out new skills and strategies helps us develop.

5. ELM Tree of Mastery – As long as you give your best Effort, strive to Learn, and view Mistakes as opportunities to grow, you are working towards developing new skills, both on and off the field.