Enhancing Athletes' Receptiveness to Feedback
How can you determine whether an athlete received the feedback as you intended? The answer is easy the athlete will respond in the way you hoped. You can facilitate such responses by taking deliberate steps to help athletes be receptive to your feedback. First, try not to become so focused on message content that you forget the emotional impact of the message on the athlete. You can increase athletes' receptiveness by starting with something positive. For example, in describing how he provides instructional feedback, former NBA coach Rudy Tomjanovich says, "Correcting mistakes is one of the most important parts of coaching. The majority of things a coach says to a player involve correcting him, and the manner in which you do so is vitally important. I feel a good way to change a negative is to add a positive to the formula" (Janssen 1999, p. 117)