Positivity Reconsidered" by Jim Thompson

I recently returned from a family canoe trip in one of my favorite places in the world, the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in northern Minnesota. After paddling the length of three lakes and handling the first portage (a trail between lakes over which we carried our canoes and packs), we were away from buildings, motors, cell phones and e-mail for seven glorious days.

When I wasn't paddling, portaging, making fires, listening to loons, and helping my son tie "bear bags" high in trees where bears theoretically couldn't reach them, I devoured a wonderful biography -- Pistol by Mark Kriegel -- about Pete Maravich and his dad, Press.

One of the things that jumped out at me was how much negativity there was in college and professional coaching in Pistol Pete's time. The norm seemed to be to spew nastiness at players and assume that it would make them better against all the evidence.

Perhaps this was so striking to me because there were many opportunities for negativity in our canoe trip. Right out of the gate, Sandra got our entry date into the wilderness wrong so we spent the first night of our trip in the last unbooked hotel room in Ely, Minnesota rather than under the stars.

More seriously, early in the trip I misread the map and we ended up at 6 pm exhausted, circling a lake trying to find a campsite. With darkness coming, I eventually realized we were on the wrong lake, one that did not have a campsite! We were two portages away from the correct lake and not likely to be able to make it before dark.

What was remarkable about these episodes is the total lack of expressed negativity. None of our party of four -- which included our son, Gabriel, and his wife, Daniella -- expressed any upset-ness at these bone-headed moves. In our daily log of the trip, Gabriel wrote, "Jim (yes, he often calls me Jim) misread a map but created a memory."

Returning to civilization I was greeted by a spate of incidences of negativity -- a college football player taunting a vanquished opponent, the taunted player (from my alma mater, no less) punching the taunter, the top women's tennis player in the world threatening bodily violence to a line judge and the top men's player in the world going negative in defeat, to name just a few of the more prominent examples.

I thought a lot about the loss of composure by these elite athletes and how our "team" of canoeists dealt with setbacks. And it's not as if our screw-ups didn't have consequences. When you are bone tired and you don't know where you are going to sleep for the night in the middle of a wilderness with the darkness about to descend on you, there definitely is the temptation to go negative!

I thought about how poisonous negativity can be to a team or organization, yet how prevalent it is in our world of sports. The very name of our organization and movement -- Positive Coaching Alliance -- came from my observing the harmful effects of unrestrained negativity by coaches and parents on youth athletes. My experience working with troubled kids in the Behavioral Learning Center (BLC) in St. Paul was formative in my thinking about PCA.

BLC Principal Shirley Pearl and social worker Don Challman drilled into me the power of "relentless positivity" in transforming the behavior of these troubled kids. My exposure to Grace Pilon's "Workshop Way" method of welcoming rather than fearing mistakes as a normal and healthy part of the learning process further influenced me.

It seemed to me then that the test of a great leader is the ability, the discipline really, to stay positive in the face of adversity, even boneheaded mistakes by members of one's team.

Because so often what seems like an awful outcome can turn into something quite positive. I believe that Sandra, Gabriel, Daniella and I will always remember fondly how we dealt with not having a campsite that night at the aptly named "Explorer Lake." What could have been a real downer turned into something memorable because everyone stayed positive.

By that measure many elite coaches fall down because they are not able to remain positive in the face of adversity. And while it could be argued that this characteristic may not be so important when working with elite athletes (although I deeply question this), youth are an entirely different matter.

Negativity poisons the atmosphere of a youth team, just as it poisons families, organizations, and individual relationships.

A coach who can remain positive with players through rain or shine will get more from them. A coach who can have hard conversations with kids while remaining positive and optimistic will be more likely to get them to change their behavior. A coach who establishes a positive team culture (culture being "the way we do things here") will be remembered by players long after they have moved on to other things.

It takes discipline to remain positive no matter what happens. It's not easy but it leads to a legacy I think every coach wants to create -- to be remembered as someone who made players better. And it begins with a commitment to being positive.

(This article appears in the Director's Corner column in the Fall 2009 issue of PCA's print newsletter, Momentum.)