Every team needs a Vision Statement. In fact, every player needs their own personal Vision Statement. They key is to ensure they are aligned.
After completing this exercise, you’ll be able to create a Vision Statement into one powerful sentence.
Vision Statements are about what you want do (Mission), how you want to go about it (Values), and why you want to do it (Purpose).
A vision statement is not about the future. It is a statement that players are expected to live and breathe every day.
There are no age requirements for creating an impactful Vision Statement. I’ve helped create Vision Statements with 8- and 9-year-olds as well as high school and college athletes.
The process is slightly different. The older the group of athletes, the more I expect them to draw from their experiences. The younger the group, the more assistance I require from their parents.
Defining the Mission: When I ask a team what do you want to do? The most common answer is, “We want to win games.” That’s not enough, you have to allow them to dig deeper. They may often have a hard time doing just that, and that’s okay. Don’t allow them to set specific goals, but rather identify something in the terms of effort and attitude. Example elements are, “be our best”, “give it our all”, or simply “come to work every day…”
Defining the Values: Then I ask, “How do you want to do that…in other words, what values are you going to lead with?” This question gets their minds going. Once you have a number of values to draw from, help the players prioritize them by comparing two values at time. This is where the real dialogue begins, and it is by far my favorite part of the process.
Defining the Purpose: Finally, and most importantly, I ask them Why? And now we are back to square one with that gazed look in their eye. Use their experiences to draw out their collective Why. This step definitely takes the longest to flush out.
The last step is to craft your responses into a one sentence Vision Statement.
In my next post I’ll share a couple of examples of Vision Statements, one from a youth team, and another from a high school team.
Until then…
Jimmy Karam, CMPC
@recreationalcoaching