“Receiving an athletic scholarship is a wonderful thing, but most of us only know what we’re getting, not what we’re getting into.”

-Stephanie Campbell, Former Villanova University Field Hockey Player 

Discovering the Right Motivation

Creating an environment in which your child is driven as an athlete, student, and person through enjoyment, genuine passion, and a “love of the game” (what we at KPA Elite Performance call “right stuff motivation”) can be tough. As parents, in our desire for our kids be the best they can be, we may end up creating an environment that is driven by rewards, punishment, pressure, and guilt. This environment can have many adverse affects that may impact our kids performance on all levels.

This New York Times piece from 2008 tells the story of multiple Villanova University student athletes struggling with the day-to-day demands of being a full time NCAA Division 1 athlete. Unfortunately, these stories have become all too common. Early in her freshman year, Stephanie Campbell was overwhelmed by the onslaught of class, team meetings and practice; a lifestyle that forced her to sacrifice all of her personal time and ultimately led her to question if she wanted to continue at all. In response, her mother sat her down and offered her own brutally honest take:

“Villanova costs more than $40,000 a year to attend. They’re paying you $19,000 to play field hockey. At your age, there is no one out there anywhere who is going to pay you that kind of money to do anything. And that’s how you have to look at this: It’s a job, but it’s a great job.”

While Campbell ultimately stuck it out, countless others did not. Citing coaches on campus, the New York Times article suggests that as many as 15 percent of athletes on aid quit within two years. Campbell says that of the 10 who initially arrived on campus with her, only four made it all the way through.

What are we to make of Campbell’s motivation for continuing?

What happens when the road becomes challenging?

“It’s a job.”

The last sentence of Kathleen Campbell’s quote tells the story here. “Its a job” sounds numerous alarms for us because research has found that the source(s) of one’s motivation have major consequences for the quality of experience and persistence over time (for a short video introduction, I suggest watching “the surprising truth about what motivates us”). In the Campbells’ case, Stephanie’s mothers’ comments equate her continued playing of the sport with an extrinsic source: money. Interestingly, the same article quotes Villanova baseball player Tim Poydenis, who reveals his opposite, intrinsic (right stuff motivation) drive to continue playing:

“we love what we do and it’s worth it.”

Professionalizing Youth Sports

Of course, this contrast between playing for money and playing for love should not shock us given how we have professionalized youth sports. Watch HBO’s youth sports documentary, Trophy Kids. Or have a look at a 2014 ESPN sports poll which reveals the latest concerns among parents: the emphasis on winning over having fun, rising costs for participation and travel, and increasing risk of injury and burnout.

The dropout literature only confirms these disturbing trends and their impact on motivation. A 2014 study of over 2000 articles on youth sport dropout found that the strongest predictors of remaining committed were related to intrinsic, or “right stuff” motivation: autonomy (feeling in control of one’s actions), perceived competence (sense of ability) and relatedness (connection to others).

From our perspective, dropout is the inevitable consequence of any experience that loses its intrinsic appeal, when we stop enjoying it for its own sake. When sport becomes simply a means to secure some external reward or satisfy outside expectations, the willingness to push through in those hard times becomes even more difficult.

KPA Elite Performance knows that this landscape is tricky and that few can offer practical solutions for how to move forward. Our programs dive into the heart of the matter by breaking down motivation, lifestyle and environmental influences that can shape your child’s long-term future. Parents who take advantage of this KPA Elite Parent program give themselves access towards truly understanding their child’s ideal performance conditions. Parenting is an elite sport in and of itself. How you live your life and achieve your goals directly influences how your child optimizes their own potential.

If you are interested in further information please feel free to contact us.

Written by:

Keith Power, KPA CEO

Vincent Minjares, KPA Associate

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Are You Maximizing Your Child’s Performance Potential?

 The Youth Sport Scene in 2015

Having been involved with elite level youth sports for 25 years, it is clear the expectations today for our young athletes have never been higher. Today, the goal is to identify talent early and develop it. Parents and kids alike feel the pressure to navigate this hyper-competitive, pressure-filled, make-it-or-break-it world of youth sport. As parents, we often ask ourselves, “Am I doing enough?” “Am I doing too much? “Am I doing the right things?” A recent 2014 ESPN sports poll outlines some of these concerns. KPA Elite Performance can help provide answers to those questions.

How do I become an Elite Parent?

At KPA Elite Performance we have a passion to help every parent become an elite parent. Being an “elite” parent isn’t defined by having your kid on the All-State Team, on the honor roll at school, or getting a scholarship to a top Division 1 College. It isn’t about following the crowd and copying what other parents do just because their kid received a scholarship. Being an elite parent is about being the best you can be as a sport centric parent by having the highest level of sport parenting knowledge, skills and tools possible at your disposal. It’s about ensuring your child can reach their maximum potential – as a person, as a student and as an athlete. If you want to maximize your child’s performance potential, KPA has a wealth of experience to ensure you can achieve that lofty goal.

Maximizing Student Athlete Performance

Over the past 25 years, KPA Elite Performance has researched, collaborated with, and worked with hundreds of elite performers in sport, business, education, the military, performing arts and show business. This led us to develop The KPA Elite Performance Model™, which is a simple, yet powerful way of understanding performance and how to execute on an elite level at an intense, consistent and sustainable manner. It can be applied to any performance environment.

The basis of our model applied to the world of sports parenting is your child’s performance as an athlete, a student and person is made up of six key skills or “cogs”.

1. Performance Culture – this is the day-to-day environment, which is created for your child. It’s the bedrock of performance, because it can have such an enormous positive or negative impact on your child’s academic performance, sports performance and behavior. Your child’s performance culture is influenced by friends, coaches and teachers, but most of all it’s YOU the parent who have the greatest impact!
2. Physical Skills – these are the physical requirements of your child’s sport/s or position/s. This includes speed, power, strength, endurance, agility and mobility. It’s important to note that these physical skills develop at different rates. Watch any youth sport game and you’ll notice some kids look like they could be fifteen and others like they are only eight years old!
3. Mental Skills – this is the mental toughness and winning mind-set required by your child to excel in sport, academics and in life. This includes skills such as resilience, focus, confidence, the ability to perform under pressure and what we at KPA call “right stuff” motivation™ – motivation driven by passion and a “love of the game” – not by punishment, rewards, control and guilt which are poor quality motivators. See “the surprising truth about what motivates us” for more details.
4. Technical Skills – these are the general and sport specific motor skills, or techniques that need to be developed by your child. For example, a soccer player needs to be able to pass with both feet, and be a strong tackler. A point guard in basketball needs good distribution/passing skills, good handling skills and the ability to lay up with both hands.
5. Tactical Skills – understanding the ‘X’s and O’s’ of your role, event or sport. In team sports such as basketball, baseball, football, softball, lacrosse and water polo players need to learn offensive and defensive formations. It is very important however to note though that because of the way a child’s brain develops, the parts that control spatial awareness do not fully mature until around the ages of 14-16 or beyond. So don’t expect your ten year old to have the tactical intellect of a seasoned pro! Younger kids just cannot process that information well enough.
6. Lifestyle Skills – this is your child’s ability to achieve balance and to manage the challenges of academics, life and sport. It’s the “off the field” stuff. This includes their ability to manage themselves, their workload, social media and sleep. There’s plenty of research out there to suggest as parents, the more we manage our children and the longer we manage them as they mature, the more it negatively impacts their study skills, social skills and sporting success. We end up ‘killing them’ with kindness.

How well you are able to execute each of these skills has a direct relationship to the outcomes or results you and your child achieve. Put simply, the quality of your child’s technical, tactical, mental, physical, and lifestyle skills combined with the quality of the performance culture you establish for your child will dictate success or failure! This model is represented visually below:

The KPA Elite Performance Model™

Some important things to note about this model:

1. Every child is different and has individual performance needs.

Sometimes we forget that our child is an individual. They each have different personalities, different beliefs, different academic and sporting strengths and weakness compared to other kids. Each child is different in terms of their  maturation rates academically, physically, mentally, and emotionally  Sometimes as parents we may tend to make unreasonable comparisons of  our kid to other kids.  Listening to other parents speaking about their child’s academic or sporting prowess, I get a little concerned when they say they are disappointment that their child ‘isn’t as good’ or as another child. What about the uniqueness of each child?

The KPA Performance Model™ recognizes that every student athlete is different and needs to have a performance development plan that is specific to them. One size fits all, just doesn’t fit all! For example, one student athlete may need to hone in on improving lifestyle skills areas like work life balance and sleep. Another student athlete may need to work more on mental skills areas such as resilience or confidence, while another may need to be focused on improving their shooting, passing hitting, pitching or tackling.

Looking at our model can you identify where your child’s strengths are? Where should the real areas of focus be for their improvement?

2. Performance cogs do not live in a vacuum.

During my many years of working in elite youth sport as a coach, a coach educator, a Professor of Sport Psychology, a parent coach, as well as my time as the High Performance Director at Cal Athletics (UC Berkeley), two things are clear. Firstly, talent is not enough for youth sport success. Secondly, hard work is not the secret of youth sport success. I’ve seen a lot of talented kids who work hard not maximize their potential. Being your best or moving beyond your best is actually about doing a lot of things very well. Its about ensuring that every one of those six cogs are nurtured, developed and executed. That is the secret of youth sport success and something every parent has the ability to influence positively.

These six skills or cogs do not live in a vacuum; they impact and influence each other. They are like interconnected cogs in a highly tuned machine. Turn one cog and it affects others. If one of the cogs is defective, it negatively influences other cogs.

For example, a young soccer player may be very skillful, tactically strong and be a great physical presence, but if they lack mental skills, like confidence, the ability to perform under pressure or being resilient after a set back in a game, that “weak” mental cog will essentially cancel out those physical, technical, and tactical cog.

Similarly, a young student athlete may have great physical and technical sport talent but be poor at managing their time, academic workload, and lack self discipline (lifestyle skills cog). Those lifestyle skills cogs are not in sync with the physical and technical cogs. That may result in a missed scholarship opportunity at top Division1 School.

Most important of all is the impact of the performance culture cog – which is the biggest and most important cog in the machine. As parents we may feel that if we do all we can on the physical/mental/technical/tactical and lifestyle skills cogs we’ve nailed it. You may think that because your kid is at a reputable sports club and you are investing in additional sport and academic support services that all bases are covered? But what about the performance culture, which is the environment you are creating for your student athlete? Is this optimizing their talent and potential or is it hurting it? How do you know?

The bottom line here is that talent and hard work alone won’t produce sustained elite level performance for your child. It’s about maximizing all six performance cogs. Again, if one performance cog is weak, it affects the other cogs in the performance machine and that means less than optimal results for you and your child.

3. Lifestyle skills are the glue that binds things together.

 With elevated expectations and scholarships on the line, our strong emotional attachments to our kids can cause us to lose to sight of the big picture. With this in mind, life skills are immeasurably critical. For example, are your kids developing the confidence to perform their best? Can they reflect on their own performance to learn and grow? Are they independent enough to manage their academic, athletic, and personal responsibilities? Do they have strong core values to help them navigate decisions? Are they able to build strong relationships with others?

Lifestyle skills can best be thought of as your child’s ability to self manage. The sooner they learn self-management skills such as self-control, social media management, grit, and self-regulation of their behavior, the better their chances of short and long terms success. Lifestyle skills are the glue that binds all the performance cogs together. For example research illustrates self-discipline is more important to success than IQ, that managing sleep has a big impact on academic performance and sport skills and that mismanaging social media can have countless negative consequences for children.

The point is that your child may have academic skills and sport talent, but if they have poor self-discipline and self-management skills that talent will be unfulfilled. In my experience when I see  student athletes struggle as freshman at University, as I did at Cal (Berkeley), it wasn’t because of a lack of  talent or a poor work ethic. It’s because they struggled managing the demands of sport, academics, and university life through poor lifestyle management skills.

When I spoke to these students and their parents to understand why the lifestyle management skills were so poor, I discovered  that in their desire for their kids to succeed, these parents had “killed their kids with kindness”. The parents had done everything for them through middle school and high school and so these students didn’t know how to manage their time, set schedules, be self-disciplined or set goals. These poor life skills had a knock on effect on the other cogs which resulted in academic and sports performance issues

4. Performance Culture – The Critical Factor

As you will see in the model, culture is the overriding performance component that drives all the other cogs. Culture is where your child’s motivation for academic and sporting endeavor comes from and where the motivation for change, development, and improvement comes from. Without it, performance cannot flourish or be maximized.

Sports parents are the financial providers, emotional supporters, chauffeurs, snack makers, and mentors to our young athletes. More importantly, our role as parents is to ensure we create the “culture” that our young athletes live in daily. How we think, respond, and communicate with our children teaches them how to do the same in their own world. Our behavior and expectations as parents therefore set the tone and culture. That culture can make or break our child’s academic, sport, and personal success.

What’s clear is that as parents we can’t always ‘buy’ an elite performance culture. Recent research shows that parents are investing significantly in professional services such as specialized skills coaching, strength and conditioning coaches, and academic tutoring, in the expectation that this will produce ‘success’. But the bottom line is that research shows that youth sport enjoyment and motivation declines as parental spending and control increases – the exact opposite effect to that which parents desire!

At KPA, we talk about culture in terms of the challenge balance™. This means as parents, if we create an environment which is too challenging, that can crush a student athletes desire to excel. At the other end of the spectrum if we provide too little personal support as parents and outsource our responsibilities to others such as teachers, coaches, and tutors alone, then this too will adversely affect a child’s wellbeing and performance. Getting that balance isn’t always easy!

In Summary

Parenting is your lifetime career. Your job description as a parent is constantly evolving. Shouldn’t you have the skills, tools, and knowledge to keep pace with your child’s progressing needs? Having the ability to produce an elite performing child requires the skills and mindset of an elite parent. Providing the opportunities for your children to succeed academically, socially, and athletically is not a simple task. However, possessing the capabilities to incorporate the elite performance model is essential to the realization of your goals for your child.

 Fine-tuning performance to help a child reach their maximum potential is not achieved through “five easy steps” or in one fell swoop. It is a process that requires an in-depth understanding of all of the various components that encompass success. The KPA Elite Parent Program is an invaluable resource for sport parents who are fully committed to doing whatever is necessary to ensure their child does not leave any potential on the table. Gaining access to an advanced method for pursing elite performance is only the initial step. What follows is a progression of knowledge that will build and strengthen your child’s future.

For information regarding the KPA Elite Parent Program, click here.

Written By:

Keith Power, KPA CEO

“It [sleep] is something that I’m experimenting with now to try to get us to a point where we can come out and be a little bit more sharp…Our attention span isn’t always the greatest.” 

-Brian Shaw, Denver Nuggets Coach, on canceling morning shoot around to give players more time to sleep

Athlete sleep has been in the news recently, especially the NBA. Denver Nuggets coach Brian Shaw has decided to abolish early morning shoot around before games in order to give his players more time to sleep. This comes on the heels of multiple athletes taking proactive rest, including Kobe Bryant, LeBron James, Derrick Rose and, of course, the San Antonio Spurs’ annual efforts to rest Tim Duncan, Tony Parker and Manu Ginobili for the playoffs. Relatedly, ESPN began a series on concerns about the NBA’s scheduling of back-to-back games for the impact on rest and recovery. In response to news about Shaw’s decision, ESPN analyst Kevin Pelton recently emphasized the sport science work being done in this area:

There’s some science to this too. In an Insider series on the NBA’s schedule, Dr. Charles Czeisler, director of the sleep medicine division at Harvard Medical School, informed us that lack of sleep can have serious negative effects on a player.

You lose significant reaction time,which can cause injury, and retention of information is diminished if you don’t get enough zzz’s. Furthermore, testosterone levels can be drastically depleted if a player has a sleepless night or a series of abbreviated nights of sleep.

Parents of developing athletes, take note. Taking rest and sleep seriously isn’t just for professional athletes. Your child too can benefit from what the research on sleep and athletic performance has been saying. As it concerns psychomotor functioning, sleep researchers have found that:

Slow wave sleep ensures the release of growth hormone, which promotes protein synthesis for body repair

Stage 2 harvests sprindle production, which integrates motor learning and any implicit learning.

 REM (dream) sleep sharpens spatial orientation and perceptual skills for things like hearing important sounds and performance of visual perception tasks


When Stanford Men’s basketball players slept for 10 hours a night, free throw accuracy and sprint times improved above baseline.

Proper Sleep is Essential to Performance

In many ways, the sleep research seems to confirm our common sense suspicions about the day-to-day impact of sleep. Yet, consistent quality sleep eludes teenagers and adults alike. Parents today know the challenge of convincing your teenage son or daughter to turn off their smartphone and hit the lights. Of course, therein lies the heart of the matter: habits & lifestyle. We know that the beneifts of sleep won’t acrue simply because we know the benefits of sleep! There has to be a commensurate change in evening routine. Noted expert Cheri Mah points this out

A strong foundation of good sleep habits is essential and is especially helpful when you may have difficulty sleeping during competition or post-exercise

Fine-tuning performance to help a child reach their maximum potential is not achieved through “six easy steps” or with one fell swoop. It is a process that requires an in-depth understanding of all of the various components that encompass success. Sleep is just one of these components.

The KPA Elite Parent Program is an invaluable resource for sport parents who are fully committed to doing whatever is necessary to ensure their child does not leave any potential on the table. Gaining access to an advanced method for pursing elite performance is only the initial step. What follows is a progression of knowledge that will build and strengthen your child’s future.

For information regarding with KPA Elite Parent Program, click here.

Written By:

Keith Power, KPA CEO

Vincent Minjares, KPA Associate

How many times a week do you hear or see the terms, “poor performance”, “great performance”, “performance management”, “key performance indicators” or “high performance”? Although you may hear or see the term performance referenced all the time, do you really understand what performance is? More importantly, do you know what to do to actually improve your performance and others in the workplace?

Over the past 25 years, KPA Elite Performance has researched and consulted for hundreds of elite performers in sport, business, the military, performing arts, and show business. This led us to develop The KPA Elite Performance Model™, which is a simple, yet powerful way of understanding performance and how to perform like the elite in an intense, consistent, and sustainable manner.

The basis of our model is that your performance is made up of six key skills that are represented as cogs.

1. Performance Culture – this is the environment in which you perform. It’s the bedrock of performance. This is impacted both by you (in terms of the positive or negative choices you make) and external factors such as the company culture and co-workers attitudes and behaviors. An elite performance culture is one in which we can learn, grow, and excel. How often do we excel within a positive supportive culture and how often do we feel demoralized or demotivated when we experience an unsupportive or negative performance culture? There is no end to the research that supports the importance of performance culture to business results. 
2. Physical Skills – these are the physical needs required to support our day-to-day performance like, wellness, nutrition, and proper exercise. It doesn’t mean you have to train like an Olympic Athlete to perform well in the workplace, but there are hundreds of academic articles that support the notion that physical wellness has a huge performance advantage in the workplace.
3. Mental Skills – this is the mental toughness and mind set required to excel in your role. This includes resilience, focus, confidence, the ability to perform under pressure and what we at KPA call “right stuff” motivation™ – motivation driven by passion and a “love of the game” – not by punishment, rewards, control and guilt which are poor quality motivators. Read “The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us”for more details.
4. Technical Skills – learning the skills required for your role or position. For example: IT, Finance, Sales, Leadership, Management, etc. This list also includes skills such as critical thinking skills, listening skills, and reflection skills. This article will help to clarify what KPA term technical skills.
5. Tactical Skills – understanding the ‘X’s and O’s’ of your role and knowing what, when, and how to deliver. For example, a marketing director will need to have a strategic, tactical, and operational marketing plan that aligns to the company’s strategic plan.
6. Lifestyle Skills – this is the ability to achieve the balance between work, family, and personal needs and commitments. It’s the “off the field” stuff, as they say in sport! This would include self-management skills, organizational skills, and sleep management. Investing in lifestyle skills isn’t just a “nice to do thing” .It has a huge impact on workplace performance and provides a tremendous return on investment for companies.

How well you are able to execute each of these skills has a direct relationship to the outcomes or results you achieve in the workplace and in your personal life. Put simply, the quality of your technical, tactical, mental, physical, and lifestyle skills combined with the quality of your performance culture will dictate success or failure! This model is represented visually below.

The KPA Elite Performance Model™

Some important things to note about this model:

1. These are skills!

Firstly, these six performance components or interconnected cogs are skills. That means they can be learned, developed, and nurtured like any skill. They are not “gifts”. They are not something you either have or do not have, nor are they set in stone. They can be enriched.

Even performance culture is a skill. Culture is the way individuals behave and you have influence over the way you and other people behave. You can choose to have an elite culture or a debilitative one by the way you impact others.

2. Elite performance is doing many things in a great way

Secondly, these six skills do not live in a vacuum; they impact and influence each other. They are like interconnected cogs in a highly tuned machine. Turn one cog and it affects others. If one of the cogs is defective, it negatively affects and influences other cogs.

For example, let’s take presenting. You may have respectable or great technical skills and know how to put a strong presentation together. You may have decent tactical skills and know how to work a room effectively when presenting. But what about your physical skills? It’s been a long week. Do you have the physical energy to wow your audience? What about lifestyle skills? Do you really think that missing lunch or grabbing a candy bar and a cup of coffee just before you speak is not going to negatively affect your presentation? What about your mental skills? If you are too nervous and anxious, can you calm yourself down? If you are feeling tired or low, can you energize yourself? Can you maintain focus? And what about culture? Do you have people around you who can support your preparation for that presentation in some helpful way or are they just too busy?

The bottom line here is that performance (what you do to acquire results) is holistic and your performance skills are integrated. Your technical and tactical skills do not live in a separate universe devoid of any influence from your lifestyle, mind, and body. What you think, what you eat, your recovery regime, your mind-set, your resilience, your quality of sleep and so on have a huge impact on what you deliver and the results you get. Getting performance right in these critical six areas can make or break you.

3. Focus on mental, physical, and lifestyle aspects of performance

Thirdly, the higher the level people operate in an organization, for example at middle/senior management level, leadership level and ‘C Level’, the less time they tend to spend working on the performance skills that will truly impact the bottom line results they achieve. Our research and experience show that typically business performers over emphasize the importance of technical and tactical skills and spend a disproportionate amount of time operating in these areas.

Not enough time is spent on developing the areas that ensure as performers they operate at the elite level –which is about performing at an intense, consistent, and sustainable level. Somehow the mind and body don’t exist anymore! But to be elite, you have to focus on the physical, mental, and lifestyle skills cogs of performance as they cogs drive your technical and tactical skills. Back to our presentation example again.

Elite sports performers and military performers  have to constantly work on honing their skills and tactics but they also consciously and consistently work on the abilities that enable them to execute their skills and tactics under the toughest of conditions. They work hard on areas like relaxation, sleep, mental preparation, nutrition, and hydration for performance, personal management, wellness, and physical preparation and capacity.

4. We all have individual performance needs

Fourthly, the KPA Performance Model™ recognizes that everyone is different and everyone needs an individualized elite performance development plan. One performer may need to hone in on improving lifestyle skills areas like work, life balance, and sleep. Another performer may need to work on mental skills areas such as resilience or confidence, while yet other performers may need to work on different mental skills such as mindfulness or physical skills like building physical energy and mental preparation. One size certainly does not fit all when it comes to elite performance.

5. Performance Culture is huge

Finally, never underestimate the importance of Performance Culture. As you will see in the model, culture is the overriding performance component that drives all the other cogs.

If you don’t get your personal performance culture right or if the company or team culture is debilitative in some way, this can have a huge negative effect on the ability of individuals or teams to become truly elite performers. Culture is where the motivation for change, development and improvement comes from and without it performance cannot flourish or be sustained.

In Summary

At KPA Elite Performance, we believe the real issue is that both companies and their key players often do not see themselves as human performers, although ironically what they do everyday is perform. They perform themselves, they perform for their for company, to their co-workers and to clients. Yet, they have not learned the art and science of elite human performance and the best practices that prevail in arenas such as sport, the military, and the performing arts. The lessons learned from those other arenas are directly applicable and transferrable to the world of individual and team performance in business.

By understanding what human performance is, what human performance skills are and by measuring, monitoring, managing, and enhancing these skills, at KPA Elite Performance we can help clients ensure that their key performers and teams can operate at a higher and more sustained level.

We’re talking about what we at KPA like to call SELP – Sustained Elite Level Performance.

Our flagship Elite Performer program can help you reach towards an improved SELP and beyond your best.

Written By:

Keith Power, KPA CEO

Download the PDF here

Evidence Based Practice Relies on Fact, Not Assumptions

How Can You Incorporate EBP?

Let’s lead with a typical difficulty that frequently derails a positive work environment, a lack of communication. How can EBP assist with the struggles that come from disrupted communication? Applying EBP to this situation would involve another level of analysis. It would look and feel something like this: What evidence do I have that the team is poor at communicating? What aspects of communication are they poor at? How do they compare to best practice for team communication? How do I know that a day spent doing a specific team-building activity will really help my team’s communication skills? How will I know it worked? How am I going to measure how well we communicate? How am I going to evaluate the success of the team-building intervention?

EBP is ultimately about ensuring the diagnosis of problems and issues are based on sound evidence. The goal of EBP is to eliminate unsound or excessively risky practices in favor of those that have better outcomes.

The cost to human performance, a successful company culture and company profits is enormous – yet it continues unabated.

What is evidence-based practice?

Evidence-based practice (EBP) (EBP) originated in the fields of medicine, psychology and sport science and is about applying the scientific method to diagnose problems and create solutions. The Scientific method refers to the body of techniques for acquiring new knowledge, or correcting and integrating previous knowledge. It is based on gathering observable, empirical and measurable evidence subject to specific principles of reasoning.

EBP is a very long way from “I don’t think my team is very successful with communication, so I think they need to do some “team building” exercises.”

This may sound a bit harsh, and I don’t mean to offend, but think back to recent challenges you or your colleagues have had with individuals or teams in your workplace. How well did you really diagnose the problems, and were your solutions actually effective? It’s about changing your mindset to one that always asks, “what’s the evidence?” before diagnosing problems and looking for solutions.

The cost of poor evidence

If you don’t have quality evidence to base your decisions on, then you are severely compromising yourself, your colleagues and your business. You are making pivotal decisions about your human capital, based on experience and gut feel alone. Nothing wrong with experience and gut feel, it’s a great asset – but in isolation it can be tremendously dangerous.

Poor diagnosis and ineffective solutions for human performance can prove very costly – at least $1.4 million in one case I recently reviewed with a client.

A large retail organization invested in global sales training program from a training company. The program proved to be a disaster and was having no impact on the sales teams. When I sat down with the owner of the training company and asked to be shown the evidence on which the program was based, he came up blank. He stated it was based on his experience of being a top sales manager and “stuff” he had used and read over the years.

Four pitfalls to avoid if you want to apply EBP

In the case above there was simply a lack of hard evidence. No real proof that the problem diagnosed was really the issue, or evidence that the solution addressed the problem. There was insufficient data to do a diagnosis, no review of suitable solutions and options and no evaluation. So here are four things to avoid in order to that you can really achieve EBP. 

1. Don’t allow your beliefs to over-rule the evidence

More often than we are aware, or would like to admit to, our personal beliefs get the better of us regardless of the evidence. As a result it’s extremely easy to base decisions on beliefs alone. This can have dire consequences.

2. Ensure the solution is right for your needs

Just because a particular initiative or program has been or is seen to be successful for one individual, team or company doesn’t automatically mean that by copying it, the success will be emulated elsewhere.

3. Falling for the expert trap – don’t get blinded by smoke and mirrors

Never be afraid to ask for as much information and evidence as possible from the consultant or colleague who is offering to diagnose and/or fix problems. Whilst none of us can possibly know all there is to know about human performance, we all have the capability of asking searching questions if we are looking for solutions to needs.

4. Don’t be a dedicated follower of the latest fad

Human performance solutions are like diets – there are so many to choose from and so many fads. It’s a minefield out there! Refrain from selecting solutions on the basis of that it is what everyone else seems to do, or because someone said to you it worked for them (whatever “it worked” means), or because someone tells you it’s the solution to your problems. Remember – get some good evidence that it’s the right solution for your needs by applying the EBP framework. It will save fortunes in time, energy and resources.

In Summary

At KPA Elite Performance we can help clients ensure that their key performers and teams can operate at a higher and more sustained level. We can help move you beyond your best. By applying the KPA Elite Performance Model to your performance challenges we can help ensure you understand what the real challenge is and what the appropriate solutions should be. This is how we can help you to apply EBP to your business. Why guess when you can know?

By understanding what human performance is, what human performance skills are and by measuring, monitoring, managing and enhancing these skills, we’re talking about what we at KPA like to call SELP – Sustained Elite Level Performance. Our flagship program can also help take you beyond your best.

To that SELP level.

Keith Power, KPA CEO

The Realities of Change

Are the New Years Resolutions still holding fast? Are you keeping up with the promises you made to start the year? Still enjoying a new healthy diet? Working on that exercise centric lifestyle? If you are then wonderful! However, research shows us that less than 10% of resolutions and personal goals succeed. The looming question is:

“Why does this happen?”

Let’s face it; you probably have all the technical facts and knowledge you need to make a change. I’m sure you know that to lose weight you need to eat less and exercise more, and you’ve probably been on enough management training courses to know what you need to adjust in order to improve your career.

So why aren’t you following through with it?

Likely it is because you haven’t created that deep, internal, and emotional engagement. As Alan Deutschman noted in his book “Change or Die” people tend to drive others and themselves to change through the “Three F’s”: Force, Facts and Fear. Individuals attempt to “force” themselves to change, try to rely on “facts” to make a case for change and drive their change from “fear”.

The problem is these Three F’s are external motivators that won’t create positive emotional engagement for you. You end up driving yourself to change through negativity, guilt punishment or reward. These are short term, low quality change motivators. Sustainable change is more thoroughly created through high quality internal motivators such as passion, love, and positivity.

Learning to Change from Addicts

How do you create a sustainable change driven through passion, love, and positivity while achieving true emotional engagement with your goals? Fortunately, there’s much we can learn from addiction research and treatment. At this point you may be thinking that you don’t have a drug habit, you’re not an alcoholic and you don’t smoke, so what does it have to do with me? Well it is back to the Three F’s. Addicts usually don’t change because they force themselves to or because they have the facts they need or because of the fear of not changing. They have to create a love of wanting to change. So can you!

Addicts by definition find it extremely difficult to change – they are addicted to a particular behavior. They may need to change but don’t want to, or they want to change but can’t change. Perhaps this is something you may identify with in your life, needing to change, even wanting to change, but just finding it too challenging to do so?

So let’s take the principles from the world of addiction research and treatment that have helped seemingly unchangeable people change. Lets apply these principles to assisting you in making the changes that you really want, whether it is exercising more, feeling less stressed, or establishing improved people skills.

The Four Key Principles to Successful Change

Below are the four key steps, which should create the internal motivation you need for change. These steps will help you to understand how ready you are to change, address any ambivalence you have about change, and help you build and maintain the motivation for change. This is based upon the work of Miller and Rollnick who established the “Motivational Interviewing” method for creating positive and sustainable internal change.

Step 1 – Know how ready, willing and able you are to change!

One of the central pieces of information gained from addiction research is the knowledge that people need to be ready, willing, and able to change – in order to mentally sustain behavioral change. Unless you can put ticks against each of those three areas, then it’s unlikely you’ll maintain your motivation for change.

Willing to Change – this is the level of importance you ascribe to change. Unless mentally you recognize there is a large enough gap between your current way of behaving (e.g. too little exercise or not good enough people skills) and the ideal pattern of behavior you desire (e.g. enjoying regular exercise and activity, or having highly honed people skills) then change simply won’t happen.

Able to change – this is the confidence you have for change. You may feel that change is important but not be confident enough to change. Usually this is our self-defence kicking in! For example, you may think: “I know my people skills are letting me down…but I’m too set in my ways to change and I just don’t feel I can do it”. Let’s face it; you don’t need to have a personality transplant to make a few adjustments to your behavioral style!

Ready for change – this is a matter of priorities. You may think that a combination of high importance and high confidence would be enough to instigate change – but it isn’t. How many times do you think to yourself something like: “It’s really important that I engage in more exercise/spend more time with my family…and I know I can do it…BUT I’m so busy and I have this meeting/presentation/report to finish.”

So, if changing a specific behavior is not a priority it won’t happen – “I’ll start tomorrow” is a clue to your own self-deception!

Change Exercise 1: Readiness for Change

First, think about an area of your personal or business life that you want or need to change. Then on a 1-10 scale score how ready you are to change (how much of a priority it is in your life), score how willing you are to change (the level of importance) and then score how able you are to change (how confident you are of succeeding).

Next review the scores. If you score less than 5 in any area then you have little chance of change success. If you score 6-7 in any area your odds of success are probably 50/50. If you score 8 or above in each area, then you likely have an 80% chance of making and sustaining that change.

The point here is that if you have low or moderate scores then you will have to be very honest with yourself and acknowledge that embarking upon change in this particular area won’t be successful.

You now need to think about why a score is low in any one or more areas, what it is you need to think or do to change it, and how you can change it. Only when the thing you want to change becomes important, a key priority in your life and you are confident about achieving it can the change become sustainable.

Step 2 – Address Ambivalence

How often do you think, “I really want to lose weight/improve overall health…but I don’t like exercise” or “I know I need to make more time for my team…but I have too much to complete.” Although you are able to consider the possibility of changing, you may be ambivalent about it – mentally weighing the pros and cons of changing your behavior. Ambivalence is a challenge typical to individuals with addictive behaviors and one that you can learn from. Not being able to balance the desire to change with the desire to continue with the negative action directly impacts our ability to prevent self-sabotage.

For example a stressed-out business manager may have plenty of fantastic reasons to manage the impact of work stress on their life. Even though this is the stress that is causing them physical and mental burnout, poor performance productivity and no quality time with their family, they continue to defer change. This is often due to the fact that the business manager’s ambivalence towards his goals controls his decision making process.

However, there are also factors that are preventing that change – fear of not being seen as committed by their boss, fear of not hitting targets or fear of making lifestyle changes. This person may feel that the big picture benefits associated with making that change won’t outweigh the short-term costs on not making that change.

Change Exercise 2: Ambivalence Test

Think about that one thing you want to change – what are the pro’s and con’s of changing and what are the pro’s and con’s of not changing? Spend some time writing down and running through your personal change scenario in the way that I have above. Create a passionate emotional engagement and mindset that drives you to really want to love to make those changes. Acknowledge but move away from focusing on a mindset that continually creates that fear of change or excuses of why you can’t do it. If not now then when!

Step 3: Have a Clear Plan of Action

According to the Stages of Change Model, (Prochaska and DiClemente 1983), which was developed to understand how addicts change behaviour; a clear plan for change is crucial to the change process. This may sound like “stating the obvious” – but you’d be amazed how often people launch themselves into change without a plan.

Getting up one day and saying to yourself “I’m going to get fit” or “I’m going to improve my organizational skills” has less than a 5% chance of success – without a plan. Think about it, how detailed is your current personal change plan compared for example to a business project plan? Why wouldn’t your change plan be as thorough as a project plan?

So for example if you want or need to improve your presentation skills, what’s the plan? What part do you need to improve? Is it technical? – Do you need to increase your power point skills? Is it physical? – Are you living on junk food and not having the right energy levels for success? Is it mental? – Do you feel too nervous or lose focus?

Change Exercise 3: Personal Performance Plan

Set aside an hour and write a detailed change plan of what you need to do, how you will do it and when you will do it by – and don’t forget to make it a SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Time-Based) goal! Too clichéd? Too simple? Too obvious? Never forget simplicity is genius!

Step 4: Learn that it’s ok to relapse!

Along the way to permanent change the vast majority of people experience relapse – in fact it is much more common to have at least one or more relapses than not. If you relapse you may feel discouragement or even be angry with yourself. While relapse can be discouraging, the key point to understand is that the majority of individuals who successfully change do not follow a straight path to a lifetime of new and improved habits.

Going back to the addiction research; gamblers, alcoholics, smokers and drug users will often relapse – but in the long term tend to be successful in beating their addiction when they learn to love change and became emotionally engaged when they followed the path that was outlined above.

The important thing is that if you do slip, you shouldn’t see yourself as having failed. Rather, you should analyze how the slip happened and use it as an opportunity to learn how to cope differently. In fact, relapses can be important opportunities for learning and becoming stronger. Relapsing is like falling off a horse – the best thing you can do is get right back on again!

How KPA Elite Performance Can Help Achieve Change Goals

At KPA we are aware of the concept that change and elite performance requires structural support and a strong foundation. We provide the elements necessary through what we call “elite performance architecture”. This focuses on collaborating with you to understand your personal, team, and organizational needs in whatever arena you compete in and ensuring that the solutions that are driven by YOU. This ensures emotional and passionate engagement designed to dramatically increase the likelihood of success.

KPA Elite Performance is an organization that is mindful of the fact that hard work and talent alone may not be enough to create the lasting impactful change that you desire. The elite performers that we support – top CEO’s, Olympic and Professional sport champions, show business personalities, and elite military units- know that success is rarely obtained without an intricate understanding of the process. Gaining inside information into what that encompasses is at the heart of what we provide at KPA Elite Performance.

Keith Power, KPA CEO