by Dr. Frank W. Dick OBE
President, European Athletics Coaches Association

1. Keep Vision and Values Front and Centre
The coach is a visionary and lives by adhering to core values.  He should have very real strength of character and commitment to personal integrity and honesty.  Winning at any point should never come at the expense of values.

2. Think Deeply about and Pursue Holistic Education
The coach sees himself as preparing people not only for achievement in sport, but through sport for a life of personal fulfillment and for the enrichment of community.

3. Dedicated to Life-Long Personal Development and Professionalism
The coach tirelessly pursues personal education, formally and informally, both in the performance related sciences and in liberal arts.  He sees the journey to coaching excellence as a never ending story; seen not only in terms of a chosen sport and coaching theory and practice, but in understanding how to successfully live a balanced and full life, while facing tougher and tougher challenges in the chosen field of endeavour.

4. Mentally Tough
The coach is focused, determine, tenacious, hard – even ruthless – but never cruel.  His resolve to overcome obstacles and challenges in pursuit of the agreed goal is unshakeable.  No matter how many setbacks, he has the resilience to keep coming back, to keep fighting.  He always has heart for the fight.  He persistently seeks for the advantage and no matter how small that is, he will seize it and maximize its value.  He is devoted to passing these qualities on to everyone he influences as coach.  That means driving them to go beyond what they think they are capable of, even when this means tears and pain.

5. Meticulous in Preparation
The coach takes the advice of Abraham Lincoln “If I had eight hours to chop down a tree; I’d spend six of them sharpening the axe.”

He is a master of strategic thinking and quality control, and is guardian of good order throughout the coaching process.  He is thorough in briefing and preparing his athlete, team, coaching colleagues, management and performance services experts for the specifics of a given competition or campaign; he constantly seeks new and better ways of doing so.  In this aspect of his role, he is thoroughly disciplined to system and method.  His approach to preparation includes anticipation and coping with uncertainty.

6. Excellent Communication Skills
The coach makes the complex simple and ensures that what is heard, seen, understood, and translated into action is exactly the intended response to his verbal, visual, and kinaesthetic messages.  He communicates as much through the emotions as the intellect, and leans heavily on anecdote, metaphor and simile, as on data and drawing board.

7. Relationship Management
The coach exercises intelligence in initializing social interaction and persistently applies best endeavours to ensure relationships work effectively for the individuals concerned and for the collective purpose.  This means taking time to understand each person in their sphere of influence; what they need from the relationship; what they bring to it; and how they can connect in learning, in performance, and in delivering the strength of independence.  The coach is always visible, accessible and approachable. 

8. Decision Making
The coach has exceptional decision-making abilities.  These range from decisions which determine the route to achieving long-term goals, to resolving situations under pressure and at speed, selecting the right course of action in a crisis.  So he is very competent at making the judgment to change direction from an agreed game plan in order to seize the opportunity of success for the enterprise.  He knows his most important decisions are selection of his team, from athlete to support staff.  His operational network to facilitate this is part of such selection.  He is well aware of his areas of strength and recruits people to make these even stronger.  He is equally aware of his weaknesses and brings in those who will compensate for these.  While challenging each person in the team to raise their game, he also expects to be challenged to raise his.  He creates a culture where correct decisions are based on what needs to be heard, which may not always be what is wanted to be heard.

9. Self-Knowledge and Awareness
The coach knows himself.  He never underestimates his leadership role, responsibilities, and accountabilities, yet he may understate his leadership value.  He is acutely aware of his limitations and measures himself persistently and more harshly than he measures others; 99% of his best he considers failure, even when in others he would see 51% of their best as a win.  He is true to himself and naturally to those professional standards of excellence for which he is known.  In being true to himself, he knows that, being human he is imperfect and even fallible.  Achievement, for him, is only in part reflected in performance and results in the competition arena.  Rather, it is in what he did and how he did it in his leadership and coaching roles, and, in the longer term, in his legacy to those whose lives he touches, to the sport, and to his community.

10. Belief, Faith and Trust
The coach radiates self-belief, belief in his people and belief that the agreed goals will be successfully achieved.  Those around him respond to this by believing in themselves and in him more.  A shared sense of personal value grows, fuelled by his passion, pride, patience, persistence and powers of persuasion.  Yet he has personal humility and an inbuilt sense of belonging to a great scheme of things.  He sees trust as pivotal in that scheme: his trust in others sharing in the struggle to reach the goal, and their trust in him.  It is a trust where each knows the other will do the right thing, and, whatever the outcome, all will learn to be even better in meeting challenges that will follow.  He has a great personal strength of spiritual faith according to his beliefs.  And, finally, he has an unshakeable conviction that even in those ruthless arenas of life where facts and figures conspire to sets limits to human performance, it is the intangible but irrepressible power of human spirit to go beyond those limits that is the winning difference.  The great coach fans the flame of that human spirit.

11. Passion
The coach is passionate about life, people, and coaching.  It is this that is at the root of his capacity to motivate.

“You won’t sweep anyone of their feet if you can’t be swept off your own.”
That passion is infectious; however, he is instinctively compassionate when occasion requires.
Renowned as one of the best motivational speakers today, Frank Dick is currently the President of the European Athletics Coaches Association and a board member of the UK Sports Institute, Scottish Institute of Sport and member of the IAAF Coaches Commission.