Creating a Collective Purpose
COLLECTIVE PURPOSE
We recently sat down with some of our advanced athletes to come up with a collective purpose for the group itself in advance of their upcoming competition in December.
I found this a really beneficial experience, finding out their ‘why’ in terms of understanding their reason for participating in our sport. I thought it would be worth sharing for any parents or coaches.
Why?
For most athletes, they understand the what and how when it comes to sport. What do we do when we are here? We train Calisthenics. How do we do it? We work on new moves or routines. Some of the straight forward answers we get. However, when we ask why, the conversation usually gets a bit more awkward!
We wanted them to highlight some reasons why they come over to train calisthenics. To get fit or strong wasn’t a strong enough answer as we can do that in any sport or gym. I wanted them to think about why they have chosen this sport in order to become fit or strong, as they called it.
This led to them having to think a bit more in-depth about their reasons for coming here and giving up so much of their time in order to improve in the sport. This led to the answers highlighted above. We placed all of these in a whiteboard and created our ‘collective purpose’.
After calling these individual reasons our ‘collective purpose’ I then showed the group the picture of the ship above, and caused a wave of confused faces as I did. I asked them, and I will ask you, to stick with me for a second!
I asked them to roughly describe what period in history they thought this ship came from. They came back with roughly the 1700-1800s. I said this would have been a time of great voyages and exploration. I explained that at the bottom of the boat each crew member would be asked to write their individual purpose on a plank of wood. This would allow them to find their own higher purpose and motivate them during their time on the ship.
I asked them to imagine what did they think those crew members might have wrote on the base of the ship. Examples came back of ‘explore, bring back money for my family, find new land’.
I highlighted that even though they all may have had individual reasons for being on the boat, they needed to work together in order to achieve the collective purpose as shipmates. This example was used to show that even though we may be an individual sport, all coming together with individual goals, we need the group in order to achieve them.
I think, and hope, this led to valuable discussion among the group about what we need to do together in order to achieve our individual aims and how we can support each other. What does the environment need to look like in a training session in order for the group to motivate each other? What does support look like to the group? This helped us to link together each individual person’s ‘why’ and create a collective purpose - weaving I and WE together.
I always find it really interesting to find out people’s why when it comes to sport. In this instance, I wanted to highlight that even though we are an individual sport, it is the environment and the support from the group that helps us all to achieve our aims - I think that’s a fascinating insight for any coach of an individual sport, or for a parent within our club.
If you are a parent, maybe ask your child ‘why’ they like the sport they are involved in. You don’t need to create a collective purpose whiteboard, but sometimes finding out why they are interested in sport is completely different to the reasons we think and this can help us find new perspective. As a coach, we tend to get bogged down with our own reasons for why we are involved in the sport, and don’t take the time to find out why the group we have in front of us are there. This is an important discovery and I would urge any coach to try and find out their team’s version of a collective purpose.
Our next event takes place Sunday December 4th, for our members, all information can be found below