Feature: Selected Sport and Physical Education Career OpportunitiesNo.52
January 2008
 
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  Feature: Selected Sport and Physical Education Career OpportunitiesNo.52
January 2008
 
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Can Elite Coaches have a Balanced Life?
Sean McCann

 

The Problem: High Coach Turnover = Low Performance
For the past three winter Olympic Games, entire coaching staffs have changed in some sports, ensuring a lack of coaching continuity from one Games to the next Olympic Winter Games. An important factor in many of these changes is the inability of many of our coaches to lead a balanced and healthy life. Some coaches have told us that it becomes a choice between a marriage and coaching. Other coaches have said that they cannot tolerate the time away from their children. Finally, some coaches have stopped coaching because the constant performance stress was changing them in ways they did not like.
Given the high turnover rates, the ability of coaches to be happy, healthy and balanced is more than some psychologist’s touchy-feely ideal. After talking to coaches in many sports, I discovered that this is a serious performance issue for professional, college and Olympic Sport coaches. Unhappy, unhealthy and unbalanced coaches either burn out or leave coaching. Coaches who maintain some semblance of a balanced life are better performers. Sports organisations that retain personnel perform better than organisations that have to start from scratch every year. Developing excellent coaches is impossible if the coaches keep changing.

Leading Factors in Coach Imbalances: Culture & Personality
The “more is better” culture of elite sport – The culture of elite sport today is a major factor leading to coaching imbalances. In virtually every high-pressure coaching situation, there is a belief that working harder is the solution to every performance problem. This issue is not unique to coaching, as hard work is also the bottom-line in business today, from computer software designers pulling regular all-nighters, to salespeople flying half-a-million miles a year.
In business, however, organisations are finding the limits to hard work, the downside of turnover and the point at which working harder equals lower performance. The culture of sport is definitely lagging behind business in the awareness that hard work is necessary but working beyond sustainable limits is counter-productive.
In sport, we know that pushing athletes in training is absolutely necessary for them to gain strength, speed, endurance and sport skills. We also know that these gains are lost if we do not allow enough recovery. The literature is so convincing that researchers are starting to use the new term “under-recovered” instead of the more familiar term “over–trained.” If athletes have the time and techniques for recovery, training can be incredibly intense. As a coach preparing for World Championships told me, “Athletes in the best shape are also the most vulnerable, so recovery is the number one performance issue.”
The workaholic coaching personality – In addition to the culture of sport, the personality of coaches also plays a part in unbalanced lives. At the national team level, a remarkable number of coaches are workaholics and perfectionists. Many of our best coaches tell the same story – as athletes, they made up for a lack of pure talent with intelligence and hard work. These athlete and coach traits were rewarded. If you have been rewarded all your life for working harder than others, the response to overwhelming workloads is often, “Bring it on! I can take it.”
Ironically, blindly adopting the normal productive workaholic strategy tends to backfire at the most important and stressful competitions. At events such as the Olympic Games, the perfectionist, workaholic coach can become a stress-ridden, emotional liability to his/her athletes. When coach-athlete communication is most important, the overstressed, overworked and under-recovered coach sends the message, “Don’t add to my workload, and don’t talk to me unless it is good news.” These are the coaches who later say, “If only I had known she was anxious, I could have reassured her.”

Three Ways to Build a Balanced Coaching Life
  1. Don’t neglect recovery. Since workload for elite coaches is nearly always high, coaches soon get out of balance if they neglect personal recovery from work. For most elite coaches, the two areas neglected during high stress periods are regular sleep and a personal exercise program. While sleep disturbance usually corrects itself in a short time, personal exercise is a critical and underrated component of recovery that can go neglected for long periods by coaches who complain about a lack of time.
    The impact of exercise is subtle but important, as regular exercise enhances energy, sleep, immune system response and recovery from stress. Perhaps the most important benefit of regular exercise for coaches is the proven positive impact on mood. This impact allows a coach to be a positive motivator, handle bad news and communicate more openly with assistants and athletes. Exercise enhances performance. Can a coach afford to give away this advantage?
  2. Challenge your own workaholic mythology. One reason for the neglect of a personal exercise program by coaches is the personal myth that more work equals a better product. When I talk to workaholics about modifying behavior, I first need to challenge this myth. I use the example of a workaholic distance runner who refuses to reduce workouts the week before a critical 10k race, because she needs to know she “has worked harder than her competitors.”
    After a number of races in which the runner shows no improvement from training, it makes sense to challenge the effectiveness of this high-mileage, slow-race strategy. Just because it makes you feel better to train more, it isn’t a smart strategy. Eventually, the athlete admits it is very hard to take a recovery day even if it makes performance sense, because it makes her “feel guilty.”
    This story is relevant for coaches. In the case of the distance runner, I ask if they want to be the best worker or the best runner. When they say they want to be the fastest runner, I respond, “That makes sense to me, so why are you being lazy and neglecting the recovery days you know you need? How good do you want to be?” Workaholics hate to be called lazy and occasionally the shock of this word creates the first cracks in the myth of more is always better.
    Coaches are also being lazy when they neglect recovery. Workaholic coaches always have excuses and will respond with, “I just don’t have enough time, my needs are less important than my athletes’ needs, there is no off-season in my sport and being on the road makes it impossible.” In response to these rationalisations, I ask coaches how good they want to be. If a coach is too lazy to pay attention to personal recovery, I know they won’t ever be as good as they could be.
    Despite the performance evidence for athletes, coaches consistently neglect their own recovery from work and stress. In my experience, coaches also get tired. The culture of elite sport makes this truth seem a weakness rather than evidence of humanity.
  3. Challenge the Culture. I recently heard of a college head football coach who gets to the office at 4:00 a.m. every morning and works through until after dinner. He harasses assistants who get to work after 5:30 a.m., leave work to attend events with their family and do not work through the night. Single-handedly, this coach drives away talented coaches who avoid his program rather than suffer an unhealthy coaching culture. Ultimately, this culture hurts coaching performance.
    Certainly, coaching at an elite level means long hours, travel and hard work. This doesn’t mean that certain aspects of the coaching culture cannot be challenged. A great example of this was a recent discussion I had with the head of coaching for a very successful U.S. Olympic sport. He said, “We don’t ask our coaches to go to all that extra-stuff after the season. We did, but we found it caused us to lose coaches. Coaching is hard on coaches and their families, so we push them during the season and then give them big enough breaks to get away from the sport. Now, we keep our best coaches, and they produce better results.”
Is your coaching culture producing the best results? How good do you want to be?
Reprinted with permission from Olympic Coach e-zine (Spring, 2007). Olympic Coach is a free service of the United States Olympic Committee to subscribe go to http://coaching.usolympicteam.com/coaching/ksub.nsf


Contact
Sean McCann, Ph.D
United States Olympic Committee
Colorado, USA
Email: sean.mccann@usoc.org





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