The Common Mental Mistake New Coaches Make When Helping Athletes
From the outside looking in, it appears that the hard part of coaching is teaching athletes technical and tactical skills. While these skills are important, one could easily argue that good technical and tactical coaches are a dime a dozen. Any great athlete could transition from player to coach if all they needed to worry about were technical and tactical skills. However, this isn’t the case.
What separates a good novice coach from a good coach with experience is the mental side of coaching. For example, there is one mental mistake new coaches tend to make all the time when they are coaching an athlete up on the mental side of the game. The scenario plays out more or less like this…
Let’s say an athlete on the team is having trouble with their confidence when they compete against the best competition. The athlete knows this, their teammates know this, and the coach knows this. Basically, it’s no secret that the athlete has a problem with confidence. So, what does the coach do?
How New Coaches Handle the Mental Side of Sports
A new coach has a talk with the athlete and tells the athlete they need to have more confidence. The coach emphasizes the importance of confidence and tells the athlete that they are good enough to compete with anyone. The coach ends by saying the only thing holding the athlete back from being one of the best is their confidence. Boom…That’s it.
The mistake here is that this new coach didn’t actually do anything to help with a solution. The coach just pointed out the problem, which was already obvious. New coaches tend to think that pep talks about mindset problems qualify as solutions to that problem. Unfortunately, pep talks do nothing to improve an athlete’s mindset. In fact, it might make the problem worse as the coach’s pep talk just ingrains the problem more in an athlete’s mind.
How Experienced Coaches Handle the Mental Side of Sports
On the other hand, a coach with experience has been around the block multiple times with athletes suffering with mindset issues. An experienced coach already knows that pep talks about mindset problems are a waste of breath. Especially when the problem is already so obvious.
Therefore, instead of talking about the “what” experienced coaches help their athletes execute the “how”. In this example, the coach may start by measuring confidence and assessing the athlete’s sources of confidence. Then the coach may help the athlete sets some goals related to their sources of confidence, and break those goals down into a measurable progression. To close the loop, the coach may end by working with the athlete to establish habits and routines to execute the progression towards their confidence goals.
Approaching the mental side of sports with a process like this is intuitive for a coach with experience. Mainly because experienced coaches have already made the mistake of using pep talks that don’t work. Experienced coaches know that athletes don’t choose to struggle emotionally and would change if they knew how. So, telling them to change without telling them how just adds insult to injury.
Simply stated, if an athlete knows the “how” of something to help them win they will do it. If an athlete only knows the “what” and not the “how” it will just make them frustrated. The frustration is compounded when it’s a mindset issue. Coaches must take the time to both know the “how” and know how to teach the “how” if they truly want to help an athlete with the mental side of sports.