This is What Elite Athletes Need Most from their Coaches
Elite athletes have already accomplished a lot in their sport. They have already made it through the grueling process of going from good to great. In addition, elite athletes already have a firm grasp of all the skills they need to win against elite competition.
So, what’s left for a coach to do when they are coaching elite athletes? There is only so much mastery of the fundamentals a coach can train before they bore an elite athlete. Moreover, coaches who help athletes with the fundamentals come a dime a dozen.
What separates coaches who successfully coach elite athletes from every other coach comes down to one thing and one thing only. Motivation!
Yes, elite athletes have tons of self-motivation. You can’t become elite without it. However, staying elite requires a different form of motivation than becoming elite. It’s easy to motivate yourself when you are making gains every day, week, month, or year. Progress is motivation in itself, and herein lies the problem for elite athletes.
Elite athletes don’t make as much progress as average and good athletes. For an elite athlete, anything less than being #1 is a setback. Therefore, coaches of elite athletes must be masters of setting micro- performance goals, process goals, and behavior goals that keep their athletes motivated to strive for fractional improvements.
Instilling self-motivation in an athlete by helping them achieve goals that represent fractional improvements that impact performance only occasionally is difficult. But this is what elite athletes need most from their coaches.
These fractional improvements are what keep an elite athlete elite. Furthermore, no athlete, regardless of how elite they are, can find fractional improvements like this without the help of a coach.