Why Some Athletes Work Harder Than Others
Coaches love nothing more than an athlete who works hard. Moreover, it’s a coach’s dream to have an athlete on the team who both works hard and has talent. The problem is this dream is rarely fulfilled unless the coach makes it happen.
In other words, most athletes don’t come to coaches with both a good work ethic and supreme talent. It’s a coach’s job to mold these two attributes together. However, there is a common school of thought among coaches that you can teach an athlete how to improve their skills, but you can’t teach them to work hard. These coaches believe the will to work hard is something you either have or you don’t. It’s a personality trait.
Therefore, the ability to work hard is an innate characteristic that’s in an athlete’s DNA. Ultimately, this means these coaches don’t believe they can do anything to help an athlete who they think is lazy. As a result, these coaches like to run athletes who appear to be lazy off the team as fast as possible so they can just focus on coaching the hard workers.
Being Lazy is NOT a Personality Trait
It’s easy to use laziness as a catch all personality type to justify the lack of hard work. It makes explaining the difference between those who work hard and those who don’t easy, but it doesn’t make the problem go away.
The fact of the matter is being lazy is not an evidence based personality trait. What’s more, very few people are lazy by choice, and even fewer athletes. However, most parents, coaches, and teammates are not ready to confront the uncomfortable truth that an athlete who doesn’t work hard may be showing a symptom of a deeper issue.
For example, that athlete may not be working as hard as others because of:
- Fear
- Injury
- Trauma
- Bullying
- Abuse
- Low self-esteem
- Lack of interest
- Not believing in the process
- Lack of knowledge
- Lack of energy (due to bad diet / health / lack of sleep)
- Depression
- Addiction
Instead of taking the easy way out and judging an athlete as lazy for not being a hard worker, try to dig deeper and challenge yourself to help that athlete confront the real problem.