I heard a statistic secondhand in early 2023 that, while dramatic, probably won’t be shocking to you. I was speaking with a major conference Division 1 head coach. The coach reported, that prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, the school had about 900 total visits to it’s counseling/mental health department. For the year that students returned to campus full time, the 2021-2022 school year, that figure was 36,000.
Again, not a surprising statistic for anyone who works with young people. In many ways this is absolutely good news. When I look at that 900 figure, common sense dictates that vastly fewer people than needed those services were actively seeking them out. Imagine if only 10% of people who broke their leg went to the hospital and the other 90% decided to just “tough it out”. The destigmatization of seeking help with your mental health is a fantastic development.
It’s also a tsunami. Our current systems are constantly running behind this sudden demand. That is where I want to focus today’s blog. I think that most people understand that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. And yet, most institutions are not proactive when it comes to mental health. As someone who’s work and training is on the proactive, preventative side, I have spent a lot of time thinking about why.
Simple vs Complex
One obvious reason is that reactive solutions are simple and proactive measures are complex. What I mean by that is that most reactive solutions are intuitive to people in the sense that they naturally perceive a problem, activate their problem solving mode, and find a solution. Let’s term this with A being the problem and B being the solution.
Most people are not proactive about problems they haven’t encountered yet, that’s some next level stuff that gets you in rarified air. So if we look at this exploding mental health situation and try to apply proactivity to it, the equation gets far more complex. Instead of moving to A to B, we are introducing A, then starting at some other point in the alphabet, say T. T is progressing to U, V, etc.
At the end we hope that A does not occur again, but if A does not occur again the equation has so many variables it becomes impossible to prove that T was the reason.
Let’s return to the broken legs from earlier. Orthopedic surgeons are well paid to fix broken legs. Much less well compensated are people who work to prevent people from breaking their leg in the first place. Accidents happen, of course, and some are not preventable. But many less catastrophic accidents happen when you improve systems long removed from the point of failure.
Problematically Motivated
There is a deeper problem with proactivity. In my experience, proactivity often begets complacency. Why? Because solving a problem was often the overriding motivational factor in the beginning. If you make the proper system correction it can often lead to flagging motivation.
Put another way: in re-routing clients to a different path, they often lose the thing that motivated them to start in the first place.
Recently, to counteract this, I have changed strategies. Because one of the questions I ask with each step I advocate is: am I taking my own medicine? So I changed strategies not out of selfish desire to keep people as clients but in order to better serve them in the longer term. I too was following the problem narrative.
Now, from the beginning of any work, I am training people to see opportunities. I had this reflection as I am about to wrap up the longest coaching engagement of my career, which faithful readers and listeners will know has been with current Stanford swimmer and World Championship silver medalist Henry McFadden.
A typical engagement with an athlete is usually 3-6 months. I haven’t had a client report less than major progress in three months since I started in 2016. I take each three month period as it’s own project, with a firm set of agreed upon goals that I will apply everything I know to achieve.
What has differentiated Henry? As soon as he made progress with something, he wanted to start a new project. It’s one of the things I’ve found distinguishes elite athletes, an aspect of coachability. I’ve often found it described as a lack of complacency, but I think it’s more than that. It’s as if they are actually not fixating on problems as much as constantly organizing where they want to expand.
So can you coach someone to be more “coachable”? I say yes. My own skill set on it is still underdeveloped, but I’ve taken it on as a project now which means I’ll spend years thinking about it. Years of practice leads to improvement. It is crucial to me to figure out if it is possible to do so in a positive, sustainable fashion.
The path to stringing athletes along in an unsustainable fashion have roots in coaching so deep and profound we may never undo them. It would be easy enough to undermine their confidence. I could constantly remind them of new problems to worry about in order to keep them “motivated” and hungry for more. But to what end? Making them more anxious, more insecure about the future?
At the same time, I know I need to take caution to not become a “curling” coach, constantly sweeping things out of the way, because lack of adversity absolutely stunts growth. What I’m saying is that the natural adversity of sports and life can be enough, we don’t need to supplement it with a difficult coach.
These days I am training people in the habit of proactivity. That involves actually moving away from a constant focus on what ails you into the realm of what you actually want in the future. It precludes an entrepreneurial mindset that seeks opportunities instead of problems. It means finding a way to be satisfied with indirect, sometimes immeasurable changes in systems.
How will we know when it’s working? When our problems change.
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