I remember vividly when I first became a “head“coach. In early July of 2013, I was standing on the pool deck of the Danish National Championships. I was embroiled in a bitter “contract dispute” with my current employer. Some time after warmup I was handed an envelope by the club’s board chairman with a contract inside.
The contract stipulated that I would forego my existing contract and take a demotion within the club. I was three months into moving myself (and my wife Kate carrying our first child) to a foreign country. I had spent the preceding three months hoping naively that someone would come to their senses. Surely they would honor the contract they had given me in the first place?
That day I accepted that it was never going to happen. Amid the bitter conflict, my employer had accused me of negotiating in secret for the head coaching position at a rival club. That day I walked down onto the deck and told the outgoing coach that I was willing to take a meeting with his board.
Within a few days, I was sweating poolside at Gentofte Swim Club and negotiating a contract. By the end of the week Kate was framing me for a headshot on the wall of our apartment.
I didn’t realize it at first, but at that moment the way in which I would go about coaching was completely changed. I was no longer awaiting instructions from some higher power. I was the one giving instructions. All of a sudden, I had no colleagues. No one was safe to betray vulnerability or doubt to. Every problem that went on in a club that counted 2000 members would be laid at my door.
Everything I do in my work now has a genesis in something that I wish I had in my past. When I was an athlete, I would have benefitted so much from someone guiding me through the near meltdowns I had at higher and higher levels of competition. When I was an assistant coach, i could have really used someone to teach me how to process my frustrations and keep focused on what I truly wanted.
But there is perhaps no stage where I could have used the help more, and where there were less resources, then when I was a head coach. The weight of responsibility, much of it self-assigned, that I carried during that time often threatened to overwhelm the rest of my life.
Here are three ways I help head coaches to manage their day-to-day:
Ongoing coaching and accountability- I don’t mean to suggest that coaches are not accountable, but often that accountability comes from people who are only loosely engaged. Whether it be parents on a club program or administrators on a college level, you can often get into a mode where people only hold you “accountable” when they perceive a problem. This is toxic for relationships and for your own general well-being.
I give coaches someone who is following them and focused on them. I provoke them to be proactive in a way that admins or parents aren’t thinking about and subordinates are perhaps scared to. I help them track and assess their own progress and give them a sounding board for reflection with no negative consequences for sharing their lowest lows.
Crowd-sourced knowledge- One of the great privileges that I have in my work is that I get around and talk to coaches from all over the country (and world). It’s a luxury that not a lot of coaches have in their day to day.
That means that when a coach is facing an issue, I may be able to offer them a perspective from halfway around the world that they might not have otherwise considered. Or I may be able to connect them to a resource to get the knowledge they need. One way to look at working with me is like an ongoing coaching clinic, where instead of just being exposed to a different knowledge set once a year, you can get it on an ongoing basis throughout the year. Which, instinctively as a coach, do you think is better?
Disciplined, qualitatively tested psychological approaches- I specialize in the psychological side of sports. A lot of people may claim that their strategies are “science based” and I agree that there is value in scientific exploration.
I can walk someone through all the steps to shifting their own or an athletes mental process. I didn’t pull these processes completely out of thin air. Positive Psychology as a field is the foundation. The actual application comes from real-live coaching, whether it be my own or the hundreds of coaches I have learned from over the years.
The best analogy I can make is if you want to build a house, do you want advice from a physicist or a carpenter. A physicist can describe the best way to strike a nail with a hammer for maximum force, but a carpenter is out building stuff every day.
Sometimes it’s good just to not be alone- I don’t know how else to describe this, but as I said being a head coach is lonely. I have yet to meet a head coach who didn’t agree with that sentiment. A lot of us fell in love with sport for both the competitive aspect and the camaraderie and found the second lacking when we got in charge.
It’s good for your mental health to have someone who understands intuitively what you’re facing on a daily basis. Where there is no need to give context to someone outside of coaching or swimming and you can just get straight to whatever you’re facing at that time.
Ultimately my head coaching journey ended in spectacular fashion. I had some wonderful success, but like any human being I occasionally linger in what ifs. What remains of course is that I can’t change the past. So when I coach, I try to help coaches work through the challenges that I found myself up against and write a different story.