In just a couple of days I will be taking my annual vacation with my family to Denmark. There are many remarkable things about Danish culture- and a few shameful things too. One of the things that I think Danes score very high on is trust.
When I left the US to coach In Denmark in 2013, I was extremely jaded about the level of corruption and ethical backsliding I saw in the sport. In my other homeland I found that people still had some misgivings about many things: each other, their national governing body, local and national government. However, the nature of those misgivings seemed incredibly trifling in comparison to what I was used to.
Perhaps few things embody the level of trust in Danish society more than the way people behave behind the wheel of a car. When I depart New Jersey and the pathologically aggressive turnpike, I am transported to another world. In this new reality, very few people speed, people generally follow the rules of traffic, and yet in 40+ years of going to the country I have never seen a policeman doing a traffic stop.
I’ve traveled a bit around the world and driven a lot of places, and one thing I can say where you really see this is when you encounter a roundabout (or rotary as we called them in my native Massachusetts). A roundabout is like a compromise between a multiple way stop and a traffic light. It orders things, but only slightly. It’s success as a mediator of traffic relies heavily on the level of trust between drivers.
In a high trust society, people approach the roundabout and can expect that they will get an opportunity to enter it and exit with relatively little stress, even if there is congestion. In a lower trust society, all hell breaks loose. One by one, drivers concede that it is every man for themselves and a roundabout can come to a complete standstill.
Now, I’m not very concerned with how countries mitigate traffic, but I am concerned with the cultures of competitive sports teams. Sports are, and remain, a forge for learning. A lot has been made about competitiveness and how it poisons sports, but it doesn’t need to. It’s true that competitiveness leads a lot of people to go for easy solutions, and easy solutions are often bad in the long term for everyone.
What’s best for me vs What’s best for US
In working with both coaches and athletes, I have observed the following phenomenon. There is a broken culture of trust between parents, athletes and coaches on a team. A parent may be paying for their kid to be on a team, but they do not really believe that the coach is a good coach for their child. The athlete may be coming to practice, but they are not really responding to any coaching because they also don’t trust the coach.
The coach is, and you’ll forgive me reserving extra empathy for coaches, swimming in this sea of mistrust and it alters their behavior. They are frustrated- their fuse gets shorter as the toll of consistently being mistrusted accrues. That shorter fuse only leads to behavior that confirms the mistrusting hypothesis of the parents and athletes who didn’t really trust them in the first place.
So what should do you if you find yourself in a situation like this? In my line of work I am often in the position to give counsel to all parties involved, so let me get specific about what I typically see as the path forward in these situations.
Athlete: One of the fundamental realizations I try to guide athletes too is that there is almost no path forward for them without the help of their coach. People often come to me struggling with their thoughts and feelings around competing. While you can make some progress through work on your internal though patterns, ultimately the strength of your relationships outside of your own head is the real game changer.
For any athlete, their coach is going to be one of their most important relationships. I coach athletes to have empathy for their coach and see them as a full human being, not just someone who shows up in a polo shirt to give them swimming advice. From that point, we try to take an appreciative approach on any coach: instead of critiquing them like a figure skating judge, we look at what capacities they have.
Every coach I have had in my life, from worst to best, had capacities that could help me to get better. An athletes job is to figure out what those capacities are and use them to promote their own growth.
Parent: A lot of the parents I work with are going through one of the hardest phases any parent will face: teenage years. Their child is in some ways distancing themselves from their parent. Where once they had no filter on their feelings, they may be hiding or obfuscating what is really going on.
Worse yet, a parent may find their attempts to help rebuffed and rejected. For parents, I try to get them to deal with their own feelings around that distancing and rejection so that they don’t carry them into the moments where they can truly help.
With regards to parents and coaches, the process is very similar to the athlete section above, getting them to see their coach as a person and having empathy. From beyond that, taking them away from a critical standpoint to areas where they might already trust a coach.
The realization in parents when they take the step of putting more trust in their coach (and what it results in for their child) is a pretty rewarding part of my job.
Coach: For coaches, the most important step is breaking their part of the self-sustaining cycle of mistrust. Most often, that is coaches losing their cool and lashing out at an athlete or parent. While they may feel righteous and justified, at their core many coaches realize they are not doing their best coaching this way.
Worse yet, they are missing opportunities to build trust while they fume about the situation around them. I believe that many coaches recognize inherently that they are in a position of authority, that is why they take it even more personally when they are mistrusted.
Creating an outlet for processing that frustration away from parents and athletes is a key part of the process for many coaches. Beyond that, being thoughtful and planning for situations where you can build some trust is incredibly important.
How’s Your Roundabout?
Think about the team you’re on right now. Does it have a functioning roundabout. Do people approach the group even in times of high stress and emotion and expect that generally everyone around them will behave and do what’s right? Or do they think that they have to fight selfishly for whatever they can get?
If it’s the latter, you can do something to change it, and coaching people to make that change is what I do. If you want to work with me, reach out and I’ll do a free consultation.