Love Your Coaching Life So Much They Want to Punch You in the Face

Locker room floors are littered with the crushed dreams of coaches. It is rare today to find a coach who’s really in love with coaching.

Yes, yes, I know — there are coaches who SAY they love coaching — but in reality it’s just a small part they love.

Y’know, like the winning, or teaching, or fine-tuning a technique. Those are chunks of coaching.

But it’s rare to find a person who loves it ALL.

Yet, there are THOSE coaches.

They are easy to recognize. They’re smiling, enjoying themselves, and are happy regardless how things are playing out on the competitive field. Okay, they might be focused, showing a frown, or using an emphatic manner to get a point across, but inside they’re loving it — EVERY moment.

And other coaches just want to smash them right in the face.

Why?

Jealousy perhaps. The “in-love” coach has found something those other coaches just can’t get their hands on. And they want it.

So how do YOU find that love, if you don’t already have it?

Far be it for me to go into deep philosophical discussion about love. I can’t and you’d be gone in a second, but I will tell you this, if you are going to love coaching in it’s entirity, you have to WORK at it.

It’s worth it and can take your coaching to a new level — but it is not easy to do.

With that in mind let’s focus on three areas that are known love-killers for coaches.

Practice is where you spend the most amount of time. In my sport, rowing, we spend approximately 100 hours in practice for every race, with a race lasting around seven minutes. That puts the ratio around 100 minutes of practice to 1 minute of competition time.I learned long ago if I didn’t love practice coaching wasn’t going to be the right place for me.

So how did I find ways to love my practices?

First, there has to be control so I feel that I can teach — teaching is the part I love most about coaching.

Second, I try to surround myself with athletes and coaches who truly want to be there — who are motivated.

Third, I let the little stuff stay small, and focus on the big stuff.

So often in coaching what we think WILL happen, or what we believe SHOULD happen, doesn’t. The wheels come off the bus. (Hint: In coaching, you are going to see a lot of buses without wheels.)

Loving a wheelless bus isn’t easy, but it’s critical to loving your coaching.

How do you do that? Try:

1) find the good in the failure

2) a failure now doesn’t mean never

3) learn from the failure so you don’t have to go through it again

Big victories are great. Yup, and so is winning the lotto.

But neither of those happen as often as the small victories.Small victories get ignored or taken for granted.

Too bad, since small victories just might be the only victories a coach has in a season.