Brain in the Game | Sport Mind Coaching Podcast
Dave Diggle
Episode Twenty-Four – Balancing the Relationship Between Coach, Athlete and Parent
Hello, and welcome back to Brain in the Game. Brain in the Game's a podcast specifically designed for athletes, coaches, and parents who are looking to do their sport just that little bit smarter. Brain in the Game is like a surprise dinner: you don't know what you're going to get, but you always end up leaving full. I'm your host, Dave Diggle.
In this, episode 24, we're going to look at the precarious relationship that goes on between a coach, an athlete, and a parent, that dynamic that always ends up causing problems somewhere along the line. It is this unspoken tension that always causes a difficulty at the most inopportune times: competition times, fee-paying times, all those times where you would rather not have that dynamic going on.
If you're a coach, you know that all too well feeling of that parent marching down the corridor towards your office. It's that walk they have, that certain stomp, that sound of the footsteps. You know it's not going to be good. You know that they're going to come in there and tell you how to do your job, demanding some results, demanding some information from you. They know that their child could have been the next Olympic champion, and you god damn well better do your job.
Well, that's what goes on inside many coaches' heads when they see a parent walking towards them. And the parents, you don't get away from it easy either, because you're the sort of parents out there that may be thinking, "This coach is trying to extradite me from my child's development. They're stopping me being part of this journey. They don't want me involved. They're kicking me out of the venue."
This aspect of not really understanding what the coach's role and what the parent's role and what the athlete's role is often causes emotional destruction, and it's often this unspoken dynamic that makes it very difficult for the athlete to achieve and do what they want to do.
So in this episode, episode 24, we're going to look at that dynamic. We're going to look at how we understand it, what we do to better manage it, and what we need to do in our individual roles, either that be as a coach or as a parent or as an athlete.
With my perspective on this, both being, initially, I was an elite athlete, and then I went on to become an elite coach and elite judge and managed several centres. I'm now a high-performance mind coach and also a parent, so I've been exposed to all these different dynamics over the years. I know what it feels like to be the athlete in the middle, watching my parents arguing with the coach, watching my coach avoid my parents, and knowing that whatever was going on between them was having some kind of effect on me.
I know what it's like to run a centre and watch those parents who are looking for results and wanting to know every single step what I'm doing, and I also know from a parent's perspective. I've got three children who are all into sport, different sports, at different levels, but all have very different needs. As a parent, you invest lots of time, lots of money, lots of money, and often you invest everything within your family dynamics.
You make sacrifices. You don't always sit around the table together. You don't always get the opportunity to have dinner together. You don't always get the opportunity to share every single one of your child's passions all the time. You may be sitting on the beach or you may be sitting in the gym somewhere, and you're missing out on something else. So I get the investment as a parent.
From a coach's perspective, you've done your training. You know what you're doing. You know you are there for a very specific reason, and you're being paid to do your job, so the dynamic, as you can see, can be quite hostile. It can be very emotionally tense and can often bubble over, where the only person really suffering is the athlete is the middle. This dynamic plays out in every sport in every part of the world on many different levels, be it from the Saturday morning sport right the way through to elite.
One of the things that I get asked as a professional mind coach, and my role predominantly is to come in and help people structure things more efficiently and more effectively to cognitively and mentally and emotionally stimulate the athlete. So what I often get asked by coaches: "How do I keep these parents out? I don't want these parents in here telling me what to do, telling me how to do what I do."
And I often get parents who will sit on the other side of the fence who will say to me, "How do I get this coach to let me be involved? This is my child. I'm investing my time and family, and they're shutting the door." I'll often get these athletes sitting in the middle saying, "Help. Stop these two arguing. Stop these two at each other's throats, because it is detracting from what I do as an athlete."
How do we get this to work? Number one is we need to initially understand what our roles are. Many parents I see don't understand what their role is, have no idea what they're supposed to be doing, and so they try to do everything. The same goes with coaches. Coaches have a phenomenal ability to coach an athlete to become a better athlete, but they have traditionally very poor skills in communication, and that plays out between the athlete and the coach, but even more so between the coach and those people paying the fees, the parents.
It's not understanding what our role is that makes it difficult for us to create boundaries, to create a framework that works. As a parent, what is your role? Well, your role is to manage the emotional welfare of your child, to balance all their needs, to offer a safe, open, and supportive environment for them at all times, to facilitate their off-time when they're not the athlete, when they're not in there being taught, when they're not asked to be processing the technical.
They're in there, and they're home, they're watching TV, they're out playing with their friends, you're sitting around the dining room table having dinner. You need to facilitate that time. Unfortunately, you're the taxi driver. You're the financier. All these roles are your roles as soon as parent.
What's the role of the coach, then? Traditionally, coaches have a very diverse role. They try to take on many, many different facets of the athlete's life, no different to teachers try to do with the children in their classrooms. They try to manage the upbringing and development, where realistically, their role is to teach.
A coach's role is to coach. It's to deliver the right information and the right knowledge to the athlete, to guide the physical and technical development of that athlete, to help them build the performance strategies, to develop a competition and competitive structure and strategy. It's also to manage and facilitate the balance of the needs of all the other athletes in the gym.
As you can see, both those roles are very, very different. The coach's role is to be paid to manage the technical, the nuts and bolts, how it works. The parent's role is to manage the emotion, to look after the sporting and academic welfare of their child, to make sure that they're balanced, to make sure that they feel comfortable, they're happy, they have open communication, they can tell them what they're feeling, what they want to process, what they want to talk about.
Both those roles are incredibly different, and I'm sure, if you're a parent listening to this, there's been times that you've crossed over the boundaries into the coaching role, where you've tried to tell the coach or tried to tell the athlete, your son or daughter, how to do what the coach is trying to tell them to do. And as a coach, I'm sure there's times that you crossed that boundary too, where you tried to become the parent, where you tried to parent the athlete and often parent the parents. Blurring these lines just makes whatever role you have far more difficult.
So what's the athlete's role in all this? Are they just a product? Are they these two dynamics here, the coach and the parent, moulding this unwilling or willing body into an athlete? The athlete has just as important role to play in this tripod, in this support process and network to make them the best at what they do.
The athlete's role is to do. Not have to be done to them, not have things done for them, but to do, to act, to make the most of this emotional, supportive environment so they feel comfortable and ready to perform and to make the most of this technical environment where they can go and get the relevant information at the right time for them to perform. They have an accountability to that, and it's just as important for the athlete to know what their role is in this whole dynamic as it is for the coach and the parent to manage theirs.
The second part of building this structure that works is how these three aspects communicate. Clearly, if you're a coach and you see that parent stomping down the corridor toward your office, you are not going to be open and accepting of communication. You're not going to be sitting there going, "Okay, let's talk about this and what's your feelings." You're going to be protected. You're going to be guarded. You're going to be waiting for the onslaught.
If you're a parent and you're walking down that corridor and you, in the past, have been extradited from the venue or you felt that there's a big wall and barrier of communication up, then you're going to be in there thinking, "Right, how do I get this information from this coach? What have I got to say? What have I got to prise out of them?" You're not going to go into that environment, into that communication bubble, in the most productive way, the most productive format. You're going to be going in there possible hostile.
One of the most common things that comes out of that interaction is the lack of respect. A coach will feel that a parent doesn't respect them, or a parent will think that the coach doesn't respect their role. An athlete will sit in the middle, thinking, "These two people who are influencing my life clearly don't respect each other."
When we talk about communication, one of the areas that we need to focus on is respect, and understanding each other's role is the ultimate respect. If you're a coach and you are giving the technical information, and you see that what the parent is doing maybe doesn't fit within your model of the world, respecting the parent to do what they do is giving them the latitude to do what they think is right for their child.
Vice versa too. If you're a parent and you're paying this coach to teach your child, and yet you feel this impulse to go in there, cross that boundary, and disrespect the coach by coaching your athlete, your child, then you're not respecting that coach. If they're doing that much of an inept job, change coaches. If you've got that coach on board because they're the best at what they do, then you need to trust them to do what they do. Having that clear communication will enable you to be across, both as a coach and as a parent, what the others are doing.
These different kinds of communication models are paramount in creating a very stable platform, emotional stable platform, for the athlete to thrive on. If we don't have a collective bringing together of this process to put this athlete in the right place, then we're never going to create this stable platform for the athlete.
Part of that role is ensuring that we have communication structure. If you're on the floor and you're coaching, and you don't want a parent storming up to you in the middle of class and saying, "Right, is now a great time to talk about Johnny's technical performance?" Same for a parent. If you're at home and you're having family time around dinner, you don't want a phone call from the coach saying, "Right, I need to talk to you right now."
It needs to be an open and communicative process for everybody. That comes down to creating a structure, a structure where there's a right time and a right place and a right forum for the communication on an even and respectful level, somewhere that both the coach and the parent feel that they're on common ground.
Also, it's important to understand that when you are in that discussion procession, when you're having that communication forum, that it's not about attacking. It's about sharing. Whatever happens in that forum should be in a format that's designed to support each other, so the parent really does need to support what the coach is doing. Respect their knowledge, respect their position and their role, and then let the parent be respected too for their position, their role, their interaction.
Another thing for us as a group, as a team, to understand is the dynamics of forming a group. Back in 1965, psychologist Bruce Tuckman introduced a group dynamics called Forming, Storming, Norming, and Performing, and he later added the final phase of Mourning. This is how a group dynamic evolves. We don't just come together and slot in like Lego bricks, perfectly formed to fit. We have to understand the dynamics of the communication. We have to understand the dynamics of our individual roles.
Part of that is a feeling-out process, too. The first part of that, that Forming, is getting comfortable, feeling our way around, the courtship phase, if you like. We then need to understand how that all fits, and that is where the framework comes in, the communication framework comes in, the open communication.
The next part of that is Storming, and part of this is jockeying for position. We often see this dynamic when they become better at a sport and they start getting recognised. The parent then goes, "Oh, maybe there's something in this. Maybe we need to invest more time and effort into little Johnny, and we're going to push him along a little bit harder here, give him more opportunities."
Then the coach goes, "Whoa, that's not part of the development program that I've put together here. I see little Johnny going to the nationals this year and maybe international next year." Not understanding each other's roles and this whole Storming process of who's in charge, who's got control of Johnny's career and outcomes here, is where we get a lot of the anxiety, a lot of the tension starts to form.
When we get through that phase and we start working into Norming, this is where things, still tentatively, but start to settle down a little bit. We've got this little "I'm not going to tread on their toes, and they're not going to tread on my toes, as long as they do what they're supposed to be doing, and I can do what I can do." That Norming process is an indication that the struggle for supremacy is starting to settle down a little bit. The simmer is starting to slow down.
Then we get to the Performing stage. This is where we ultimately want to be. If I'm a coach, then I want to have the technical input and the control over his technical development. If I'm the parent, then I want to make sure that my little boy is doing the best he possibly can, he feels comfortable, he's enjoying what he's doing, he's getting everything he possibly can to be the best he can.
The gap in between, the Storming and the Norming, is where most of the tension is. If we don't do anything about managing that, that will just fester, and then you'll end up in the Mourning process. Every group comes to an end at some stage, be it the athlete moves on, be it the athlete retires, be it the athlete goes to a different venue, maybe goes into one of the elite programs or becomes a professional. The dynamic of that group, at some stage, will dissipate.
How it dissipates depends on how well it's been managed. If we do not have a framework to get us from the Forming to the Performing in quick time, obviously we need to go through the Storming and the Norming process to establish our roles. But if we don't do that efficiently and we fester in between that Storming and Norming process, then we're never to get to that Performing to that Performing process, that Performing stage where everything's hummed along and the athlete is developing nicely.
Understanding the role we play, understanding the communication model, having a place and a time that's right to communicate, that's open to communicate, where a parent feels that they can come in and say, "Hey, what's happening here? We want to know where little Johnny or little Jane's going. We want to know what their progress is. What do you see us doing in six, 12 months' time so we can support that?"
And where a parent can go to a coach, and the coach is going to go, "Hey, how's little Johnny going? What are they doing at school? How is their little brother and sister going? Are they managing all their hours that they're training? Are the family dynamics okay? Are you guys getting to spend enough time around the table having dinner together?"
We need to make sure that our roles are very defined. We need to respect the other's role and not encroach on that to the point where they feel intimidated. We need to, number one, keep in perspective it's about the athlete. The athlete needs to know it's about them too. They need to know that their parents will support them, and not behind gritted teeth, saying, "That coach won't let me in. And they need to know the coach is open with the parents ad respectful of the investment these parents are putting into them.
If just one of these dynamics fail, then it falls over. If the coach can't do what the coach can do, or the parent can't do what the parent's expected to do, and ultimately, if the athlete can't perform, then that whole tripod will fall over. If you really want the athlete to thrive, then build the foundations correctly from the start. Understand the boundaries, and be clear with the boundaries and respectful with the boundaries.
I hope you found this information relevant to you and informative. I think every coach will look at this, listen to this, and think, "There's an aspect of what I do in here." I know, as a parent, I can associate to many of these aspects of feeling that I'm not involved or the coach doesn't want us involved. My role as a mind coach gives me a unique insight to both sides of the fence, and it's important that we bring those both sides together.
I'll put the transcript from this episode onto our website, as always, which is www.braininthegame.com.au. Until our next episode, train smart and enjoy the ride. My name is Dave Diggle, and I'm the mind coach.
Copyright 2012-2022 Dave Diggle
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