Coaching to win – under pressure

Next year, the members of a national team I admire are facing a once in a lifetime opportunity to win a world championship.

This is the dream they have all worked towards since they were small children. Their coaches anticipated that as this pressure increased, the athletes’ performance could decrease.

They invited me to work with them to manage this risk.

I opened by stating that winning was the aim, but it wasn’t an appropriate goal for the athletes. This was a competitive audience with their sights set on glory; I only narrowly avoided being thrown out before the sixty second mark.

“When you coach your team or family members – do you focus on the ‘big achievement’, or on the process, habits and lifestyle that will deliver that achievement?”

We decrease pressure and increase our performance by gaining control, being in the moment and by performing in familiar territory (so far as possible). There is a reason elite military pilots spend hours under intense pressure, making and eradicating fatal errors: in a simulator.

Winning is a goal that is not within your control. Winning takes you out of the moment and distracts you from the task at hand. Winning creates uncertainty. Winning is an amateurs’ goal but a professional’s absolute and committed aim.

The professional’s goal, is to control his training, nutrition, recovery, mind (including inputs such as family, social media and the press), injury/illness susceptibility, attitude and self-talk so well, and for so long, that he delivers a (hopefully unbeatable, based on careful analysis and planning) performance on the day.

The professional will go out with the simple goal of executing the known and rehearsed basics to perfection: at the very edge of his limits: What else can he possibly do when the moment to perform comes that would better position him to win?

Winning is comparative. It requires him to think of others; of judgement; of what is ‘at stake’. Winning gives power and mental space to what his mum, dad and girlfriend may think, to what the press may write. Executing his best possible performance supremely well makes their opinions on his eventual placing irrelevant to the task in hand.

Winning may be too unreal a prospect for him, a year before the competition, to inspire him to skip a brownie today. The commitment and discipline to deliver clear and agreed basics brilliantly and to hit his numbers in training tomorrow makes a brownie unthinkable!

Winning happens in the years and months before competition.

So, when you coach your team or family members – do you focus on and celebrate the ‘big achievement’, increasing the pressure and anxiety, or on designing and embracing the process, habits and lifestyle that will deliver that achievement and make the outcome controllable?

Do you tell them ‘It’s ok, you’re great, you’ll win/pass/do better next time’?

Or do you work with them to build a plan to define and execute on the basics brilliantly and build confidence and certainty long before the pressure begins to build again?

And what do you focus on when you coach yourself?

Go Inspire!