Resilience -
noun
1. The capacity to withstand or to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness."the remarkable resilience of so many institutions"
2. The ability of a substance or object to spring back into shape; elasticity."nylon is excellent in wearability and resilience"
One of the big questions I find myself asking as a coach is ‘am I useful’
This questions usually gives way to some torrent of philosophical ramblings about how you will never know the impact you have on the people around you, blah blah blah. But i think there is honestly great importance in serious reflection on what kind of a job you are doing, and asking: what value do you bring? Especially in a role like coaching. It keeps you tucked into the important stuff, the things that you truly believe support the people that you are working with.
So, back to the question….. Am I useful?
In order to answer this question, you should have a clear idea of what doing a good job looks like, what your objective is. (I wrote a blog on what I think a good coach looks like here) As a high performance coach, the objective is pretty clearly defined - ‘create winners’. Of course what is interesting about this objective is how many different approaches there are to achieve this outcome, as well as what a ‘winner’ looks like. I mean obviously we want people to ‘win’ as many events as they can, but in which discipline and which competition? How does culture influence and determine what this looks and feels like for your athlete and at what level do they compete? I mean even Janja Garnbret didn’t step into a climbing gym one day and win a World Cup, it was a journey for her too. So defining where you are, is just as important (if not more so), than where you want to go.
It is fine to define success in a way that is supportive to your closest objective, but in high performance sport, at some point it boils down to medals.
(Of course we can use this framework to identify how we can be useful at any level. Perhaps winning for your athlete looks more like recovering from an injury, or even learning to lead climb. Steps towards medals, or just personal progress, but back to high performance.)
So, to frame the question of ‘am I useful’ in this context, we could ask, how do I help my athlete win medals?
From here, you define what a medal winner looks like (that’s a whole extra article) and then look at how you support your athlete(s) attaining these qualities.
For me, this is where the question of resilience and dependence comes in. To be most useful, you need to help ‘them’ attain the attributes of winners, not both of you, not you as the athlete / coach pair. The aim of the game is to give them the things they need, without you, to be a winner. That’s actually a pretty challenging statement when you think about it.
To clarify and drive this point home: ‘To be most useful to the athlete, you should aim to make yourself redundant to their success.’ That’s not to say that you will ever be completely successful in this goal, but I believe that this should be the aim.
So many times I feel like coaches feel this need, consciously or subconsciously, that to be ‘useful’ is to be dependable, is to be required. But this doesn’t build winners, this builds dependents. To back up this theory further, and to make it sport specific, imagine yourself in isolation before the boulder qualification round. The wall is busy, you are one coach with maybe 3 or 4 athletes, sometimes more. You are setting boulders for each athlete, managing time for them, adjusting their warmup to the temperature and how they are feeling, trying to help them make space to get on that boulder that you made that will have just the right move to make them ready for this comp……. That’s insane. Wouldn’t it be better if they stopped and looked inward? What do I need, how am I feeling, what move can I find? The beauty of our sport is that it is creative, we have to figure out how to use our body to solve a problem. I believe this starts in the warmup. In addition to that, everything you do to get someone else ready is a guess. Maybe a good guess if you’ve known them for a long time, but still a guess. Only they know how they feel. Lastly, the idea that you have that special something that someone needs to succeed at just that moment……. Isn’t that a bit narcissistic?
Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t think every athlete is ready to be left to their own devices, nor do I think you should cast them into a space completely alone. You can help, if they need or ask you, and not everyone is ready to be completely independent at a World Cup warmup. In addition, I am not saying that there are not examples of a winning pair, a coach and an athlete or even 2 or more athletes together. Some of the fastest and biggest growth I have seen in athletes has come when they have found a ‘group’ to train with, or found a coach that provides the right insight for them. This is great and not something to avoid, but like all relationships it can become toxic if dependency grows. Dependency stunts growth and builds in limitations. Maybe it feeds your ego, but in the end, either way, you will lose that athlete.
The other piece of this puzzle, and perhaps the piece that is most important in my opinion, is that dependent athletes become lost, more so than others when they experience change. Change could be an injury, a string of mistakes or setbacks or even the end of a career. When it is time to make hard decisions, they have no tools or support to do this. This creates fear and anxiety around the most normal and predictable part of any career and indeed any life - change.
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