You can work your butt off as an athlete and still feel slighted due to a negative relationship with your coach. Being an athlete is not as fun when your coach is not fond of you. Your coach can control your playing time and in a lot of ways your future for playing at the next level. Your main priority going forward needs to be building a healthy relationship with your coach. The reason it needs to be the primary priority is that it’s an obstacle that will hold you back from attaining your goals. It is similar to being injured all of the time. Your life would just be so much easier if that were not the case. A coach that does not like you is not going to go out of their way to help you succeed.
Understand The Problem
You have to understand the problem you are dealing with here. There are a variety of reasons that a relationship can break down. The first step to solving any problem is realizing that there is a problem. You have to admit that you have a problem with your coach. If you can’t do this, then you will just try and run around the situation. Ideally, it would be awesome if you could get your coach to admit to the issue as well. Then you have two people realizing there is a problem and hopefully wanting to fix it. Then you can move into figuring out what the actual issue is. Why is it that you guys have a problem? I know for myself a big thing that caused problems with my college coach my first year was that I felt deep down he didn’t believe in me. Him not believing in me made me feel like I could not believe in myself. I would say it was because he said this or this, but that was all just a cover up for my own damaged confidence. Many times when we have an issue with a person, it is easier to hide the real issues at hand, and you get nowhere doing this. You need to look in the mirror and address the real problem. Once I knew that the issue was his lack of faith in me to do well, I started paying attention to what people he did believe in.Once you understand the problem, you have to take it into your hands to fix it. You can’t rely or depend on your coaching making the same effort or even caring. It is not guaranteed. You have to take it into your own hands and to what you need to do.
- check
- check
- check
Take Ownership
By taking it into your own hands, it means taking full ownership of the situation. There is no blame or passing of responsibility when things do not work out how you want them to. Ownership implies that you are going to be the solution to the problem. How I looked at the situation when I was in college was from the point of view that I only had four years. My coach could coach for the rest of his life, but this opportunity was fleeting, and it could be gone anytime, so I had to make it right. The first thing I needed to do was drop my ego because it gets in the way of healing relationships. People want to be right more than they want to save the relationship and it strains things. Just remember that at the end of life relationships are what we remember. I could have ended my time at Iowa State with an awful relationship with my coach, and it would have been a damn shame. He has played a massive role in my life, and now that I am done with the track we are good friends, and I love that. The only reason we got to that point was that we dropped our egos. The other key to taking ownership of the situation is knowing that it is for you to be the bigger person. Imagine everyone in the world took ownership? We would not have half of the problems we do now. Blame pisses people off and creates more issues. Ownership causes reflection, and it makes the other side think about where they can be better. If anyone blames something on you and you take 100% ownership, they usually stop their verbal assault. Own your situation and do everything you can and eventually, your coach will come around and see the effort you are making to make things work. If they don’t, you still know you took it on your back and did everything you could.
- check
- check
- check
Over-communicate
You want to make sure that people overstand you. It is not enough to just be understood. Anyone who has had a broken relationship knows that most of the time it comes down to miscommunication. One person said one thing but meant something different from what the other person said. A lot of times when we listen to people, we hear what we want to hear, and it gets us into trouble. When you communicate you need to ask questions and get your coach to explain things directly, make sure they get that your new standard is that you want to overstand. You don’t want to leave any unsealed cracks that allow misunderstanding to seep in. Another big part of communication is being willing to have tough conversations. One thing I have learned in my years of being an athlete is that most athletes lack the courage to have those tough conversations. They don’t want to go to their coach and tell them they have an issue or let them know that there is a problem. Part of being an adult is being wiled to have these tough conversations.
- check
- check
- check
Create Clear Expectations
Earlier I talked about how I need a coach who believes in me. Once I made this clear for my coach, he started doing things that showed me he believed. It was not that he did not before, he just did not show it in a way that I understood. For a relationship to work, you need clear expectations upfront. What do you honestly expect from each other? For example, if you meet someone and they see you as just a potential business connection, and you are thinking they are going to be a best friend, it creates a lot of problems. You are both not on the same page, but neither is wrong, just both did not communicate intentions. When intentions are clear, problems tend to disappear because people realize early whether they want to move in that direction or not. Make sure your coach is clear with you about what role they expect you to play and how they project you to progress over the years. If you don’t feel comfortable with the expectations, you need to speak up, or else there will be issues later.
- check
- check
The Only Place to Go is Up
When a relationship gets bad, you have to remember that the only thing the positive side. The positive is that the only way to go from there is UP! You can’t go down; you can only go up. Focus on that; every little victory can be celebrated because it could be worse. That is precisely how I felt with my coach in college. We hit rock bottom. It was so bad that I was asking myself how it even got that bad! From that point, we could both take a deep breathe and say you know what let’s make this work. That is an ugly and beautiful place to be all at one time. Embrace that! Be All InA lot of the time the reason coaches don’t like athletes is because they have not bought into to their program. Coaches spend a lot of time thinking about there gameplans. If you question that, you doubt their ability to be a competent coach and that is never good. Being all in is not about seeing some success then deciding to believe. True faith believes before you know it. You have to know that the program is going to work before it does. When you have this mindset, it bleeds into all that you do. You want to be a better teammate and a better person. You want to pour in more to being a leader. Everything you do becomes more all in, and coaches notice this. No coach wants to invest in an athlete halfway out of the door.
In Conclusion: Choose Love
- 1Understand the problem
- 2Take Ownership
- 3Over Communicate
- 4 Create Clear Expectations
We can always choose love, or we can accept hate. If you hate your coach, it is because you choose to hate your coach. Just as easily you can choose to love them. Love will always conquer everything else so choose that. If your coach hates you, but you love them, it will force them into loving you back. You can do everything I listed in this article, but if you do not choose to love it through it all, it does not matter. Communicate out of love. Be all in out of love for the program. Set clear expectations out of love for your coach knowing what to expect. Take ownership out of love for your coach and not wanting to blame them. When you do it out of love, all of these things become easier to do when you don’t want to do them.
KHO Health was acquired by was acquire by 9INE POINT in the summer of 2019 and is now referred to as 9INE POINT Health.
