Challenging Your Assumptions as a Coach

When I first started coaching, I had a clear picture of what hard work and dedication looked like. If an athlete didn’t fit that picture, my thoughts were… “they aren’t cut out for this,” or “they don’t care.”

It took me a long time to see where those beliefs came from. I was coaching based on how I’d been coached, including the tactics that hurt me as a player, and on what works for me personally. I’d taken my own experience and made it the standard everyone else had to meet.

Challenging your assumptions

The first step is always understanding who you are as a coach, before you can understand your athletes or where they’re coming from. And by that I don’t just mean your coaching philosophy, though that’s definitely part of it. I mean going a step deeper: understanding how you view your athletes and the assumptions you carry about their behavior and their needs. It’s challenging what you think is “right” and “wrong.”

Before we can challenge the way we coach, we have to challenge the people and experiences that shaped it. We’re looking at coaching through a different lens. It’s uncomfortable, and especially at first, it can feel wrong. We cling to what’s familiar. But change is the only constant, and we can either grow as coaches or stay where we are, which takes away from the impact we can have on our athletes’ lives and our programs.

Schön (1983) argued that professionals, including coaches, cannot operate solely from technical rules. Every coaching situation is unique and comes with its own set of circumstances. What separates a growing coach from a stagnating one is the habit of reflecting on their own responses, especially the automatic ones.

Four lenses

Brookfield (1995) gives us four lenses to examine our coaching through:

1. The autobiographical lens - our own history as athletes and coaches
2. Our athletes’ experience of us - the athlete’s perspective and experience
3. Our colleagues’ experiences - how other coaches and mentors have handled similar situations
4. Theoretical literature - different frames and theories, the ones that agree with your beliefs and the ones that don’t

When you put these lenses on, your default frame is illuminated. Once you see it, you can choose to change it or keep it.

We’re going to go through the first one: the autobiographical lens. Take your time with the questions below. I would suggest downloading and printing the PDF at the bottom. I find it helpful to have all of your notes in one place.

The autobiographical lens: your experience as an athlete

How did your coaches shape the way you coach now? Work through these:

1. Did you feel understood by your coaches? If not, what do you wish they’d done? If so, how did they show it?
2. How would they treat who you perceived to be their favorite players?
3. How would they treat who you perceived to be their least favorite player?
4. How did your coaches handle an athlete who wasn’t performing well?
5. How did your coaches handle athletes who didn’t understand plays?
6. How did your coaches handle difficult conversations?
7. How would they handle athletes who got injured?
8. What did your coaches praise?
9. What was your impression of what they valued?
10. How did they want you to show up?
11. What did your coaches emphasize?
12. How did your coaches explain things to you and your teammates?
13. What was important to them?

In my experience, most coaches are either coaching the way they were coached, or coaching almost the exact opposite. I find it helpful to recognize those patterns, because it helps me understand why I’m doing what I’m doing. Taking that step back lets me ask myself what would actually be best for the athletes in front of me.

The autobiographical lens: your experience coaching

On culture:

1. What do your values look like in practice? Could those values look like something else to your athletes?
2. What does a good culture mean to you?

In general:

1. What behaviors make you decide an athlete is “difficult”? What might those same behaviors mean from the athlete’s side?
2. Who is your favorite type of athlete to coach, and what does that preference reveal about what you value?
3. When you explain something and an athlete doesn’t get it, whose responsibility do you treat that as?
4. How do you react when an athlete does something differently than you taught it, but it still works?
5. When an athlete is quiet, what do you assume it means?
6. What does effort look like to you? Can an athlete be trying hard without it looking like effort?
7. What does confidence look like? Could an athlete be confident and not show it the way you expect?
8. What does a leader on your team look like? Who gets left out of that picture?
9. If an athlete asks a question you think they should already know the answer to, how do you respond? What would they, or their teammates, think of your response?
10. What does respect look like from an athlete? Where did that expectation come from?
11. What does a “good attitude” look like to you? What does a bad one look like?
12. If an athlete asks a question, is that welcomed?
13. What does being coachable mean? What does it look like?
14. What does paying attention mean? What does it look like?
15. What does failure mean? What does it look like?
16. What does being disciplined mean? What does it look like?
17. Where did all of these definitions come from?

Recognizing your default mode

The reality is, changing is difficult, and you don’t have to change everything at once. The first step is RECOGNIZING, in the moment, when your default mode is driving the car. Once you start to recognize it, you can challenge it and find a solution that works for your athletes.

That’s when I can start to point your attention toward what to look for. Not to diagnose your athletes, but to better understand how to support the brain they actually have. The tendency is to put people in boxes; it’s easier, and it makes sense. But the goal is to stay open, and to have more tools to make adjustments as different situations come up.

This is a lifelong process. Be patient with yourself. And let me leave you with one more study to ponder.

What you believe shapes what you see

Think about an athlete you call “lazy.” Once you decide they’re lazy, it shapes every single interaction. They don’t understand something? It’s because they don’t pay attention. They make a mistake in a drill or a game? It’s because they don’t work hard in practice. I could go on and on. Once we put a label on someone, it’s really hard to see them as anything else. No matter how many times that athlete comes in early or gets extra work in, it gets written off as a one-time thing.

And this isn’t just in your head. In one of the most-cited studies in education, Rosenthal and Jacobson (1968) showed that teachers’ beliefs about their students, even beliefs based on randomly assigned labels, produced measurable differences in how those students actually performed. The original study has been debated, but the broader finding has been replicated. Their expectations shaped how they interacted, and that shaped the outcomes. What you believe about the athlete in front of you affects how you interact with them, and how you shape the environment around them.

So if you have an athlete you’ve labeled, I’d encourage you to ask yourself: what would they have to do for you to see them differently?

References

Schön, Donald A. The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. Basic Books, 1983.

Brookfield, Stephen D. Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher. Jossey-Bass, 1995 (2nd ed., 2017).

Rosenthal, Robert, and Lenore Jacobson. Pygmalion in the Classroom: Teacher Expectation and Pupils’ Intellectual Development. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968.