inside excellent life
In an unbelievable review The Daily Beast talks about the greatest stars who had failed in the role of coaches and manager. Among them myths like Michael Jordan and Magic Johnson: http://www.thedailybeast.com/galleries/2013/06/14/from-great-to-blah-star-athletes-who-failed-as-bosses.html#815027b6-2b8e-4092-9a13-dc2dcb24cde5
Today I watched a tennis match between two girls number 300 in the world ranking with the following score: 6/2, 0/6 and then at the 3rd set 0/3, 2/4, 4/4, 6/6 , 5/7. It’s a score common among women tennis players, showing the lack of emotional control of the two opposing, of how you can lose a set with ease without showing any form of reaction. Then who won the 2nd set to zero and after 9 games won did two errors from which she never recovered, allowing to the opponent of the equalizing and than to win the match. According to coaches and parents of women tennis players this emotional distress is a widespread difficulty while it is absolutely absent some form of mental coaching. The most common advice of the coaches is to tell the girls that, playing many tournaments, they will learn to manage themselves in a better way, if they don’t learn the coaches say “with you there’s nothing to do.” Certainly not all of them can become a champion, but I am convinced that most could improve if they were mentally coached . My advice is that coaches begin to work with sports psychologists in the construction of training programs that are intended to teach the tennis players to acquire a winning mentality. Today even more in football the coach does not work alone but while maintaining its leadership works with a team of experts. In tennis in most cases there is only the physical coch, a little for those who want to reach the excellence.
Coaches, sport administrators and parents must increase their ability to identify, understand and respond to the needs of young people whose enjoyed the trust. Why it should no more happen experiences like that of the Italian Olympian athlete Alex Schwazer.
Read more on: http://www.huffingtonpost.it/alberto-cei/perche-molti-atleti-scelgono-di-non-doparsi_b_3161051.html?utm_hp_ref=italy
Never as like during this season there have been so many expulsions of coaches in Italian football Premiere League. The phenomenon reflects a level of occupational stress that coaches often have difficulty controlling and consequently the field during the matches inveigh against referees. What might be the causes:
Pressure – there is a strong demand from the Club managers and fans to win and the result and also the inability of the Clubs to allow, with rare exceptions, at the coach to work on targets that are not only those of the next game.
Insecurity – the effect is that the coach will likely exonerated if he loses a few games or if he is not meet the expectations of the president.
Exposure – the coaches are daily on the newspapers and sports broadcasts. Around them spread a continuous gossip exposes their choices to the ongoing discussion of the public and journalists, which are interrupted only during the game to get up immediately after, during the post-game interviews.
Under these conditions it is not easy to carry out their work and certainly for the coaches can be useful to engage in activities of coaching in order to improve their ability to manage the stress they need to cope of during their job. On the other hand this is an approach used by the managers of the companies to improve their own leadership.
Since coaches and physical coaches do not teach to perform a deep breath, I want to give you some guidelines to do it. Breathing deeply is a great way to reduce stress throughout the body and has a significant positive influence on the mind.
Trained to do a series of three breaths at a time x three times in succession, when you finished three breathing, before to start again, take a short break of 30 seconds.
More and more often I wonder why most coaches do not recommend their athletes to follow a program of mental training. I do not mean the beginners but who practice one sport for many years and who want to enhance their skills when they compete. The typical words of the coaches in front of the psychological difficulties are “put a little more than …” and here you can choose the psychological dimension that it is considered the most appropriate: more confidence, more focus, more determination, more effort and so on. The problem is that athletes usually do not understand these sentences, and do not know how “to be more.” On the other hand the lack of attention to the psychological dimension of the coaches is evident in the fact that almost no athlete knows how to take a deep breath; lost no time to teach! While it is well known that a deep breath permit to lower a too high psychological tension level but never mind when the coach is in this situation he will say to his athlete, the decisive sentence “be calm,” and as a result the athlete or will feel even more tense or be angry with the coach who does not able to help him.
How do we solve this problem? Simply,the athletes more aware of the mind value decide by themselves to go to an expert in mental coaching, of course there are also coaches that guide the athletes to follow this option but they are few.
All coaches are aware of the close interaction between motivation and learning. The motivation is, however, a theoretical concept that can not be directly observed and which can only be hypothesized on the basis of their behaviors. In any case, knowledge of the motivational processes is a crucial factor for any coach who wants to teach effectively.
The most important reasons recognized by young athletes are related to:
Conversely, the main causes of the decrease in motivation or drop out in sport are lack of fun, lack of success, competition stress, lack of support from parents, misunderstandings with the coach, boredom and injuries.
In summary these are the three main needs that the athlete wants to meet for half of the sport:
With reference to the need of stimulation it can be stated that:
With regard to the need for competence, it is up to the coach to stimulate both the child and the player evolved not only to learn specific sports techniques, but also to develop the desire to progress and curiosity about themselves and the environment in which acting.
In this regard, the coach must remember that:
As for the need of affiliation it is based on the need to belong to a group and to be accepted, thus establishing with other team members in meaningful relationships. Satisfying the need for affiliation and esteem, the athlete experiences increase the confidence in himself and more control in respect of the situations. In fact every athlete and coach knows from experience that when there are communication problems between them is difficult to follow the training program that has been set.
The key points to meet the need for affiliation and esteem of the athletes can be summarized as follows:
In other words, the coach must develop in his athletes the sense of belonging to that particular group, and he must appear credible and consistent in his attitudes and behaviors.
To be credible, we must be honest with all the athletes: young and older, experienced and inexperienced. In this respect, the coach must:
I often write about the difficulty of stress managing . This is not only a problem for athletes but it is becoming increasingly for coaches too. Guardiola has resigned because he felt the need to take a rest period. The coach of Sydney football team, with the arrival of Del Piero, has experienced a period of intense stress and he has resigned. Now it was the turn of Alekno, coach of the Russian national volleyball team, gold in London: he also resigned too much stress. I hope that these stories teach coaches to be coached mainly from the psychological point of view.
Once again, the football will not forgive the coaches and regularly after some lost games they are fired. We always say that it happens because it is easier to fire a coach than 11 players and the team owners do not accept the defeats. Thinking in this way the coaches are always victims and the others are their executioners. For once, I would like to try to think that the results of the teams reflect the limits of the coaches and that these exemptions should be experienced as alarm bells for a way to be a leader, that was wrong and therefore should be understood, evaluated and changed to be more prepared when there will be the next opportunity to sit on the bench. I do not know if these coaches do this critical track and eventually if they do it with the help of a consultant in the field of performance improvement. My impression is that this way of doing things does not belong to the world of football coaches, for the reason that if they do not feel the need for a consultant psychologist when they lead the team why should they feel the need when they are without a club.
