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Archive for the ‘Work/Life balance’ Category

5 Signs You’re Burned Out…And How To Turn It Around

03 Nov

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Are you getting ‘er done…or just burned out?  Do you know when you’ve hit the wall and just can’t go hard anymore?  I was over at Bnet.com (a business website) and read a great article called “Is Your Company Turning You Into A Corporate Zombie?” and thought it made a lot of great points about what folks look like when they’re burned out and decided to bring it over here and put my coach spin on things.  How do you know when you’re burned out?  Well read on to find out!

**Keep your eyes peeled!  If you’re doing these things, you may be on the verge of burnout.**

1.       Your creativity level has dropped. Back in the day, you could spot a problem on your team and figure out a drill to fix it…or you’d schedule a team meeting…or you’d do whatever it took to address the issue.  Now, you’re flummoxed.  You’re all out of ideas to keep your team motivated.

2.       You spend less time in reflection. So I wrote this whole post about how leadership and solitude are linked (read it here) which makes it pretty obvious that I believe in giving yourself time to reflect.  When you’re burned out, you’re like the hamster on a wheel…just go-go-going!

3.       You laugh less. Your team goofball used to be able to make you smile no matter how intense you were in practice…not anymore.  Nothing’s funny because you’re tired, hopped up on caffeine, not eating right, and haven’t seen your family in weeks.

4.       You look beat down (like everyone else in your office). You come dragging in to the office at 7 am and you go dragging out at 9 pm.  You get home, go to bed, get up the next morning and do the same thing all over again. Why?  Because everyone else in the office does that when they’re in season.  You’re exhausted but you won’t rest or sleep or otherwise enjoy yourself because you’re “getting after it.”

5.       The sparkle in your eye dims. Talking about your team, planning practices, chatting with the coaching staff after practice…all of those things used to fire you up.  Now you sigh when someone asks about the team, dread planning practice, and hustle out of the gym as fast as you can when practice is over to avoid shop talk.

**Burnout killahs…do these 3 things to keep the bounce in your step!**

1.       Go home. Whether it’s to spend time with your family, or to make a proper meal, or just to relax and read a book…we all need to get away for a few hours.  Many, many things are out of our control as coaches.  Our players may get injured or another team may get the world’s best recruit, but our time?  It’s ours.  Let’s manage it so we can stay sane.

2. Set time limits on email/phone calls. Some of us think we can game the system.  We say, “oh, I go home at 6 every night.”  But what you don’t say is that you’re on the computer with the phone attached to your ear the whole time.  At some point, you’ve got to make an agreement with yourself when you’re going to turn everything off…and not just when it’s time to go to sleep!

3.       Workout/pray/meditate. Whatever you need to do to get your mind right…do it!  The idea of all of these burnout killahs is to get in control of your time, because it seems like burnout happens when you feel like there are so many things that you’ve “got” to do and you just “can’t” take time for yourself.  (I put those in quotation marks because they’re not empowering and most times just not true.)

Author’s note:  just because you’re doing the top five things doesn’t mean you’re burned out…you may thrive in that environment for short spurts.  But take an honest look at how you’re going about your business and figure out how long you can operate like that without losing your love of the game.

 
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Posted in Burnout, Coaching career, Time management, Work/Life balance

 

3 Ways To Keep Females In Coaching and Athletics Administration

29 Oct

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This is the third of three posts that I’ve put together for a myth busters series about women and athletics. Read Part One here and Part Two here.


Check out these numbers from the Acosta/Carpenter report*:

At the collegiate level, 43% of women’s teams have a female head coach, while 97% of men’s teams are led by a male coach.  Only 19% of collegiate athletic directors are females…and studies show that when the athletics director is a female, more female coaches are likely.  28% of athletic trainers are female.  12% of head sports information directors are female.

There are lots of percentages and information there, but the moral of the story is: where are all of the females in athletics going and how can we keep them around?

If 58% of assistant coaches of women’s teams are female, why the dramatic drop off from assistant to head coach?  And if we’d agree that most athletic directors transitioned out of coaching and into administration, I suppose it’s not surprising that of the 1051 AD’s out there…only 201 of them are female.

So what’s going on here?  I think that part of the problem is that we, as coaches (male and female), have accepted myths about women in athletics to be true.  Let’s take a look at a few of them.

Things that people believe deter females in athletics (and how we can prevent them from happening)

  • Marriage and family. Women are able to lead Fortune 500 companies, but it’s still a commonly held belief in athletics that once a female coach gets married and has kids, that that’ll be the death of her career.  In the great article, Women and the Uneasy Embrace of Power, on the Harvard Business Review’s website, author Jeffrey Pfeffer asserts that women must choose “a partner in part on the basis of whether that individual will be supportive of their power quest.”  In this case, the power quest is being successful in athletics…which is possible for the woman who has a supportive home base.
  • Female athletes prefer male coaches. Here’s a quotation taken from a popular volleyball forum:  In my opinion, I think girls would rather play for a guy because men don’t let their feelings or emotions dictate how they coach. Women coaches let their emotions control how they coach too much.  Honestly though, I think the biggest factor in that is they have probably played for men most of their volleyball lives. While we can say those are just the crazy folks on a discussion board, I think that’d be the easy way out and it’s our jobs to make sure that we’re coaching from a logical and fair place.  Emotions don’t have gender…both sexes display emotion.  Female athletes don’t mind emotions (anger, excitement, whatever), but it’s got to make sense for the situation…and it’s got to be fair.  Saying that, I believe that the last sentence of that quotation says it all. Most people prefer what they know…and most athletes know male coaches.
  • Gender dynamics baffle them. Going off of the previous point, the typical female athlete has had male coaches and is used to coach/player interaction from that standpoint.  Check out what Kathy DeBoer has to say about this gender conundrum.  DeBoer is the author of Gender and Competition: How Men and Women Approach Work and Play Differently and the current Executive Director of the American Volleyball Coaches Association and former Senior Associate Athletic Director at the University of Kentucky.  She says that girls and women “highly value attachment as a defining element of femaleness” and that a “web of relationships characterizes the female culture.”  So the things that a female athlete looks for in a male coach are dramatically different than what she looks for in a female coach.  As female coaches, we have to know how to manage our female athletes in order to be successful.  We can be tough and we demand great things, but we’ve got to understand what’s different about our female to female interaction.


Those were three solid answers to common myths out there about women in athletics…hopefully you’ll pass this along to your female athletes and to female coaches that you know.  We’ve got a great chance here to show that women can, in fact, be quality coaches and administrators!

*Click here to view the full Acosta/Carpenter report.

 
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Posted in Coaching career, Female athletes, Work/Life balance

 

The Great American Hoax: Work/Life Balance

11 Oct

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So coach, you go home at 5 pm or some other reasonable hour, right?  And you get plenty of sleep and eat very healthily while you’re in season too, huh?  And of course your family is super happy with the amount of time you spend at home?  I ask those questions with my tongue placed firmly in cheek, but the issue of work/life balance is a hot topic amongst employers all over…even the NCAA is on the bandwagon.  In my mind, true balance isn’t an option while I’m in season (I’m a Division III coach, we don’t get “help” with stuff), but I look at the year as a whole and strive for balance over the long haul.  I  believe there are some things I can do for myself and others that will make each part of my life more enjoyable, in season or not.  So let’s look at the…

4 Things You Must Do To Achieve Balance

Work: Coffee and colleagues.  With those two things, I can conquer the world!  Though I may consume caffeine at an alarming level while in season, it’s one of the things that makes me smile during the long days and weeks of season…try to take that away from me at your own risk.  After all, isn’t one of the purposes of work/life balance to find happiness in all facets of life?  Well, coffee makes me happy dangit!  As do the other coaches I work with.  Over the years, they’ve been instrumental in helping me work through problems, making me laugh, going out for lunches, and just generally being supportive.  Where would we be without our colleagues?

Family: This is going to sound so stereotypically female, but I love cooking.  Like big, extravagant meals cooking.  But that’s hard to do during season, so I try to do this once a week for my family because it’s one of the ways that I can show them that I love them.  Coaches, you may think this sounds sappy (that’s because it is), but you’re spending way more time at work than you are at home…make sure the fam knows that they’re important to you.  My way is cooking…what’s yours?

Friends: I’m probably the worst at this one because most of my friends are coaches who are just as crazily busy as I am.  But we need to be able to chat about things that are unrelated (gasp!) to our teams or even sports in general.  What if, and I know this sounds crazy, we just talked to people about what’s going on in their lives and in ours?  I’m going to have to remind myself to follow my own advice and stay connected with my friends while I’m in season.

Self: When I’m out of season, exercise is my preferred method of taking care of myself.  In season?  Just time to relax is huge…having an hour to sit and veg out has an amazing impact on my outlook on life.  A close second?  Spending my Sunday afternoon watching NFL games at a sports bar while munching on yummy wings and a tasty beverage.  Whatever your “thing” is, make sure to do it.  Taking time for yourself is essential so that you can give your best to your team.

Hopefully you were thinking of things that you currently do that affect your happiness level in those four areas.  I know this stuff isn’t rocket science, sometimes we just need to be reminded of what we already know we should be doing.

Now go out and be balanced!

 
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Posted in Coaching career, Work/Life balance

 

So You Want To Be An Excellent Coach?

27 Aug

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I want to be an excellent coach and I’m sure you do as well.  But how to do it?  Should we stalk the experts in our field…mining their brains for what has made them successful?  Or just keep grinding, hoping to stumble upon the key to excellence?  Well, according to this article titled (attention-drawingly enough) Six Keys to Being Excellent at Anything, the key is simple.  Practice…and practice a lot.  So we don’t have to be coaching savants, having everything seemingly dropped at our feet…we can work our way to excellence.  It goes on to say that “numerous researchers now agree that 10,000 hours of [deliberate] practice is the minimum necessary to achieve expertise in any complex domain.”  That’s great news!  That means anyone who’s committed and dogged and focused enough can become excellent.  Let’s look at how we can do it.

  • Pursue what you love. As the great book, The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle says, “if you don’t love it, you’ll never work hard enough to be great.”  The passion we have for our craft has to be at such a level that we’re willing to obsess over it and still love it at the end of the day.
  • Do the hardest work first. We think we’re focused, but we’re not.  So sit down in the morning, write your to-do list and identify those things you’re not all that fired up about doing and knock them out first thing in the morning when you’ve got the most energy.
  • Practice intensely. Check out this sentence from the article:  “If you want to be really good at something, it’s going to involve relentlessly pushing past your comfort zone, along with frustration, struggle, setbacks and failures.”  Enough said.
  • Seek expert feedback, in intermittent doses. I’m sure we all have peers that we know that we can chat with and know that they’ll give us good, honest advice.  The article says that we should definitely do that…only sparingly, so that we learn who we are and form our own style and philosophy.
  • Take regular renewal breaks. I love volleyball…I think it’s the greatest sport ever.  And I love coaching…I think it’s the greatest profession ever.  I read about them, I write about them, I talk about them.  I am fired up about my job.  But I can’t be this fired up all the time, my heart can’t take it.  So I enjoy my summers off, using them to relax and find out what it’s like not to always obsess over how to be better at what I do.
  • Ritualize practice. The 6 Keys article says none of us have very much will power (we think we do, but we don’t), so we’ve got to plan for getting better.  Personally, I look at a few business blogs everyday because, a) there aren’t many sports coaching blogs out there, and b) there seems to be an intrinsic link between the business and coaching worlds.  If you’ve checked the links on this site, a lot of them come from the Harvard Business Review’s blog…good stuff, highly recommended.


So it seems that excellence is closer than we think.  It’s not something innate or inherited, but something we can will to happen through our own focused hard work.  Are you up to the challenge?

Coach Dawn Writes is pretty sweet, right?  Did you know that you could get the articles emailed directly to your inbox?  Well, it’s free and easy.  Just click here and you’re all set!

 
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Posted in Books, Coaching nerds, Coaching philosophy, Work/Life balance

 

How to take care of yourself and give the best to your team

28 Jul

Every coach says the same things to their team:  make sure you’re eating right, be sure to get enough sleep at night, don’t procrastinate on doing your work, etc.  But us coaches are the worst in terms of following our own advice!  We stay at work making calls or watching video a little bit later than we’d planned and end up going to the vending machine and having Doritos for dinner.  We focus so much on our seasons that the project that our athletic director asked us to do a couple of weeks ago still hasn’t been touched.  And on and on it goes…you know the drill.

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If we want to stay in this thing for the long haul, we’ve got to take care of ourselves.  Here are 5 things that I think are essential to avoiding coach burnout.

  1. Workout: figure out a way to get some cardio and strength training in during your season.  It’ll keep you focused and energized.
  2. Personal time: for me, that usually is my workout time.  During the season, we’re so available to our athletes and fans and parents that it can be mentally draining.  Take time to recharge your batteries…whether it’s meditation or prayer or a morning walk.  Make time for yourself.
  3. Have work buddies: we spend the majority of our time at work, so you need someone in the office that you can talk with when you’ve hit the wall, are frustrated, or just have a funny story to tell.  For as much time as we spend at the office (whether it’s your actual office or your gym or court or field), we need to be able to have quality down time at work.
  4. Involve your fam:  my husband comes to all of our home games and we’ll have the team over for dinner sometimes.  It’s good for the team to see that their coach has some sort of balance in their lives and it’s good for your fam to see you in your element.
  5. Enjoy it: I love everything about being in season.  The hard work, being in the gym, the ups, the downs, being tired from the non-stop pace, sweating through my t-shirt in our hot and sticky gym…all of it.  Because I get to do the thing that I love to do.  I love coaching and I love volleyball and this school is willing to pay me to do it.  I think that makes me pretty lucky.

Is there anything that you would add to the list?  What things keep you sane during the season?

 
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Posted in Burnout, Coaching philosophy, Work/Life balance

 
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