Volleyball Coaching Life-Trichotomy of Control

I recently spoke to a fellow volleyball coach and friend, he was feeling distraught because of how his team jad performed at the end the season, falling short of his expectations. More importantly, he felt that he had let a great opportunity for winning slip away.

I knew that Stoic philosophy is the lens to help him look at his situation in a positive way. In fact, the Stoics offer many tools and practices that are useful even though they are difficult in practice. The trichotomy of control is the tool I am recommending for this case.

In mainstream Stoicism, this concept is the Dichotomy of control, i.e. there are two ways to look at control. I refer to the Trichotomy of control, three ways to look at control, because in real-life coaching situations, there are often more gray areas than not. The idea of the Trichotomy of control comes from William Irvine’s A Guide to the Good Life.  An excellent guidebook through the world of Stoicism.

Simply put, the dichotomy of control idea is: worry about what you can control and don’t worry about what you cannot control. In what is seemingly a simple and oft quoted maxim, the complexity of the decisions of what is controllable and not controllable is daunting. We regularly worry over things happening in our daily lives, but we do it without thinking about just how much control we have over those things. Life comes at us fast and furious, so it is all we can do to survive the barrage of decisions. The Stoic tool of dichotomy of control tells us to analyze the decisions that we make, and we should decide on which events are directly controllable.

On the other hand, we should sort out those things over which we have absolutely no control and learn to avoid wasting time on worry over these things because we know we can’t control them no matter what we do. In addition to those things that are obviously out of our control, we must take into account serendipity and uncertainty being a major factor. We, being humans, will spend an inordinate amount of time worrying over everything, but by recognizing that we can’t affect the outcome, we can focus all our energies on those things that we can control and affect.  Coaches also have a tendency to fret over the What-Could-Have-Been’s and we bury ourselves in regret when we overanalyze those variations.

What does this mean in volleyball coaching? Each coach should do mental triage over the things that are a regular part of their work day mental process. The obvious things that we can control are the most direct things that we do daily, we focus on our training and how we can persuade and teach our players the necessary things. This means that we need to take control of the technique training to bolster our team’s toolbox, we condition them physically so that they can  execute the game plan and the skills, and we train their mental game to react rather than analyze in the moment. We control our practice environment to foster learning. We control the pace of the drills to stress their minds when they are in a training situation so that they can react the right way when they are in competition. We control the practice plans to optimize learning.  We control how we communicate with our team, the parents, and our staff to make sure that we have accurate understanding. We control our game planning for specific situations as well as to prepare the players to deal with the unexpected.

Even as we marvel at how extensive the controllable list is, the uncontrollable list is even more extensive.

We don’t control how the other team execute. We don’t control how our players execute. We don’t control how the official’s judgement will go. We don’t control the temperature and humidity of the gym. When we are outdoors we don’t control the sun or the wind. The most significant thing that we don’t control is how the players on both sides of the net process information and react to pressure and stress. We are much less the chess master than we are the powerless observer. We are the Wizard of Oz: just a normal person hiding behind the curtains, pretending to be in control.

Some things on this list seem only somewhat uncontrollable, which makes it more difficult to definitively put them in the uncontrollable bucket. Volleyball, as with most sports, has multiple interaction between players, the ball, the net etc. There are times that the game action seem so inter-related that we will project our biases and desires into how we frame and look at the situation and we convince ourselves that we can control them.

This is where we need the third leg, the trichotomy of control to deal with the ambiguity, this can be described as things that we have some control but not all control, and this is where most of the stress in coaching volleyball come from. It is the gray areas, the spaces in between the known decisions. This is the area where we think we should have complete control, but most of the time we do not.

What can we do to truly triage those situations? Do we resolutely split the list into two different buckets without thinking? Do we just assume that they are controllable and wreck our emotional health? Or do we assume that they are uncontrollable and ignore that thought in the back or our minds screaming at us and worry that we are not doing enough to prepare our team.

The key to this conundrum is our players - they are the interpreters of our thoughts, the mechanism that validates our decisions:  we can be the best coaches on paper until our players interprets our thoughts and executes both our technical and tactical decisions. If we did our jobs right, and if we are in a perfect world, we should win. The reality is that all our best laid plans and our best intentions, are filtered through our surrogates: our players. This is the crux of a dilemma: do we assume that we are in control because we train them? Or do we assume that we are not in control because of that gap in the control: the execution of the players. 

A proactive approach to resolving this dilemma, as specified in Irvine, is to examine those situations and interrogate our goals to further segregate them into external and internal goals. It is our stated goals that drives our belief in what we control. We want to achieve our goals, so we are looking to controlling everything in order to attain that goal. External goals are those that involve the ambiguity in our situations. We can say that our goal is to win the point, the set, the match, and the tournament. But no matter how hard we try; the outcome is beyond our control. By focusing our attention on those things that we don’t control, we are battling ourselves: we are trying to control what is beyond our control. But, if we selected internal goals as our focus, those things that we absolutely control, we can meet our expectations and let the uncontrollable part of coaching volleyball to take place without stressing ourselves.

What are internal goals, those are the goals we absolutely control? We don’t control how the other team executes, but we do train our players how to react to how the other team executes. We don’t control how our players executes, but we do control how we train those players to execute. We don’t control how the official’s judgements will go. We do control how we teach our players to react to those calls. We don’t control the temperature and humidity of the gym. When we are outdoors we don’t control the sun or the wind. We do control how we teach our players to react to our environment and externalities. The most important thing is that we don’t control how the players on both sides of the net process information and react to pressure and stress. We do control how we teach and mentor our players when they are under pressure and dealing with the unknown and the uncertain. We work with our players to react and execute our skills while under stress, or at least we should. This is an area that many coaches neglect because we are so focused on the technique, tactic, adjustments, matchups etc. that we forget that we are coaching players and not technique, tactic, adjustments, matchups etc. 

I will present this to my friend, I hope that he takes heed because there are too many things that we stress about which will eventually kill us. The trichotomy of control is a good way ease some of that stress by looking at the situation and performing our sanity saving mental triage. I hope it helps.