Volleyball Coaching Life-Comfortable

I had asked a question of the denizens of the Volleyball Coaches and Trainers Facebook page and the answers kind of surprised me.

The question was:

When did you feel that you were comfortable being a coach and not just treading water?

Most of the coaches who responded said that they are still not comfortable no matter how experienced they are, and I find that hard to believe.

Either they are being overly modest, disingenuous, or they are putting themselves through misery when they coach.

Discomfort is a natural response to doing something new, it is the mind’s response to new challenges and stimulus, but as the mind becomes better at doing the coaching tasks, the discomfort should transform into a sure handed confidence as we perform this task, we get better at what we do and as we progress towards competence, we should feel more at ease with performing the task, until we eventually become sure handed and we get into a flow or a zone when it comes to coaching. It becomes the dynamic, effortless, and unselfconscious state of mind of a person who is optimally active and effective.

We most often will coach with certain amount of trepidation and discomfort because that discomfort drives us to progress in our coaching acumen, we also must reach a certain level of equanimity with certain coaching tasks, because if we didn’t, we would not be able to coach to our best abilities, we would be forever in a cycle of fear.  If we are continuously stressing over the same mundane tasks: whether it is two hits or three hits, whether the kid with the different colored jersey can hit front row, we will never get anywhere. It is this sense of equanimity that I refer to as being comfortable.

We humans have just a limited amount of bandwidth with our cognition abilities, and as we are feeling uncomfortable with how we do what we do, our cognition gives all our bandwidth to performing those uncomfortable things. If we are never able to become comfortable with the basic rudimentary tasks of coaching, we would never be able to advance our coaching capabilities because we would not be able to free up that bandwidth to learn and adapt new skill, information, and be able to deal with uncertainty.

I have been coaching for over twenty years, and I truly felt comfortable only after I overcame my impostor syndrome and started to think about the game beyond the in-the-moment mindset, beyond treading water, beyond hoping that you are never caught being an impostor. In order to get there I had to go through and be comfortable with many things. The x’s and o’s of coaching volleyball: knowing the rules of the game, finding myriad ways to communicate that knowledge, knowing how to put together a lineup, knowing how to teach to different ages, speaking in public, overcoming my natural aversion to large crowds, knowing how to read and teach the fundamental physiological demands and techniques that make up the volleyball skills well enough to diagnose and identify problems.

Once I was comfortable with the rudimentary tasks, I was able to progress in my coaching abilities. It wasn’t until I realized that I had a lot to share with my players and that I am not an impostor that I became truly comfortable. This doesn’t mean that I am complacent or that I have stopped learning, it just means that I am learning more and different things, I am exploring the more complex issues in my volleyball and athletic knowledge skillsets. You can not progress through the knowledge of the game without being comfortable with the foundations of coaching.

I had always marveled at some of my coaching mentors, how they can anticipate and see things happening on the court as well as the behavior of players. When I started to anticipate the action on the court because I knew the game and the human tendencies well enough, my level of discomfort de-escalated.  My epiphany with comfort came when I know what I needed to do to help them as they are dealing with the chaos and challenges on the court without losing my mind or the confidence of my players. I felt calm and equanimous in most coaching environments, I didn’t fear the coming practices or matches. I still must deal with situations that comes up, I still get frustrated and I still get jolted when the unknown rears its ugly head. It is still a struggle to handle all that happens and the pit in the stomach never goes away, but I realize that I can handle it and that I am capable of making reasonable and quick decisions, fully knowing that the decision may or may not work out; knowing that it might not work but still having the courage to make the decision is also a sign that you are growing comfortable with your role as coach.

Being comfortable is also about living with your decisions, however it will result and being able to analyze and dissect your reasoning process with clarity and without biases after it resuts, this comes with experience and the recognition and acknowledgement of our fears, weaknesses, and errors in our judgement and being able and courageous enough to overcome them a little bit at a time. None of the doubts go away, you are just better able to handle and deal with it and be able to achieve equanimity.

Concomitant with this sense of comfort is a sense of curiosity and adventurousness, you begin to ask questions that carries more gravitas, that are more global in scope, and with more granularity and depth that you were able to muster as a frazzled and uncomfortable beginning coach. You can ask the better, deeper, and broader questions, more importantly, you are able to understand the explanations and potential answers. All that comes with comfort.

I hope I was better able to explain the intent of my question and explain why a cursory: I never get comfortable, is not a good answer.

I want to emphasize that being comfortable in your coaching role is not a sign that you given up on learning, questioning, or have come to a complacent rut in your coaching, far from it, being comfortable enables me to explore more of our sport and be able to understand the Why’s, What-if’s and how’s.

To answer the question for myself, I stopped feeling like an impostor when I started a club with some great friends and they, through their own actions and examples, showed me that I was not a complete idiot. It was about six or seven years into my coaching life.

Learning to Be a Stoic: Don’t Cares

I was a freshman electrical engineering student when I was introduced to the Karnaugh map in my digital logic class. It is a method of reasoning out the decision logic for a digital circuit design by using Boolean algebra.

While I never entered the world of digital design, I did take away a rudimentary idea of what Karnaugh Maps is, how it is used, and most importantly, I was introduced to the idea of “Don’t Care” cells.

“Don’t Care” cells are the outputs to a logical circuit that has no effect on the overall problem solution, so that you really “Don’t Care” what the result is. You mark that cell with a capital D and you move on to the meat of the digital logic design. It makes designing so much simpler and relieves a lot of unnecessary work. The simpler work and alleviating of extra work definitely appealed to this lazy freshman.

The “Don’t Care” idea stuck with me for some reason, I guess the elegance and simplicity of the idea appealed to me so much that my mind grasped it and held on to it as a guiding light to the rest of my life, pretty soon I found myself saying “Don’t Care” to things that have no impact on me; that is, I extrapolated the digital logic lesson to the rest of my life. Freshmen engineering students will do that.

It was a great filter for me to apply to sorting through all the different decisions, events, issues, distractions and assorted nonsense that came through my life. By saying “Don’t Care” I was able to focus on what I was interested in and what I knew to be important for my future work as well as my future life.

It soon became a dominant mindset that allowed me to be more efficient and effective. I no longer dwelled on those things I felt I didn’t care about.

Unfortunately, this mindset can also backfire on you and make you realize that, indeed, you should care about certain things. It was good seasoning and great lessons in learning to make decisions and being careful when you do triage on the things that life throws at you.

In time, this mindset evolved into a reasonable facsimile of the Stoic’s dichotomy of control. Those things I have no control over are thrown into the “Don’t Care” pile, and I don’t worry about them. I am thinking now that this is a reason that the dichotomy of control was so easy for me to accept out of all the Stoic practices, because it fit so well within my natural preferences regarding my decision making and outlook on life. This unintentional attitude was serendipity blessing me with great wisdom even though I was ignorant of its impact on my life. Or it may just be a coalescing of fate. Not quite sure which it is.