2022 Year in Review

What a year it’s been. Writing unfair advantage has taught me a lot - about myself, the fields of psychology and coaching, and most importantly, what people seem to want most of. Let’s start there.

This year, through no doing of ours, the conversation around mental health and performance of coaches has exploded. We’ve seen a record number of coaches walk away from once prestigious posts to be, gasp, normal people. That’s right - coaches, just like everyone else on earth, want some semblance of harmony in their life. They want to spend time with loved ones. They want to experiment with new behaviors without fear of being punished (safe behaviors, of course - and punished, in this instance, meaning fired). They want to be allowed to have interests outside of X’s and O’s.

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And the sports infrastructure has failed them. Surely, this failure is driven in part by the massive increases in coach salary which also lead to massive increases in expectations. Perform, now, or get out. That perform now mentality comes at a cost - to coaches, and to the people that support them.

The coaches who walk away have simply decided this game isn’t for them, and perhaps something even deeper. The game is rigged.

You do a good job, you’re rewarded with more money, higher expectations, more pressure… all things that, over time, suck the joy right out of the activity itself. The result is the hedonic treadmill on overdrive. More and more achievement becomes less and less meaningful. After a while, that pace simply can’t be maintained.

All of this points to the fact that there is A LOT of work to be done here - and that is something we have contributed to. This year has taught me that people really care about coach’s health and high performance. And we’ve stricken some cords in our community, started to generate a real conversation, and are hopefully going to contribute to a solution here sooner than later (looking at you, 2023).

Interestingly, what resonated most for our audience this year was:

• How politics undermine performance

• What a reimagining of coach education would entail

• Concepts for coaches like the forgetting curve and mental performance

• The application of expertise outside sport to the world of coaches and elite performance

My main takeaway: we have to address coach health and performance from all levels. The system, interpersonal, individual all need help.

The second thing this year confirmed for me is that coaching and psychology need each other.

As a psychologist, it pains me a little bit to write this, but it’s my honest assessment - coaches have gotten the positioning around improving human potential right.

Psychology’s persistent focus on illness, pathology, refusal to abandon outdated science, and half-hearted attempts to make itself accessible through half-assed self-help resources has done our profession a remarkable disservice. I’m fortunate to know so many talented practitioners across specialties who are unable to fully scale their helping ability simply because our field has, for a long time, tried so hard to figure out what’s “wrong” with people that we grazed over the innate human tendency toward growth. This is where coaching stepped in.

But coaching isn’t all rosy. Coaching needs psychology - the real science that’s been replicated, the processes we know lead to learning and behavior change, and the understanding of how relationships really work to promote growth. Coaching, as a profession (sweeping generalization coming) is largely uninformed of the evidence supporting or refuting what it considers best practices.

Here’s a great example for you: coaches, by and large, insist that working more and working harder leads to better results, despite several large scale, replicated studies that show things like more vacation lead to better performance and time off improves productivity.

These unguided attempts to follow intuition that run rife through coaching have limitations and real consequences. This is a place psychology can and should help. Coaches are following logical conclusions to illogical ends. The end result is sometimes even catastrophic: coaches burn out, investigations abound, and sometimes, tragically, athletes die.

Coaches and psychologists need each other. Soon enough I’ll write my predictions for the future, but here’s one you can have now - psychology and coaching will overlap more and more until we’re forced to reconcile the two professions at varying levels. Would you rather employ an expert on human behavior, or an expert on tactical, technical, and strategic execution? I’d say you don’t need to choose - you should have both. But both should learn from each other, leverage modern science, and focus on deep personalization.

Finally, a few thoughts on my own process.

First, writing this often is really hard, but I think it’s made me better. I can articulate my thinking in ways I’ve never felt comfortable before. I have clarity on some concepts I’ve struggled with for years. And the more I write the more I realize how much more I want to share.

2023 is going to bring some exciting new things to the unfair advantage community, and I can’t wait to share them with you as we keep growing and working toward becoming a one-stop shop for the integration of psychology, coaching, health, and high performance to support our coaching/sports leadership community.

Onward we go.

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